If something is fungible, it is essentially swappable with anything that is identical to it. Let’s say you and I both have our own dollar bills. We trade bills. We both still have $1, because the value of the bill isn’t related to the individual note, but rather the fact that you have a note. I don’t care which bill I have, because it is fungible. Sure they have serial numbers, but I’m not tracking those in regular usage. Functionally, the cash is fungible; If I loaned you $50 for a week, I’m not expecting to get back the exact same $50 bill that I handed to you last week.
Cash is just one example of a fungible item, but it could really be anything that is traded in lots or bulk. Maybe you buy a 50 pound bag of sand. You’re not buying each individual grain of sand, and tracking them all individually. Those grains of sand are fungible, because you only care that you got 50 pounds of them total. Hell, even the bags of sand could be fungible, as long as they’re all identical enough that you don’t care which bag is yours. It could be pounds of rice, or gallons of water, cans of soda in a vending machine, etc… All that matters is that the quality is similar enough between two items that you wouldn’t notice a difference between two, and you don’t care which specific item is yours. That’s what makes them fungible.
A non-fungible item is something that you do care about individually. A deck of playing cards may be fungible to a casino that buys 5000 of them per year… They don’t care which specific deck is in use at a poker table, because they’re all functionally the same. But each individual card is non-fungible to the poker players who care a lot about which specific cards they were dealt. A car dealership may have 20 identical cars parked in a lot just like yours, but one of them specifically is yours.
In the digital world, basically everything is fungible. Copies are easy to make, and are functionally identical to each other. If I make a gif and someone else reposts it, their repost isn’t functionally different than mine. NFTs were an attempt to create a sort of ownership ledger for digital items. A way of saying “you can copy this, but this one specifically is mine.” Technically, an NFT could point to anything, because all it is doing is attaching a unique identifier to the digital item, then entering it into the blockchain (essentially a ledger) so it can be tracked. If it exchanges hands, the blockchain will reflect that. But importantly, making a copy won’t enter a new copy into the blockchain, because you can’t copy the unique identifier.
It has a few potential practical uses. For instance, maybe digital IDs could be secured, as it would allow people to verify that their digital ID is the original and not a copy. Essentially, they’d show that they own the NFT for their ID, the blockchain would confirm that, and their ID would be verified.
But instead, techbros immediately turned it into a pump-and-dump and/or pyramid scheme.
An NFT is essentially a number tied to another number in a block chain that establishes ownership.
It provides a history of who owns it to. It’s very useful when validating contracts and preventing fraud. Somehow it got turned into little graphics exchanged for money and I still don’t understand how that happened.
So, for instance, since the owners of the NFTs know that the wallet is compromised, the recipients of the NFTs after this point in the block chain are recipients of stolen goods. So anyone tracing the validity of an NFT knows that these are now all worthless.
Yes, plenty of ways, but none that didn’t have flaws. The idea behind it is that it leveraged a publicly viewable history.
Something like a Title Search for a home purchase would be done looking at the token’s history. It’s also not a database so there’s no way to edit it after the transaction has been performed.
In the instance of equities exchange it can also be used to prove who has and historically had ownership. In the care of, say, a broker, no one actually owns the stocks, the broker does and gives you an IOU for the stock. This means they can do whatever they want with the stock while it shouldn’t be touched since it’s yours.
There’s nothing there that can’t be done with a standard, public database. What’s lacking is the political will to modernize these systems. NFTs don’t solve that.
I brought up Ticketmaster because it’s a common thing to bring up for NFT replacement. A dumb thing to bring up, because while everyone hates Ticketmaster, people don’t understand why venues are beholden to them and how NFTs won’t solve that.
For classical databases there is always someone with root access, who could modify whatever they want.
In practice, for important stuff, there is a good chance enough people were observing to make a case based on witnesses, but it isn’t exactly ideal.
You don’t often get banks running with your money or some storage facility selling your stuff illegally, but it could happen. And that is enough for some (paranoid) people. Maybe some day there might even be applications that would not otherwise be feasible due to fear of scams.
There is a usecase for crypto currencies, so why not the highly related NFTs where the only difference is that the stuff you own is a unique thing (like a title) instead of a bunch of non-unique things (like currency).
There are audit trails and compliance for this stuff. It’s a solved problem. Techbros just don’t understand what’s already there and think it needs to be fixed with something that happens to make them rich.
The best part is that for 99% of NFTs, that graphic isn’t stored on the blockchain. It’s just a standard internet URL. So you are relying on the TLD to be alive in ICANN, the TLD to be registered to the same party that originally sold the NFTs, the DNS servers the TLD uses to be registered and function as expected, and finally the servers that are privately owned by somebody else to be hosting the stupid graphic at the URL the NFT is registered to.
NFTs, as implemented on a block chain are a unique number. A URL to that transaction can be generated, but a URL itself does not establish anything.the NFT needs to be in your block chain wallet. “Not your keys, not your wallet, not your crypto” applies here as well.
