What are NFTs? Cyber Elephant in the Digital Room

What exactly are NFTs? This question seems outdated in July 2022. Half a year ago, this term has already jumped into the mainstream media in Taiwan, and the European and American media has a year earlier. But at the dawn of digital civilization, this is still a rather naive question. Explaining NFT is like a blind man touching an elephant: "NFT is a water pipe" "NFT is a pillar" "It's weird, NFT is a big fan". You might think that the self-proclaimed web3 new human beings are all psychopaths, and even if everyone speaks different ways, the same person will be inconsistent. This is because workers from different backgrounds are discussing NFTs from different perspectives.

But more troublesome is that talking about NFTs in this day and age is inherently reflexivity. In May of this year, Vitalik and Weyl published a paper on Soulbound Token (SBT). In less than a month, SBT projects appeared in the global blockchain hackathon in June. You and I must get used to this era of high-speed iteration. When you reach out and point your finger, the world has changed because of you. NFTs have become the cyber elephants in the digital civilization room.

What you say it is, I can almost argue against it. New media artist Wang Xinren said that his NFTs are useless, but there are already thousands of services that are converting network domains, bills, and exchange coupons into NFTs. There are people who put the spirit of decentralization into practice against platform capitalism, but at the same time many hedge funds are making their fortunes in cryptocurrencies. Most believers believe that NFT is a decentralized asset, but Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike made a joke that his NFT will display different pictures on different platforms, that is because his works are stored in a centralized server and can be changed arbitrarily . In fact, many NFT platforms don't use decentralized public blockchains at all, but users don't really care.

Villagers and village women believe in him (with Ada, he has a prosperous life. See Ada gossip); wise people believe in him (such as Weyl, the author of the radical market above). What exactly are NFTs? An artist asked: "Is NFT a medium?" My response was: "It can be, but we rarely talk about it that way." NFT is really a... token that can carry multimedia on it media, so that digital bits can finally be exchanged.

And this "exchange" alone has created so many beautiful imaginations. We have finally entered the era of digital assets from the digital age. Libertarianism believes in the spirit of decentralization, which re-empowers digital humans to exchange autonomously; at the same time, central banks of various countries are developing digital currencies (CBDC), and the consortium blockchain of financial oligarchs is also rampant. President Yang Jinlong's public briefing three days ago showed that digital NT dollars may support smart contracts, which made us see the phantom of desktop NFTs. The CCP regime is tightening its restrictions on NFTs, and digital collectibles with Chinese characteristics strangle the seedlings of anarchism born in the West. Being certified by a "centralized government" is an important prerequisite for digital collectibles, which can also be exchanged. And "soul-bound tokens" that reflect on the nature of exchange have also appeared. An anonymous official discussed privately: "How does the government issue soul-bound tokens?" This is really soul torture!

Token "exchange" is maturing, and NFT makes digital assets not just money, but also things. As the saying goes, love and bread cannot have both, and digital love is not easily just a currency. Looking back at the history of cryptocurrencies, the 2010s of money-for-money have progressed to the 2020s of money-for-things, and even back to the generation of barter thousands of years ago. The cryptocurrency world was once a wave of money and a wave of technology, and now it is about to usher in a wave of digital things. When you see things, have you ever stared at virtual treasures in a daze, staring at Line stickers without moving? Civilization is still adapting, "feeling" buying an e-book is actually just buying the viewing rights; "feeling" buying an NFT digital artwork is actually just having digital naming rights. Is it really? Mental activities do not exist in the legal world, and the "possession" in the heart is solid. Make a bold assumption, just emphasize "you lost" or "you don't", and you become a wave of "have" desires. And between loss and possession, there is "exchange".

Because of this "exchange", I also dropped out of the research institute after resigning from the hospital. I was caught in this beautiful dream, and I was one of those blind men who saw reflexivity and dreamed of becoming an elephant rider. In this extremely complex exchange system, what do you want to create? Let digital art finally be exchangeable? Make private parking rights exchangeable? Let spiritual values finally have a price to anchor? Or let a story appealing to class, nationality, ideology be paid for? Digital trading has been around for years, but digital asset trading is just getting started. Blockchain technology gives you the imagination of infinite extension in time and space, making digital assets more like objects.

The dawn of digital assets brings many experiments, such as the grafting of virtual and physical empowerment (Utility), empowerment is a transitional product of the era to explore "virtual" and "physical"; Empower (Empower) is inevitable at multiple levels in different eras The concept being discussed, our Acura web3 era finally makes creation worthwhile, really? As a decade of successful data workers, can we escape? Is data a digital asset? It is very possible that digital assets are just a process of making it easier for artificial intelligence to identify the human mind, as we are forced to be born digital from a world of analogies.

What are NFTs? In fact, I want to say that NFT may be a kind of photography, photography can be an art, but it can also be just a tool. As a kind of time frame, NFT depends on which process the author wants to sample. Casting acts as a shutter to develop digital assets for the audience and for themselves. This can break the traditional rules, and it is possible to choose almost any creation timeline, and even leave it to the audience to continue to derive after the creation is completed. A random draft, post-event record, souvenir, digital accident, community resonance, there are too many to explore.

It won't take a few years, no one will care what NFT is, as an asset, it has become a part of daily digital life. Your collection of digital assets is the elephant in the room now.

(Written three days before the public sale of Baiyue Project, I hope to be a blind man who is groping.)

Cover image: alphaIpsum #60