I try to keep up on things. For the past couple of weeks I have been trying to understand NFT’s or non-fungible tokens. They’ve been selling for big bucks lately, but what are they?
Truth be told, I’m still not sure.
First, I keep getting stuck on the name. I see fungible and I think of the first part, the fungi part, and I start thinking of mushrooms. I like mushrooms. Some are very tasty. But these things have nothing to do with mushrooms or anything remotely edible. Which is a bit disappointing.
A non-fungible token is a unit of data stored on a blockchain that can represent a unique digital item like a piece of art. Although the definition of art is pretty broad in this case.
Like sports cards. A Lebron James slam dunk card, not the real card, the digital version, went for over $200,000 as an NFT. Or you can buy music. Or paintings. Or even memes. The original tweet by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey went for close to $3 million. A tweet!
And it’s not that you really have these things. You just own a digital representation. Technically, you own the original, but others can still have copies that look just as good. But those are copies and you have something that says you actually own the original.
Then, like a lot of people, you can take this digital certificate, hide it in a digital wallet and forget the password, like a lot of people have done with cryptocurrency.
I still don’t really understand it, but I know I’m not going to come across one hiding in the corner of my attic. And I suppose there is an up side. Unlike the hockey cards I had as a kid, my mother can’t throw them away when I move out of the house, leaving me to wonder if I had something valuable at one time (I didn’t).
And there is a down side. Since they are connected to block chain there is a rather large carbon footprint attached. So that’s the reason I’m not buying any of these NFT’s. Well… that and the fact that I can’t afford them in the first place. But the carbon footprint thing sounds better.
