But here’s the twist: when the auction completes, the video will be removed from YouTube.

Charlie Bit My NFT

Following in the steps of Disaster Girl making $500,000 as an NFT, or the less successful David After Dentist making $11,500 as an NFT, another old school YouTube viral video is getting in on the act.

This time it’s Charlie Bit My Finger, which will be auctioned as a 1/1 NFT through Origin Protocol. In a twist, the original video will be removed from YouTube when the auction is complete. It currently has over 881 million views.

Origin Protocol has a suite of blockchain products and has its core team is made up of ex-employees from the likes of YouTube, Dropbox, and Zoho.

Simply put, an NFT is a unique digital item. Unlike cryptocurrency like Bitcoin that can be farmed and generated, an NFT belongs to one person. The true owner of the item is recorded in a ledger called a blockchain.

Charlie Can Bite Your Finger

The auction winner will also get a chance to recreate a parody of the video with the now-teenage Harry and Charlie. Because that’s something you’ve been dying to do, right?

Of course, we’ll have to pretend that countless copies of the video don’t exist elsewhere… and that it’s not simple to download videos from YouTube.

In an interview with the New York Post, the now-14-year-old Charlie said:

Charlie’s father, Howard Davies-Carr, claims that the family aren’t doing this for the money (the goodness of their hearts instead, perhaps?), and that they might lose out overall. That’s because they will fly to the winner at their own expense, in order to record the reenactment video.

The auction begins on May 22, 2021, though it’s unclear how long it’ll last for. It’ll be interesting to see whether this old viral video has jumped on the NFT bandwagon too late, or if the added hook of being removed from YouTube is enough to rocket the price.

A Piece of YouTube History Is Being Removed

Charlie Bit My Finger became a global sensation only a couple of years into YouTube’s life, so it’ll be strange to see such an iconic video removed from the platform after 14 years.

That said, considering the rate that viral videos and memes come and go nowadays, perhaps it’s not such a big loss.