Thread by @owenbroadcast

heres how i explain what NFTs are to people. im posting this as i wake up + have coffee this morning because ive seen 100s of posts explaining it from a negative angle and i can tell they dont get it, so, if you have no idea and want a short amateur simple explanation heres mine

im both neutral in the sense that i havent done anything personally art-wise with the tech, and also an amateur in that im not a crypto guy really, i am just casually into it, but sometimes thats the best person to get ur foot in the door with a simple non insider explanation.

(last caveat that this is not my field) - the big moment things clicked with me with all the bitcoin and blockchain stuff is that basically bitcoin solves a very simple problem that you would naturally have when making digital money which is that you can duplicate digital stuff.

so if i sent a “digital dollar” to your computer, you could just copy and paste it over and over and have 100 dollars. or if there was some “thing” that said “owen pays me / owes me 50 dollars” you could just duplicate that over and over and take all my money. thats “the issue”.

so normally this is solved by having some intermediary institution like a bank who acts as a middle man or by having literal physical dollars, or by a bunch of things that we’re trying not to have in this situation. so how do u fix that. thats what the crypto in cryptocurrency is

basically in a way thats too complicated to fit into a few tweets, to dumb it down, you have an ID that is some numbers, i have an ID that is some numbers, the transactions have an ID that is numbers, and all this get run together into a crazy math equation every time we interact

i kind of imagine it like a rubix cube. oversimplifying to the point of possibly being slightly inaccurate, its like every bunch of transactions gets run through a crazy math equation and put into a rubix cube, then the rubix cube gets solved, and we get some more numbers from it

the numbers from that rubies cube then start the next rubrics cube, that we are going to feed the next few transactions into, and get a new number, and then use that number to start the next rubrics cube, over and over, for all the transactions. why.

because all these numbers are now woven together in such a way that you cant go back and alter them. so, we have a transaction on monday where i pay you 50 dollars. it goes into that chain of rubics cubes. later, you cant go back and change the 50 to 100 and take more money. why

because if u changed that one number, all the numbers after it would be wrong. it would change all the numbers in the whole chain of number rubics cubes we set up. someone would notice it because suddenly in this huge chain of numbers something would not fit in. u cant change it

so by feeding all the transactions into this mega string of equations that gets rubics cubed and then tied to the next set of equations over and over, we solve the problem of digital stuff being easily altered or duplicated. now digital things can be woven into a permanent record

and no ones keeping the record. theres not one guy overseeing it who could change it. it doesn’t belong to any one group or institution. anyone can go “check it” and no one can alter it. that is the game changer with the tech that imo most normal people dont understand.

so that chain of rubics cubes, thats the blockchain. its literally a chain of blocks, that are chained together with those equations. those equations are part of a field called cryptography, where information is hidden + encoded in cool ways like that. thats why its called crypto

so then, NFTs are basically just using that permanent record chain of blocks to insert a little digital “tag” in there (this is my phrasing of it and how i understand it), that utilizes that whole situation we just described to make it so now that ticket cant be duplicated.

so what people dont get, is that its not “about” art and owning JPGs. when new tech comes out artists play around with it and thats what ur seeing. but the tech itself is porting over the solution to the “digital stuff can be copied or altered” problem out of “money” into “stuff”

so, people are like “lol you can just download the JPG” because theyre mistakenly seeing artists using a new tech and presuming (because other people are telling them) that that is what its about and that their perception of it is the extent of it.

so, heres an example of how it will actually be used in my amateur opinion. you play a game. you have a skin or weapon in the game. you “own” it. but you dont really “own” anything, right. because what would it mean to “own” a digital item like that outside of the game?

it almost doesnt even really make sense presently to imagine “owning” a game item outside of the game. but with NFTs you actually could have a non duplicatable “permanent” ownership designator for something digital like that. and you could port it to other games, for example.

imo that will be the first way it “pops off” for regular people. people already pay a ton of money for items and skins in games. i suspect they will just tie NFTs to this stuff and most people wont even realize that theyre using the tech.

then someone who is a larger proponent of the tech would say this could be applied to other fields. records, ownership tickets for assets IRL, theyve done tickets to events this way, random stuff. u can probably imagine many things.

im kind of neutral, i think itll be definitely be used in games, outside of that i cant say, but thats what the tech is actually like if u care / wanted to know. just posting since ive seen a lot of bad explanations. imo u will probably use NFTs at some point without realizing it

btw if someone that knows more about this than me wants to correct something or has a better analogy for something im definitely open to it.