Which is why the whole graphic -> nft thing didn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Great. You own the number assigned to a graphic. You own that graphic. You can still copy the pixels of that graphic too.
What do you mean, I shook my magic 8-ball and it clearly said I was correct in valuing my stick figure at 50b USD. I was completely bankrupted when my kid ripped my paper in half
It provides a history of who owns it to. It’s very useful when validating contracts and preventing fraud.
So useful in fact that no company in existence that I know of uses it.
Don’t know of a single bank, fortune 500 or any financial institution that uses it.
Wonder why.
So, for instance, since the owners of the NFTs know that the wallet is compromised, the recipients of the NFTs after this point in the block chain are recipients of stolen goods. So anyone tracing the validity of an NFT knows that these are now all worthless.
Yeah, I dont think you can go from worthless to worthless.
What if we took the art market, where prices can be whatever, so it’s really easy to launder money. Then we let people easily set up multiple accounts for wash trading. And we supported currencies held in stupidly large amounts by people who can’t legally use them for anything useful.
Being “fungible” means that something is functionally equivalent with something else.
For example even though every dollar bill is unique (they have unique serial numbers), they are all fungible. If you deposit $100 in the bank, then withdraw $100 later, you are not getting the same bills, maybe not even the same denominations, but you don’t care because it doesn’t matter.
In the digital world copies are cheap and perfect. There is literally no way to tell a copy of an image from “the original”. So in the digital world all copies of something are fungible, and originals don’t meaningfully exist.
NFTs try to introduce artificial scarcity to the digital space by creating a distinction between “the original” of something and the copies, by introducing a sort of chain of custody tracking system.
Just want to add to that, NFTs aren’t inherently about artificial scarcity, they could also be used to track ownership of rights or real life items without a central authority that everybody needs to trust.
Of course, cryptobros immediately went to pushing them as an investment scheme, and the actual implementations are slow, inefficient, and downright expensive to use. I don’t think anybody has managed to make NFTs actually useful, but I imagine the original creators weren’t looking to create… Whatever this is.
Me neither. Please explain. Something with mushrooms, surely.
If something is fungible, it is essentially swappable with anything that is identical to it. Let’s say you and I both have our own dollar bills. We trade bills. We both still have $1, because the value of the bill isn’t related to the individual note, but rather the fact that you have a note. I don’t care which bill I have, because it is fungible. Sure they have serial numbers, but I’m not tracking those in regular usage. Functionally, the cash is fungible; If I loaned you $50 for a week, I’m not expecting to get back the exact same $50 bill that I handed to you last week.
Cash is just one example of a fungible item, but it could really be anything that is traded in lots or bulk. Maybe you buy a 50 pound bag of sand. You’re not buying each individual grain of sand, and tracking them all individually. Those grains of sand are fungible, because you only care that you got 50 pounds of them total. Hell, even the bags of sand could be fungible, as long as they’re all identical enough that you don’t care which bag is yours. It could be pounds of rice, or gallons of water, cans of soda in a vending machine, etc… All that matters is that the quality is similar enough between two items that you wouldn’t notice a difference between two, and you don’t care which specific item is yours. That’s what makes them fungible.
A non-fungible item is something that you do care about individually. A deck of playing cards may be fungible to a casino that buys 5000 of them per year… They don’t care which specific deck is in use at a poker table, because they’re all functionally the same. But each individual card is non-fungible to the poker players who care a lot about which specific cards they were dealt. A car dealership may have 20 identical cars parked in a lot just like yours, but one of them specifically is yours.
In the digital world, basically everything is fungible. Copies are easy to make, and are functionally identical to each other. If I make a gif and someone else reposts it, their repost isn’t functionally different than mine. NFTs were an attempt to create a sort of ownership ledger for digital items. A way of saying “you can copy this, but this one specifically is mine.” Technically, an NFT could point to anything, because all it is doing is attaching a unique identifier to the digital item, then entering it into the blockchain (essentially a ledger) so it can be tracked. If it exchanges hands, the blockchain will reflect that. But importantly, making a copy won’t enter a new copy into the blockchain, because you can’t copy the unique identifier.
It has a few potential practical uses. For instance, maybe digital IDs could be secured, as it would allow people to verify that their digital ID is the original and not a copy. Essentially, they’d show that they own the NFT for their ID, the blockchain would confirm that, and their ID would be verified.
But instead, techbros immediately turned it into a pump-and-dump and/or pyramid scheme.
Something that is fungible is not unique.
An NFT is essentially a number tied to another number in a block chain that establishes ownership.
It provides a history of who owns it to. It’s very useful when validating contracts and preventing fraud. Somehow it got turned into little graphics exchanged for money and I still don’t understand how that happened.
So, for instance, since the owners of the NFTs know that the wallet is compromised, the recipients of the NFTs after this point in the block chain are recipients of stolen goods. So anyone tracing the validity of an NFT knows that these are now all worthless.
