You recently must've heard some news about Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey's tweet being sold for $2.5 million or a Beeple artwork being sold for $6.6 million and so on!
Now for those who are completely oblivious to all the things that I mentioned above, let me enlighten them because hey the article is titled "NFTs for dummies" right? 🤓
A bit of history 📜
So for quite some time artists, collectors etc have been selling their work online, digitally as something known as Non Fungible Token or NFT (we'll get into the technicalities later). It basically means that a digital piece of art or a song or a sneaker or literally a GIF is being sold for millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. Now you must be thinking "That's ludicrous! Why would I pay millions of dollars for an image of an artwork when I can just download it from Google images." Well to be honest I had that thought myself, so let's dive a bit deep and try to understand what's actually going on.
What are NFTs?
A non-fungible token is a unit of data on a digital ledger that can represent a unique digital item and provide proof of ownership of the NFT.
I can already imagine the comments "Ooof Sarthak if I just wanted copied definitions then why would I read your blogs". Wait, chill xD 😪 . So to put it mildly an NFT is some data (any type) on a blockchain that represents something unique. Yup it's as simple as that.
Why are people paying millions of dollars? 💵
To understand this ask yourself this question. "Why do people pay so much money for a Picasso's painting?". These are the reasons that I could think of :-
- It's unique (Picasso only painted a certain number of every painting).
- You have an eye for art.🧐
- You buy it as an investment, hoping it's value will increase over time. 📈
- Well, you are a collector and you like boasting your collection. 😎
Now ask yourself this "If a Picasso's painting was sold as an NFT and not as a physical copy, won't you have the same benefits?".
- The NFT is unique, that data is one of a kind on the blockchain.
- You still have an eye for that painting xD 🧐 (Big 🧠).
- It might very well go up in price (stonks 📈).
- You want to flex your collection. 😎
Bonus - How to create an NFT 🤑
You literally need no technical knowledge to do this. Although I would suggest to know what you're doing because it will cost real money.
- Go to Opensea.io.
- Click on Create.
- Sign in with your preferred web3 wallet (Metamask FTW).
- That's it. Then you just have to provide the data for your NFT (image, GIF, etc). Put up a name and a description.
- Decide how you want to sell it (a fixed price or an auction).
- That's it! Hopefully your NFT sells for astronomical prices ❤️ (if it does send me a small share please xD 🙏🏼).
I hope you had fun reading this and learnt something new. Let me know in the comments if I missed anything or something you'd like me to write about.
Top comments (3)
Anything digit is fungible by definition. Just looking at an image in an application will cause the image to be copied around the computer's memory, proving this point. NTFs are, to put it bluntly, nothing more than an extravagant way for rich people to show off how little money matters to them.
I agree that just by looking at an image it'll be copied in the computer's memory but the metadata of the copied one will be slightly different from the one which was created from scratch. And the real valuable NFTs are those which have the latter. So I won't say it's about showing off money but rather the new era of collectibles.
I always assumed that media metadata are editable. Aren't they?