Remember 2018? It would be a year before Thanos could collect all the Infinity Stones, and it would be some time before Uzi got his hands on Vision’s at a high-roller’s yard sale. Drake was down in Miami, giving away his entire music video budget to perfect strangers. And the phrase “non-fungible token” had yet to be enshrined in pop culture lore as the acronym of the century among the Art Basel set.
In the past few weeks, that acronym has gone from the depths of niche subreddits and crypto micro-communities to the mainstream. Google Trends really paints a picture — hockey stick much?
While I’ve written about cryptocollectibles and digital scarcity in this newsletter before, I’ve never tackled the acronym “NFT” directly. To be honest, I never thought it would catch on. “Fungibility” isn’t exactly a sexy word, nor is it a concept that most people wrestle with regularly, so forgive me for my shortsightedness. Maybe I should have been more aware, however: seeing that we live in a world where only half of all Republicans know what “GOP” stands for, the canonization and regular use of a highly technical term like NFT seems to be par for the course! And if the Crypto Twins™ get their way, we’ll all be calling these cryptocollectibles “Nifties” soon enough.
Back to 2018. Having just finished breeding my Gen 11 Cryptokitties, little did I know that a 2-year long Crypto Winter had begun. More importantly (for this newsletter), I had just completed a primer on decentralization, self-sovereignty (going “Bankless” is such a better term — I missed that one, too!) and ownership in virtual worlds. In the spirit of crypto, I’ve decided to go open source on this one and make it available here in both PDF and Keynote form. Because this short document was a 30-minute presentation, I suggest going with the Keynote version: included therein are fairly detailed notes that add a tremendous amount of context to each slide. I suspect you will find slides 10-12 most poignant; if topics like redistributing computational resources, decentralizing identification and developing new forms of self-governance don’t give you at least a half-chub, I suspect you’d probably want to skip forward a bit!
That’s it, that’s this week’s newsletter. I only wanted to get this document into your hands. Hopefully you find it helpful, either as a primer (as it was then-intended) or as a measuring stick against which you can see how far the world of crypto has come in 3 short (but oh-so-very long) years.
Now go on, scram — nothing left to see here!