What are NFTs?

"NFT stands for nonfungible token. But what does it actually mean?

an uncopyable digital asset linked to a JPEG, which can be used to mark that particular copy of the JPEG as the “real” one... like the certificate of authenticity you might get if you bought an expensive sculpture.

community or pfp (profile picture) NFTs... a series of unique but thematically related NFTs, released in limited batches... digital collectible, and a membership card to an exclusive club... Some community NFT projects even organize offline events and parties... signal a kind of in-group status...

It’s possible ... that early NFTs will one day become as valuable as original Picassos and Monets... " or also that Gary Vaynerchuk is right and that "98 percent of NFTs would lose money." most of today’s NFT activity remains speculative

terms

• “Rug pulls” — when a crypto developer abruptly abandons a project and runs away with buyers’ money
• “whitelisting,” in which certain people are invited to buy their NFTs before they’re available to the general public... profits flow to well-connected insiders
• wash trading ... selling something to yourself in order to inflate its perceived value

In many NFT sales, what the buyer gets is simply the unique entry in the blockchain database that identifies them as the owner of the digital good — the token - not what the token represents (eg copyright).

Main pro arguments

• better deal for creators: 3LAU might sell one album NFT to a superfan for $3.6 million, and make more money than they would have from a lifetime’s worth of Spotify streams.
• metaverse: people who spend more of their days interacting in virtual spaces will buy all kinds of digital objects to enhance their lives, and many of those objects will take the form of NFTs.
• be patient...: Digital scarcity is a genuinely important concept that will open up an entirely new economy of unique digital goods,

Decentralise then recentralise

NFTs dominated by large platforms, which have sometimes acted like oldschool central platforms (OpenSea delisted certain NFTs that it deems stolen or fraudulent).

NFT ownership is also relatively centralized - rather, concentrated.

But:

• NFTs live in their owners’ crypto wallets, which aren’t chained to any particular platform.
• they can be interoperable, you can theoretically take NFTs with you from one virtual environment to another

How to sell something

• browser extension MetaMask to set up an empty crypto wallet.
• used wallet to open an account on Foundation, a NFT trading platform.
• Through Foundation, I “minted,” or created, my NFT, which involved uploading my file to a decentralized hosting service and creating a blockchain-based asset pointing to that file.
• Listed it for sale.
• The whole process took a few hours, from start to finish —
• cost roughly $100 in “gas fees” to mint the NFT.