How to understand NFTs?
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Well, the million-dollar question is … what is an NFT? Anybody can perform a short Google search, and will see the definition by Wikipedia: “A non-fungible token (NFT) is a non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a blockchain, a form of digital ledger, that can be sold and traded. Types of NFT data units may be associated with digital files such as photos, videos, and audio. Because each token is uniquely identifiable, NFTs differ from most cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, which are fungible.
NFT ledgers claim to provide a public certificate of authenticity or proof of ownership, but the legal rights conveyed by an NFT can be uncertain. NFTs do not restrict the sharing or copying of the underlying digital files, do not necessarily convey the copyright of the digital files, and do not prevent the creation of NFTs with identical associated files.
NFTs have been used as a speculative asset, and they have drawn increasing criticism for the energy cost and carbon footprint associated with validating blockchain transactions as well as their frequent use in art scams. The NFT market has also been compared to a Ponzi scheme.” But even after seeing this definition, the question comes up again: what is an NFT?
In a nutshell, it is “something” with a unique record on the database that blockchain is Cryptocurrencies like BTC are fungible because you can easily replace one coin with another, but the NFTs are not fungible because every NFT has its own digital signature of the blockchain. So from the blockchain point of view, every NFT is unique. The NFTs can be photos, videos, audio files, digital art, and other things. Just for the sake of the exercise, if you go to Youtube, and if you are uploading a song from the 80s it is most likely that Youtube will show a pop-up alarming you that there is somebody else who is the copyright owner. But if I make a picture of yourself (yes, of yourself, thank you for reading the article), and put it on sale in a marketplace, and make let’s say $1k from this, you may never know that I did that, so you will not even get the equivalent of a coffee from this. So one big question in the NFT space is who is the copyright owner of the digital assets on sale on various platforms. Some of the NFTs don’t have any utility, they are just some files registered on a blockchain, others could be used as an entrance…
