8 Money Toilets

The chicken nugget’s title suggests that it is valuable for two reasons: it is marketed as shaped like a character from the multiplayer online game “Among Us.” It is also from a limited-edition BTS McDonald’s meal, which is a secondary market of its own. In reality, it is a 44-cent chicken nugget with legs, or, when presented upside down, a chicken nugget shaped like a Peep.

According to The Verge, the seller had offered to ship “some” of the Szechuan sauce that came with the meal.

No one has authenticated the nugget’s source.

After sitting on eBay for a few days at the starting price of $0.99, bidding took off on May 30th with an opening of $14,969.69. The same bidder suspiciously upped the ante four more times to over $18,000 until 44 bidders eventually joined. (The original bidder tapped out at $99,696.96.)

The shortage of single-packet ketchup brought the nation to its knees; the masses reckon with reality as cold as a delivered french fry. The reality is that a $2.49 McDonald’s hamburger tastes like death without the savory-sweet lubrication of exactly one packet of ketchup.

The people have paid handsomely (at least up to $4 per packet) to ease the hardship. Others bogarting the ketchup are cruelly listing their coveted foodstuffs for thousands; this one on eBay can be paid off in manageable installments of $481 for 24 months with PayPal Credit.

On March 21st, 2006, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey set up his Twitter page, and LO:

“just setting up my twttr”

A lot of stuff happened; a tyrant nearly blew up America; Jack became a billionaire; Roseanne was canceled; non sequitur humor had a good run; etc.

Blah blah blah on March 21st, 2021, Jack Dorsey sold the tweet for $2.9 million.

Buyer Sina Estavi, CEO of a blockchain tech company Bridge Oracle, had tweeted that he would have gone as high as $10 million but got a bargain. Dorsey saved this narrative from becoming another public display of wealth hoarding by donating the proceeds to Give Directly, a charity that sends funds directly to people living in poverty.

And that’s it. That’s the tweet. Or is it. I don’t know, it sounds like something someone on Twitter would say about this.

Let’s imagine a world before March 11th, 2021, before Beeple shook the earth and sold an NFT for $69 million, summoning a monsoon of NFT press releases. What did we consider an unreasonable purchase? What did we talk about? If you are not a tech blogger, artist, art critic, gallerist, crypto trader, or CNBC consumer, please let me know. About anything.

Back in January 2021, a collector paid $396,000 at Heritage Auctions for a $20 bill with a Del Monte banana sticker underneath part of the bill’s Treasury Seal and serial number. The provenance dates back to 2004 from an ATM in Ohio, which dispensed the note to a student and has now been auctioned three times.

“Collectors immediately fell in love with it,” Dustin Johnston, Vice President of Currency Auctions at Heritage Auctions, was quoted in a press release. Sorta not really explaining why this $20 bill is worth 19,800 pristine $20 bills, he added that “the placement of the ‘Del Monte Ecuador’ banana sticker is ideal.”

But why $396,000? Why not throw in an extra 4k for a smoother “four hundred thousand dollars” which rolls off the tongue at a cocktail party and is far more aesthetically appealing in a press release headline?

Zipping back to the ineffable present, a man has sold hundreds of farts. Or, NFTs pegged to the description of audio files of farts.

Alex Ramírez-Mallis (who considers the NFT craze ludicrous) told the New York Post that he and his friends recorded farts and shared them daily from March 2020 to March 2021. Ramírez-Mallis has sold a full-year compilation for .24 Ethereum (in late March, roughly $430) as well as seven single farts for .05 Ethereum (then, $89). Head over to the Post if you’d like to know more about the man behind the farts. In this case, I prefer to separate the art from the artist.

Joke coins, haha, they’ll never catch on, right? Surely Coinbase will never list—

After years of anticipation, Tesla unveiled the rhomboid bulletproof wagon of SpaceX steel. Despite the swift realization that its “armor glass” was not in fact metal-ball-proof, Musk reported that hundreds of thousands of Tesla completists put in preorders, anyway.

CryptoPunks represent the only historically relevant narrative upon which value could conceivably live for decades within an expanding catalogue raisonné, and I’ll be damned if I’m counting Jack’s tweet.

CryptoPunks, some of the first NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, were created by software developers Matt Hall and John Watkinson, aka Larva Labs, in 2017. As a fixed set of 10,000 and therefore a “safe” investment, they are represented by algorithmically-generated pixellated avatars, with extra mileage promised from a classic 8-bit aesthetic.

The creators claim that CryptoPunks “inspired the modern CryptoArt movement,” which glazes over the fact that artists and curators who have been thinking about how to interact with the blockchain for years—but okay, in the sense that CryptoPunks represent a vanishingly thin barrier between art and transaction.

CryptoPunks, at first distributed for free, aren’t trying to be anything other than tokens. That’s fine. Somewhat charmingly, the market for CryptoPunks has dispersed to porn site CamSoda, where one sold for $200,000 to “mrpussyfucker23.” Every mrpussyfucker deserves his day.

But if Sotheby’s and Christie’s succeed, and they usually do, CryptoPunks will assume a permanent role as a storage space for generational wealth for decades to come.