We are Non-Fungible
Daily Ramble
NFTs. If you’ve not heard the term yet, it means Non-Fungible Tokens. And it’s all the craze on the interwebs. You’d have to be hiding under the North Pole to have missed the interstellar rise of NFTs over the last few months. So what are they, and why do they matter?
Let’s start with the word fungible, which is not associated with the mushroom kingdom. Instead, fungible is used to describe mutually interchangeable items. For example, if I go to a store, it doesn’t matter which €20 note I give the cashier; he’ll accept it because €20 notes are fungible. Other examples of fungible items include bitcoin, publicly traded stocks, and commodities (corn, copper, wheat, etc.…). Fungibility is the exception rather than the norm, though. Most of our reality is made up of non-fungible things like living beings, pieces of art, and clothing.
Non-fungible tokens are not specific to any single blockchain, and each token represents a unique digital item. Unless it’s a set of NFTs, each unique item correlates with exactly one unique token. If it is a set, then each of the items in the limited set is the same, but the set itself is unique — like a package of socks, for example. The important part is that having an NFT on a blockchain allows for private ownership outside the walled garden ecosystems we have become accustomed to online. That means that you can keep your digital collectibles in your unique wallet that you, and only you, have the key to moving. If you want to send your NFT to India on a whim, you can. If you want to move it from a marketplace into a video game and back to another marketplace, you can.
NFTs have a rich history that started in 2017 with CryptoKitties. Though that wasn’t a pop culture event, NFTs have been one of the first crypto applications that lept the adoption barrier and captured the public’s imagination. For example, NBA Top Shot was the mainstream breakthrough product that allowed NBA fans to purchase cards that contained sets of highlight-reel video moments from NBA players. The Top Shot market exploded at the beginning of the year, making early collectors into overnight wealth stories. Both CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shots proved that people would pay good money for a digitally unique item.
Why do NFTs matter? Because they are a key piece of the building block for the metaverse being built online. A metaverse is a digital world, like Minecraft, that allows users to build the reality itself within the digital environment. NFTs are creating digitally-scarce unique items that can be traversed across the digital reality of a metaverse. If you’ve not seen the movie Ready Player One, watch it. It’s a great movie, but I’ve yet to see anything that does a better job showing people what is being created right now. My wife and I spent several hours this weekend looking at different NFT projects, and I saw her excitement grow..and grow. Seeing Ana validate the reality I’ve been watching emerge was validating.
More importantly, my thesis that crypto is reorganizing humanity from nation-states to digitally self-organized tribes and clans is solidifying. If you haven’t started the process of separating your sovereign identity from the nation-state you live in, I recommend starting ASAP. It might help your process to realize your culture and the nation-state that manages it are not the same. I’m not advocating that you leave your culture behind. Still, as we see the nation-state model continue to decline in the years ahead, those that make the transition soonest will reap the rewards in humanity’s new organizational structure.
Rad Things on the Interweb
Real-life is still better than any computer-generated graphic! 1
Bitcoin Price Prediction
Weekend: $43.7k - $49k
Today: $43.7k - $49k
Tomorrow: $43.7k - $49k
Bitcoin is treading water since moving up to $48k the second half of Friday. Since then, the price has bounced between $45.5k and $48k. I continue to see $49k as the next stop before the market decides if we’re continuing straight up or pulling back more substantially. Blowing through $49k would be extremely bullish, but the bullish momentum is beginning to stall, so the odds of smashing through on the first shot are low. That said, the case for a pullback grows if we lose $45k on a daily close.
Bitcoin Q & A
Q: If I wanted to send $.10 to Nairobi, how could I do it?
A: By using the Bitcoin Lightning Network.
The fiat monetary system has too many intermediaries to make a small international payment feasible. The Bitcoin Lightning Network has solved this issue for the first time, allowing pennies to be sent globally for fractions of a penny. Small global transactions open the doors to new, online economic opportunities for the nearly 700M people living on less than $1.90 per day. Bitcoin’s Lightning Network is posed to bank the unbanked, unlocking the entrepreneurial spirit of those hungriest for change.
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Thanks to Adam R for sharing today’s Rad Thing on the Interwebs