NFT's for Pathologists
When I try to explain Web3 to my former self (a physician with his head in the sand), I feel like Rick from @rickandmorty. That’s why I’m writing “NFT’s for Pathologists: A knuckle-dragger’s reference.”
What you need to know for your personal and professional development.
THREAD:
NFT = Nonfungible Token
To understand it (and block chain in general) you need to take a step back an think about what makes the infrastructure of western style business and capitalism as Hernando de Soto wrote about in his book “The Mystery of Capital”
(The economist, not the conquistador)
Everything we do in developed nations that carries monetary value - the value only exists due to our infrastructure of business law, contracts, titles, deeds, trusts, and the enforcement of those property rights.
Those property rights are validated by the legitimacy of the state.
e.g. legitimacy of the nation-state
Rule of law, etc.
An “NFT” in its current definition - is a traceable jpeg - but that that’s only because we are still very early in the evolution of NFT’s and block chain.
For example: say you have a jpeg image of Ja Rule performing at Madison Square Garden.
How do you prove that it’s yours?
The blockchain, Ethereum or Solana blockchains are a permanent digital ledger - a record of your exclusive ownership of that image.
If you post that photo on the internet somewhere and someone screenshots it - it’s still yours on the block chain. They do not own the original minted version of that jpeg.
Now… extrapolate that “NFT” concept to ANY form of property - real estate, intellectual property, video property, music property, etc.
And you get an incredibly different market place that is no longer enforced by the nation-state - it is enforced by the community regulated encrypted network = the specific block chain upon which that property was minted.
Back to JPEG’s:
Why do human beings collect? I don’t #&$%-ing know - why do you collect slides of interesting cases? Partly for education value (but honestly how many unknown conferences are you really going to give).
Humans collect stuff because it signifies story, history, emotion, attachment to ideals/values/relationships.
It’s so deeply rooted into our DNA, you only really become cognizant of it when you have to move cross-country to start a fellowship and you look at your apartment - “wow look at all this #&$% I’ve been storing here - oh yea that race number reminds me of that bike race I did in the park, or.. that bottle of Henny reminds me of Mardi Gras.
The enforcement of property rights is the a basis of all markets. Markets are now changing dramatically with the introduction of these “digital goods” and “digital collectibles”. Now there is “digital real estate” - think a bill board in a virtual environment such as Zwift, League of Legends, Call of Duty, Digital Professional Meeting Lobby, etc.
All of those digital products are NFTs because they are unique and enforceable. Minted irreversibly on a shared, community-regulated network.
During our lifetime, this marketplace will be very volatile and unstable. Why, you ask?
Think about what NFT means for the nation-state.
You’re basically circumventing the United States, the Federal Reserve, the Legal infrastructure, etc with a shared ledger (blockchain). Nobody knows how quickly this adjacent digital economy will rise. Bottomline: Web3.0 community ownership is the future of human commercial and personal interaction.
If this transition away from the nation-state happened abruptly, we’d all be &*#$ed. There would be a war in the streets.
The Federal Reserve and the legal profession in this country is not going to just let the dollar de-value suddenly. But simultaneously there is a this new digital marketplace rising adjacent to the fiat marketplace.
There will be two worlds, and multiple sub-worlds of commerce divided among individual crypto/NFT tokens - like for example, right now OpenSea is the largest market place for NFTs, primarily based upon the Ethereum network. There are other, smaller, experimental marketplaces (Solana, Polkadot, hundreds of others) that trade digital goods in other cryptocurrencies - and the jury is still out on which one will be the dominant player.
Right now you can store cryptocurrency in your Venmo wallet as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Light Coin, and Etherum. Venmo is owned by PayPal, which is a publicly traded company that was co-founded by Elon Musk - they have the ability to do far more sophisticated risk projections than a knuckle-dragger like me.
You don’t have to be an engineer. If you have an internet connect and a stolen laptop, you have access to Twitter, Reddit, Discord groups, and YouTube videos. That’s where the conversations about Web3.0 are happening. That’s all I have to say now.
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