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by mjevans 1705 days ago
blockchain "baseball cards" is the best quick description I have for NFTs.

It makes less sense than that to me though. Isn't an NFT just, within a specific blockchain, claiming to 'own' or control a bit of datastream? Like a photo, or video, or object model. Except this isn't even insanity normally practiced like copyright or patents; you don't get any of those artificial 'land grab' rights. Just your name attached to the thing within that blockchain?

1 comments

I think "baseball cards" is a limited view of the NFT model, which is what's being argued in this article; it's essentially a programmable, global database.

Just like how we trust certain government records to be accurate & representative of ownership, each chain, if secure, can achieve the same functionality in a more open and decentralized way (also its inherently global, which can have huge implications wrt globalization)

> I think "baseball cards" is a limited view of the NFT model, which is what's being argued in this article; it's essentially a programmable, global database.

NFTs are built on a preexisting global programmable database, but are specifically a use of that database to create digital baseball cards.