Tuesday, December 13, 2022
Before we start talking NFTs
James is a young boy who loves playing videogames. He has spent hours every day sitting in front of his computer, navigating through fantastical worlds and battling enemies and spending hundreds of dollars on in game assets. James was a skilled player, and he had worked hard to level up in his favorite game and spend a lot of money getting there. He had earned a number of achievements and was proud of the progress he had made.
But one day, something terrible happened. James was playing his game when suddenly, the screen went blank. He tried to restart the game, but all of his progress was gone. All of the achievements he had worked so hard to earn had vanished, and James was devastated. James used local storage to save the game and the marketplace he was using did not save all his data. We've all been there in some way shape or form, word docs, google docs anything that just vanishes..
But what if this would happen to your credentials? Your Identity or your bank account? Isn't that data centralised? This is getting grim, let's move on.
I want you to imagine a videogame, you play the game and level up. By doing so you accomplished leveling up, you receive an achievement, proceeding in the game we need to have tracked that you leveled up. We can do this by tallying up that you leveled up. Not much different from going through grades at school. So we need some sort of registration. We do this in a database, save the data and make sure that it is registered mainly at a centralised database. We can do this on the blockchain as well making it kind of decentralised . By registration that you leveled up we log a transaction. So what if we call the thing that just was registered an NFT? Does that make sense?
A Non Fungible Token:
You could actually register anything, as blockchain is a ledger technology, anything goes.
We could think of an achievement in the real world or in the digital world. Maybe a Real world identification, your personal resume, your house, anything we can log and connect to the digital plain. So basically NFT is simply a digital pointer that points towards the actual asset, but now logged with a timestamp on a blockchain. So instead of having it on the playstation, steam or university account it's on a blockchain.
A token could be seen as the digital asset, the thing we can interchange with each other or send or receive from an address or protocol. To make sure the ledger sees what happens these tokens get logged on every transaction. What makes it very transparant and tracible. The thing is, there are more types of tokens.. That's a bit confusing.
We have Fungible and Non-fungible Tokens.
Fungible: mutually interchangeable as in if i give you €50,- and you eat the bill like a goat. And pull out your wallet and give me another €50,- I'll be made whole again.
Nonfungible: non-Interchangeable as in when I bring my kid to your house and you give me your kid in return when I come to pick up the kid that doesn't work. Sure your own child might be a handful but my kid as yours is non-interchangeable. So each child is unique in their own way. And we love them for that.
ps.
I don't have kids, but definitely would want my own child back in that scenario.
I'm a web3 enthusiast living in the Netherlands and helping companies and individuals on a strategic and practical level. I also maintain and engage with over 2000+ people within the Dutch Web3 industry. I Help Agencies, entrepreneurs & Individuals understand and execute in Web3.