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.
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.