NFTs: What if we buy digital stuff?

Likely, these last few days, you have not stopped hearing the term NFC or how jpg images of kittens are sold at crazy prices. If you don't understand anything, it's perfectly normal, and that's why I'm here today to explain what all these "non-fungible tokens" are about.

Just like a Pokemon card or an image of a kitten that sells for several thousand dollars, an NFT is pretty much the same. But to understand what these NFTs are, we will have to go back several years in the life of Mark Cuban, a famous billionaire investor. At age 15, Mark Cuban discovered a way to buy 15-cent stamps to sell for $25 an hour later to save for college. Even then, he saw how collecting assigned a different value to a physical good. But he now believes in the NFTs revolution, which is the digital version of a label or art in general and that we are the ones who give it a very high value, in this case.

Furthermore, these assets are gaining ground and are part of that new culture in which the blockchain and cryptocurrencies are also fully integrated. Many speak of bitcoin as a store of value that replaces or can replace, what it has always represented, gold. But for Mark Cuban, it is precisely the same. Because that gold has become the store of value par excellence is "a narrative," and it is that many precious metals meet the exact requirements, but gold has more buyers when the number of buyers increases, the price rises and vice versa. There is nothing special or unique about gold, just many people who believe that narrative and buy gold. That exact reflection that other economists and analysts have made. In the past, Yuval Noah Harari talks about it in his best-seller "Sapiens: from animals to gods," which explained how the value of gold and silver is purely cultural.

Now that we have digested and assimilated this, we go directly to the NFT, the non-fungible token. They are a digital file that is an extension of this same idea. Before, we value tangible goods such as gold, and now we do it with intangible goods that we can hardly touch or see. Crypto-currencies are an approximation to that principle, but the NFT goes a little further and applies that concept of reserve value to those objects more oriented to collecting. A digital pokemon card is a good example. It is the new collectible stamp format, and the concept is the same as the one that became famous years ago with that surprising fever of crypto kittens that are still active and trading at very high prices.

For many, they are absurd because a digital avatar of a cat costs 115 thousand dollars, so very easy: enough people believed in that, and that's it. Although there is a fundamental difference between crypto-currencies and the NFT, the NFT cannot be exchanged, and that is that no two NFTRs are alike. Your crypto kitty card is unique like any other digital art.

Most of these tokens or collectibles are based on the standards of the Ethereum network and its blockchain, which has made it easier to operate with them when buying and selling them and that services as meta-more are references in this type of transaction. In addition to this, the NFC meets several characteristics that are strangely unique.

These assets have many analogies with works of art of which there may be copies, but here the owner can certify that he is the sole and actual owner of the original. Although they can be easily shared on the internet, they are not interoperable and indivisible. Unlike crypto-currencies, NFCs cannot be divided into smaller parts and have total value as an entity or token. Furthermore, the data of an NFT is indestructible. It is stored in the blockchain through a smart contract, making it impossible to destroy, delete, or replicate. They have absolute ownership, unlike music or movies. If you buy one of these goods, your property is yours. You do not buy a license to watch a movie or listen to a song, but that intangible good is entirely yours. Finally, the blockchain is verified to verify something that is much more complex to demonstrate or certify with subjects such as art or stamp collecting, for example. The blockchain keeps a history of who has bought or sold an NFT and who is its current owner, including the original creator from whom that digital asset was purchased in the first place. This makes NFT a proprietary all-rounder format.