NFTs solve the problem of digital ownership. They allow you to claim “yep, this thing is mine” even if it’s digital.
Ever since the Internet went mainstream, the online industry has been struggling with finding a technical solution to selling digital things. Remember how Microsoft was trying to introduce Digital Rights Management with their WMA format at the time when you could stream music for free with Pandora and use Winamp to play pirate mp3s downloaded overnight with Napster? There was no medium ground between clunky gatekeeping and full-on piracy.
Then came Apple iTunes, Spotify and eventually Netflix that made the experience smoother and more legit. However something still wasn’t quite right: with Kindle or Apple TV, when you bought a book or a movie you didn’t really own the copy. You merely received a right to download or stream something from a company that controlled both your account and the content. This was not ownership as in owning a physical book, a DVD or an audio tape. It was more like renting rather than owning.
Bitcoin is this zero to one invention that makes it possible to natively store and move value over the Internet in a digital form at the protocol level, making the entire technology stack of the current cross-border remittance systems obsolete overnight. Then Ethereum generalised the idea by making the transfer of value programmable, making it easy to create tokens, exchanges, financial products and eventually NFTs. [by the way, storing NFTs over Bitcoin is possible as well and is probably a good idea since this is the most secure network by far]
As long as you are the only one to know the private key for your public address (whether the chain is Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tezos, Polygon, Avalanche, Algorand, Flow or Solana…) then you own everything that is on this address: coins, tokens and NFTs.
All you need is a private key. Any other type of secret (user-generated password, 2FA challenge, credit card number, expiry date, 3-digit pictogram thingy, phone number, SMS code, 3D authentication, postcode, passport number, birth date, maiden name of your Mum, name of your first dog) is simply inferior.
Because we have been conditioned to using things for free on the Internet for the past thirty years, we still struggle with the idea that we can own something online. We still haven’t absorbed the concept intuitively. In 1994 we would have said “I downloaded a page of HTML markup over the HTTP protocol from a World Wide Web server”, today we just say “I found this online”. Similarly in less than ten years instead of talking of “Non Fungible Tokens on blockchains" we will just say “I own this online” or even just “I own this”.
Comments