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Nifty (NFT) Intro
It took a while, but NFT’s have recently swept the headlines of major publications. People can’t understand why someone would pay millions of dollars for a jpeg or GIF. Simple explanation: An NFT (Non Fungible Token) is a digital collectible. It’s a bit like a digital baseball card. The more technical explanation is that encryption enables NFTs to be a unique token which is not interchangeable due to the unique address it has been given. It is impossible for the tokens to be exchanged or replaced. They can be removed from the network by the owner (an act called ‘burning’).
Let me outline a use case. A common phenomenon on the internet is the meme, which usually consists of a free image with unique and usually funny text. The meme proliferates for free on the internet, with little chance for capitalization by the creator.
NFTs make capitalization possible by tagging this meme with unique data (like date created, who created it), which means that the true owner (or owners) can be verified and that the artwork cannot be reproduced. It’s like owning the original Mona Lisa, instead of owning the artist print. Prior to the blockchain, creating this type of digital scarcity was hard, if not impossible. People could just copy a picture and act as if it was their own image, without an effective way to…
