NFT
Explanation
The Joke
The comic shows a series of robbery scenarios that escalate in absurdity. In the first panel, a robber demands: "Gimme a non-fungible token of the contents of your wallet." The victim responds, "Okay smart guy, what, you think I can just give all those cards and fortunes from fortune cookies uniqueness?" The second panel shows: "Guy, that's a nice watch" / "Gimme a string of characters representing that I am the only person who is the authenticated owner of a string of characters pertaining to your watch."
The final panel jumps to "One day in the future" where a teacher tells a class: "They were controversial at first, but the rate of crypto-muggings gradually came to approximate zero as the muggers got bored to death."
The Humor
The comic satirizes NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) by imagining what street robbery would look like if criminals tried to steal NFTs instead of physical goods. The joke highlights the inherent absurdity of NFTs by showing that translating the concept into everyday language makes it sound ridiculous. A mugger demanding a "non-fungible token" of your wallet's contents, or a "string of characters representing authenticated ownership of a string of characters pertaining to your watch," is so convoluted and meaningless in a physical confrontation that it becomes comedy.
The punchline -- that crypto-muggings died out because the muggers got bored trying to explain what they wanted -- is a sharp critique of how NFTs wrap simple concepts in layers of unnecessary jargon and complexity. The comic was published in March 2021, near the peak of NFT hype, making it a timely piece of satire.
References
NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are blockchain-based tokens that represent ownership of a unique digital asset. They exploded in popularity in early 2021, with some selling for millions of dollars. The comic satirizes the gap between the hype around NFTs and the often underwhelming reality of what "owning" an NFT actually means -- you own a token on a blockchain pointing to a digital file, not the file itself. The term "non-fungible" means not interchangeable, as opposed to fungible assets like currency where one dollar is equivalent to another.