A baby bites his brother’s finger and then laughs when he cries out in pain.
It’s a simple formula that has racked up almost 900 million views on YouTube since the 55-second clip was uploaded in 2007.
But now ‘Charlie bit my finger’ could disappear after being sold in the form of an NFT – a “non-fungible token” – for a record-breaking $760,999 (€620,995).
The video featuring British brothers Charlie and Harry Davies-Carr was sold to Dubai-based NFT collector Farzin Fardin Fard – better known as ‘3fmusic’ – on Sunday.
The purchase marks another high-profile addition to Fard’s collection. He previously paid over $400,000 (€326,000) for the ‘Disaster Girl’ meme NFT.
The auction site, hosted on a platform built by blockchain company Origin, invites prospective buyers to bid for the “soon to be deleted YouTube phenomenon,” and offers the winner the chance to star in a remake of the original with the two brothers, now aged 17 and 15.
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Since putting the video up for sale the Davies-Carr family seem to have had a change of heart, however. The delisted video still appears on YouTube, pending a final decision by Fard on whether or not to delete it.
“Charlie Bit My Finger has been a huge part of the Davies-Carr family’s lives for the past 14 years, and they are excited to welcome others to become a part of their story. This is not the end of the beloved video, but rather a new beginning,” the family said in a statement.
What is an NFT?
NFT stands for ‘non-fungible token’. They are used to prove ownership of an asset.
NFTs are unique – non-fungible means they are non-interchangeable because they have unique properties.
Each NFT can only have one owner, a record of which is stored on the publicly viewable Ethereum blockchain.
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The blockchain is decentralised, meaning that every transaction is verified by thousands of miners who receive the ether cryptocurrency as a reward. This makes it – in theory – very difficult to forge.
There’s a drawback to this. Verification uses a lot of computing power and therefore a lot of energy, meaning there’s an environmental cost to NFTs.