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It might be covered in one of the resources, but when people talk about NFTs, they just mean some token on Ethereum that the issuer of said coin say is "the" product. For instance, the NFT for "the first tweet" that sold is just someone created an Ethereum token and said "this one is the first tweet", presumably w/ some text in the token that states the tweet. In that regard, its kind of centralized. There can be multiple NFTs that claim to be tweets. There's no naturally definitive "twitter" token, unless it's managed by Twitter itself. But you're relying on the issuer of the coin to say "I am the NFT coin" and everyone to agree. Real world NFTs (e.g. art and collectibles) are unique in that there is no dispute about what the original is. The art was created by the artist or its a forgery. In that regard NFTs rely on some issuing entity that bestows upon itself an arbitrary form of ownership. I can make my own Twitter token and if I get someone to buy a coin for an absurd amount (insider dealing?), and convince reports to write about it, I can be "the twitter nft" Or am I thinking of this incorrectly? |
For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, a simulacrum is a copy of something that has itself become hyper-real and usurped the reality of the original. The canonical example is Disney World, which is a copy of Disneyland, which is itself a copy of many elements of Americana (Louisiana Bayou, the frontier West, Main Street USA, etc.) Disney World has eclipsed Disneyland in visitors, which itself has eclipsed visits to various small town main streets or the Louisiana bayous. You plan a family vacation to Disney World, you don't plan a trip to Bumfuck, Wyoming. Even though it's a copy of a copy (and a poor one at that), its reality has eclipsed that of the original, just because the original is hard to get to and kind of boring.
Similar with NFTs. Yes, you can make an NFT of the Mona Lisa and claim that you have the only one. Yes, you're a lying swindler and probably a bad person. But your copy is much easier to trade, move around, and store than the actual Mona Lisa. And just as there's only one original Mona Lisa, there's only one original NFT of the Mona Lisa, so your copy still has the same scarcity. As more capital comes onto the blockchain, your NFT is likely to acquire its own hyper-reality and become the Mona Lisa, and the original painting will be hidden away in a museum somewhere and disappear from trading.