Non-fungible doesn't mean something can't be divided, it means a specific one just can't be substituted for another one.

An example: If I trade oil, one barrel of oil with a certain spec[1] is fungible with another barrel of oil with the same spec. If I sell you some oil you don't care which specific barrel you get as long as it's the same kind of thing. Likewise if you borrow 10 dollars from me you can pay me back with any combination of notes up to the value of 10 dollars, you don't have to give me back the specific bills I gave you.

On the other hand, things like art are not fungible. If I loan a Van Gogh to a gallery I very much want the same piece to be sent back to me after the exhibition is done. It's not ok for them to send me something else. Even if it's "sunflowers" (since Van Gogh painted a few of those and they are quite similar), I want the actual one I loaned to be sent back to me.

Normal bitcoins or ETH are fungible whereas NFTs are non-fungible. The specific one you have matters usually because it represents a digital proof of ownership of some specific resource (a bored ape or whatever).

[1] The spec for oil types standardises particular grades and then people trade a standard barrel size (called a bbl which is short for "blue barrel" because they used to be painted blue). "Brent" and "WTI" are different grades. A barrel of brent is fungible with another barrel of brent but not with a barrel of WTI because that's a different grade.

My favorite description, heard just this week:

“Here’s a receipt for the Mona Lisa that says that you own this receipt of the Mona Lisa”.

So I do wonder whether the NFT divide (between people who get it and people who don’t) might be a generational split, related to a larger societal shift away from ‘owning things’. We’ve definitely passed ‘peak thing ownership’.

For those of us old enough to have grown up with the idea of ‘buying a book’, ‘buying a toy’, ‘buying a CD’ or ‘buying a magazine’ we have a particular mental framework for ‘owning’ stuff.

But people stopped buying those things a while ago (people stopped buying toys? Not completely, but certainly some of that spend now goes on apps right?).

So for people who have grown up in a digital-subscription world, they might just have a fundamentally different mental model of ownership - one which is more compatible with NFTs as a reasonable idea than the paradigm us old ‘thing owners’ have.

Like, consider some of the things you likely have bought recently: a ‘twelve month Netflix subscription’, a ‘Steam library game’, an ‘app’… you bought those things with no expectation you could resell them later because you don’t think of those as ‘things’. And because you haven’t yet adjusted your mental model to the reality that this is what you spend your wealth on now - ephemeral digital rights you won’t be able to pass on to your kids when you’re gone.

But if you grew up digital native and the only things you’ve ever been able to buy are non transferable digital pointers to rights to use something, maybe the idea of a transferable digital rights pointer seems like a crazy innovative new idea that changes everything?

> I mean, opensea.io does allow you to mint (the term for magically turning a media into an official NFT backed by the blockchain) up to 100MB of content. So where is it? Not in the blockchain, obviously, it's already fat enough with tiny transaction data. Well, it's just stored in the centralized platforms like opensea, rarible, etc.

You’re right that this is the way many have been created so far, but that will not be the case for long. Already people have pointed NFTs to IPFS/Filecoin which will give them much more staying power. And this can be done without using a centralized platform like opensea, check out nft.storage and metaplex (1) as starting points.

1. https://github.com/metaplex-foundation/metaplex

Not quite right.

The assets aren’t necessarily stored on OpenSea. You can see how OpenSea gets the metadata like asset url via the docs:

https://docs.opensea.io/docs/metadata-standards

If you scroll down you’ll see that the assets can be hosted on decentralised networks too like IPFS.

Also, not all NFT projects are built the same. I suggest you check out Pak’s Poets project - it’s a very exciting piece of performance art built around game theory.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any NFTs but that doesn’t mean I’m not excited by what they’re doing.

There are certainly a chunk of NFTs that the media only exists on one centralized server somewhere. Someone forgets to pay the bill and poof there goes your art. You can download the image but the contract's `tokenUri` function still points to that old location.

Then the next tier up would store their media on IPFS, if you purchase the NFT you're expected to be responsible for pinning that IPFS content somewhere. That's not communicated too well though. The benefit there is if the original minter stops paying for IPFS hosting but you still have yours pinned, it's still available. I think most of the "Mint as a service" platforms will use IPFS by default.

Then there are projects that are storing the images entirely on chain. These are obviously more costly to create but don't require another service/protocol/platform.

Anyone who buys these things is getting scammed and I feel sorry for them. I have friends who regularly fall for MLMs and other scams like this, and they never seem to learn. Is there any way to get through to them?

As stupid as it is, what you describe IS exactly "baseball cards in the blockchain", because each individual card/nft can only be owned by one person at a time.

The difference with baseball cards (apart from not being physical) is that most nft projects are combinatorial, so they make 10000 different cards, constructed from combinations of a much smaller number of "traits". That way the artist only has to draw say 25 faces, 20 hats, 20 eye glasses etc.

With baseball cards you'd instead make 100 different cards, and then print 1000s of copies of each. You could do that with NFTs, but you don't. The reason for that is probably that you can't sell NFTs in sealed packages where 95% of the cards will be uninteresting. I guess you could, but again you don't.

Did the early days of the internet have as much scams and money-laundering in the mix? Not in my neck of the early days of the internet woods.

I kinda hate NFTs: But, the analogy to a "certificate of authenticity" for "real pieces of art" or "memorabilia" is reasonable. It's not "actually the art".

the "centralized platform" blocking you is kind of immaterial. The point is that other people can see that the token matches. Though one difference from CoAs is that the "centralized platform" could remove the art. I don't know how opensea works, but one could in theory hash the digital content, drop it onto bittorrent (or whatever, use the bittorrent hash id) and lock that up with the token. Is that how opensea works?

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the NFT thing (I get the base concept, and I know originally it was thought of for digital ownership of home deeds, etc, which makes perfect sense to me, but everything that I'm seeing from it lately just seems like beanie baby collecting, like art and avatars and buying with the sole expectation of selling to a bigger sucker later).

Where are you going to immerse yourself into this universe and seeing the community and experimentation? I don't know where I'd even start with that.

Your second last paragraph perfectly summed up my feeling about it. :p I don't want to touch it at first, since its scam/money laundering smell is very strong(and also environment impact) also I think overall thing is pretty stupid.

But after some time that I,um, "participate" in it, I can feel the lots of weird creative energy flowing in there, collectively. Not a thing we see often in today's world. It's quite rejuvenating, and crazy.

This is so wrong, I made an account to comment.

While you are right that the NFT is just an entry to the blockchain with a URI to the actual media file, the file is NOT stored on a centralized platform.

While it is possible to use a regular server to store the media file, it is certainly very bad practice and defeats the whole point of NFTs.

The media files are stored on IPFS, which is a decentralized peer-to-peer storage network. This ensures that the media file that a NFT represents, will always be available, since it is hosted by many people on the network.

> The platform disappears, or bans you, or changes policy, or is blocked, or whatever, and your NFT is back to being a bare-bone blockchain contract number and a token id.

So what? You can obviously right click to save the JPEG, so if the platform goes down it doesn't really matter. What you're buying is ownership of the NFT of the JPEG, not the JPEG. Even if the platform goes down, you'll still be able to see the name of the piece in the metadata.

> community bonding, money laundering and genuine experimentation

To be fair, the real-life art auction world is basically all money laundering, too.

I think the best explanation is that NFTs are a very fancy system of provenance (which the art world already takes very seriously).

Isn't it more like if you see an image you own anywhere, you can claim ownership based on your NFT?

Could be hilarious if you ask someone to remove it from their site. You own 1% of it? Which pixels do you want recolored? :D