The Context: Should you care about NFTs?

There is a lot of enthusiasm lately around NFTs, Non Fungible Tokens, especially among those who have been following Bitcoin and Blockchain applications, but they didn't know how to relate to them. Maybe they weren't attracted by the financial aspect or the decentralization that they could represent or the more radical societal implications.

Should you care about NFTs? And why all the interest? Should you now turn everything you have into an NFT? What does that even mean? The ability to better handle digital objects than alternative systems has been a promise of blockchain technologies for long. Bitcoin is digital money, and the promise of Bitcoin is to be a better money than other alternatives.

The solution of NFTs is the ability to transfer the uniqueness of physical objects that are not interchangeable, to unique digital objects that become also not interchangeable, as a consequence of wrapping them in a digital signature that is managed on the blockchain. We know of all the various features of Blockchains: the transparency, the traceability, the free unfettered participation, and so on. As you combine this wrapper around a digital object that makes it unique, with the rest of the features that blockchains have, you achieve something that can be applied in various areas, and they can be useful indeed useful, with a staying power that deserves your attention.

The first application of NFTs has been the collection of digital art. In the past few months the prices of certain auctions reached levels that are hard to justify. But as it is often the case, it is not the price that matters, and you should not concentrate on that, or the mere expectation of financial gain when experimenting with NFTs.

I sold as an NFT my first tweet about Bitcoin from 10 years ago, and it gave me direct experience in the process. An opportunity to see if the platform was friendly enough. And indeed, one of the best surprises was how much the systems have evolved and how easy the process has become.

There will be many other applications of NFTs in the future, and we are really at just the beginning of this new interesting technology.