NFTs are one of the foundations of web3, and this series will introduce NFTs through 30 short articles to help everyone understand and master the relevant knowledge about NFTs from scratch.
Welcome to the first article, and I'm glad you're here to read it.
Before we dive into more specific content, it's necessary to understand what NFTs are.
Simply put, NFTs are a type of digital asset. We are all familiar with assets in the physical world (such as clothes, cars, artworks, trading cards, and books), and NFTs are assets that people can own in the digital world.
Let's start by explaining the abbreviation of NFT:
Non: Not
Fungible: Interchangeable
Token: Token
The word "fungible" is unfamiliar to most people, so let's clarify its meaning. If something is fungible, it means it can be replaced by another identical item. Physical currency and cryptocurrencies are good examples of fungible items. For example, the value of one US dollar is always equal to the value of another US dollar, and the value of one Bitcoin is equal to the value of another Bitcoin. If you give me a $10 bill and I give you another $10 bill, nothing really changes.
This means that "non-fungible" represents that each unit is unique and cannot be replaced by another unit. For example, if we each have a dog, we can exchange them, but they are not the same dog. Each dog is unique, and both of us may feel sad because we miss our own dog.
NFTs are the same. Let's look at the last word of this term - "token." It is basically used to represent any cryptocurrency or digital asset. Therefore, we can say that NFTs are a unique digital representation of assets. If you want to know how these tokens are unique and identifiable, you can think of NFTs as digital passports, where each token contains a unique and non-transferable identity that distinguishes it from other tokens.
NFTs allow us to tokenize items such as artworks, collectibles, and even real estate. Each item can only have one true owner at a time and is verified by the blockchain. This means that no one can change ownership records or copy and paste a new NFT. (If you want to know what an NFT is, it is actually a public database that runs on multiple computers worldwide.)
Today, we talked about what NFTs are, and we will provide a more detailed introduction to blockchain and the use of NFTs in the next article.
Additional Resources:
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If you have two minutes, this video explains NFTs well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8ww4aNlPQU -
If you have five minutes, here is a fascinating Twitter thread that explains how to use appropriate metaphors to describe NFTs:
https://twitter.com/swombat/status/1548412342571917312
Rewritten by: Hoodrh
Original by: ZenAcademy
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