Business, Community & Government, Science & Tech
NFTs: Digital Goods
Lesson time 14:08 min
NFTs may be the buzziest acronym in cryptocurrency. One by one, Chris Dixon deconstructs the types of NFTs and their potential applications. He also shares how these tokens allow for participation and ownership for everyone involved.
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Topics include: Art NFTs • Sports Collectibles NFTs • Music NFTs • Game NFTs • Monetize Ownership, Not Information • A Digital Identity • A Long-Term Commitment
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[MUSIC PLAYING] - So Web 1, as described before, was about democratizing information. But the actual mechanism by which that information was democratized was the website. And so the website took this kind of big, amorphous concept of democratizing information and made it a digestible unit. A website is a thing that a software developer or a creative person, whoever, can go and they can design the website. They can design the structure and the architecture and put images and videos and have interactivity and code and a whole bunch of other kinds of things. But the website kind of was the unit by which the promise of democratizing information was delivered. And in the same way, in Web 3, the token is that mechanism. A token is instead of being a unit of information, like the website, it's a unit of ownership. A lot of the kind of popular discussion around NFTs has kind of likened it to art and other kinds of familiar creative activities. But I think that's just a function of it being early. And people are looking for understood metaphors. In fact, it's a very general concept. And I think over the next decade-- 10 to 20 years probably-- we'll see people in the same way that they kind of rethought what a website was from 1990 to today really, people will be thinking about all sorts of different ways in which tokens can behave. So just to give you an example. Like most tokens today are static, they don't change and they don't have interactivity built in. But tokens can contain code, be interactive, they can be dynamic. And we're just starting to see people kind of explore that. But the kind of key concept, the big idea is for the first time in the history of the internet outside of a few niche things like domain names, we now have a technology that allows for distributed ownership. That allows for ownership that aren't just sort of corporate entities owning a website or an application where users and all the kind of internet participants, all five billion people can now own something in a technical sense. Now, what those particular things are that they end up owning and how those things have value will be decided over the coming years as people invent all sorts of interesting new applications using tokens. [MUSIC PLAYING] If we look around today, there are various ways in which people are using NFTs. I would expect that there will be many more new ways to use them. Today, in the future, as people kind of play around with this new medium and invent new things, today you see it kind of fall into a few different categories. There's art. So these are people that were previously probably making physical art and selling that physical art and maybe, in many cases, had a digital website to showcase the art, but didn't think they could actually sell the digital versions of the art because before NFTs there was no way to do this. So if you go to websites like OpenSea, or Foundation, or SuperRare, which are all ki...
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Since Bitcoin’s launch in 2009, crypto has offered the hope of a stronger, more democratic financial system. And it’s raised plenty of questions as it continues to evolve. Now experts and skeptics at the center of the conversation are sharing a straightforward look at how this ecosystem is changing. Learn the basics, dive deep into the world of blockchain and Web3, and get the breakdown on what you need to know now.
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Chris Dixon, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, Emilie Choi, and Paul Krugman
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