I mean, they were worthless before…
Worthless on their own, yes. It’s very valuable as a technology in terms of trackability and transparency, and establishing ownership.
Tied to a graphic? That’s just stupid and anyone who spent money on them deserved what they got.
That has yet to be proven. Other technology already exists which does this, and that is currently being used as that by most of the world.
We had ways to do trackability, transparency, and establishing ownership before NFTs came along. They solve nothing.
Please, for the love of fuck, don’t say Ticketmaster. That argument is the worst.
Yes, plenty of ways, but none that didn’t have flaws. The idea behind it is that it leveraged a publicly viewable history.
Something like a Title Search for a home purchase would be done looking at the token’s history. It’s also not a database so there’s no way to edit it after the transaction has been performed.
In the instance of equities exchange it can also be used to prove who has and historically had ownership. In the care of, say, a broker, no one actually owns the stocks, the broker does and gives you an IOU for the stock. This means they can do whatever they want with the stock while it shouldn’t be touched since it’s yours.
I don’t know how Ticketmaster plays into this?
There’s nothing there that can’t be done with a standard, public database. What’s lacking is the political will to modernize these systems. NFTs don’t solve that.
I brought up Ticketmaster because it’s a common thing to bring up for NFT replacement. A dumb thing to bring up, because while everyone hates Ticketmaster, people don’t understand why venues are beholden to them and how NFTs won’t solve that.
For classical databases there is always someone with root access, who could modify whatever they want.
In practice, for important stuff, there is a good chance enough people were observing to make a case based on witnesses, but it isn’t exactly ideal.
You don’t often get banks running with your money or some storage facility selling your stuff illegally, but it could happen. And that is enough for some (paranoid) people. Maybe some day there might even be applications that would not otherwise be feasible due to fear of scams.
There is a usecase for crypto currencies, so why not the highly related NFTs where the only difference is that the stuff you own is a unique thing (like a title) instead of a bunch of non-unique things (like currency).
There are audit trails and compliance for this stuff. It’s a solved problem. Techbros just don’t understand what’s already there and think it needs to be fixed with something that happens to make them rich.
I might be incorrect, but databases can always be updated to affect existing data.
That’s what an audit trail is for.
No it’s not useful at all
The best part is that for 99% of NFTs, that graphic isn’t stored on the blockchain. It’s just a standard internet URL. So you are relying on the TLD to be alive in ICANN, the TLD to be registered to the same party that originally sold the NFTs, the DNS servers the TLD uses to be registered and function as expected, and finally the servers that are privately owned by somebody else to be hosting the stupid graphic at the URL the NFT is registered to.
So then they aren’t even NFTs
The NFT is just the receipt for a URL isn’t it?
NFTs, as implemented on a block chain are a unique number. A URL to that transaction can be generated, but a URL itself does not establish anything.the NFT needs to be in your block chain wallet. “Not your keys, not your wallet, not your crypto” applies here as well.
Which is why the whole graphic -> nft thing didn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Great. You own the number assigned to a graphic. You own that graphic. You can still copy the pixels of that graphic too.
What do you mean, I shook my magic 8-ball and it clearly said I was correct in valuing my stick figure at 50b USD. I was completely bankrupted when my kid ripped my paper in half
50 billionth of a USD sounds about right.
So useful in fact that no company in existence that I know of uses it.
Don’t know of a single bank, fortune 500 or any financial institution that uses it.
Wonder why.
Yeah, I dont think you can go from worthless to worthless.
Step 1: Say blockchain to an investor
Step 2: Tell them you will use it to sell a new thing.
Step 3: Tell them that no one has ever done it before, and it’ll be the next hot thing.
What if we took the art market, where prices can be whatever, so it’s really easy to launder money. Then we let people easily set up multiple accounts for wash trading. And we supported currencies held in stupidly large amounts by people who can’t legally use them for anything useful.
It’s all fun and games until they’re prosecuting you under the RICO act ;)
Then you just pay the president for a pardon. No worries.
Being “fungible” means that something is functionally equivalent with something else.
For example even though every dollar bill is unique (they have unique serial numbers), they are all fungible. If you deposit $100 in the bank, then withdraw $100 later, you are not getting the same bills, maybe not even the same denominations, but you don’t care because it doesn’t matter.
In the digital world copies are cheap and perfect. There is literally no way to tell a copy of an image from “the original”. So in the digital world all copies of something are fungible, and originals don’t meaningfully exist.
NFTs try to introduce artificial scarcity to the digital space by creating a distinction between “the original” of something and the copies, by introducing a sort of chain of custody tracking system.
Just want to add to that, NFTs aren’t inherently about artificial scarcity, they could also be used to track ownership of rights or real life items without a central authority that everybody needs to trust.
Of course, cryptobros immediately went to pushing them as an investment scheme, and the actual implementations are slow, inefficient, and downright expensive to use. I don’t think anybody has managed to make NFTs actually useful, but I imagine the original creators weren’t looking to create… Whatever this is.