Created: October 05, 2021
Modified: October 05, 2021
Modified: October 05, 2021
non-fungible token
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- NFTs 101: https://medium.com/@intenex/nfts-101-why-nfts-are-a-generational-innovation-4626ae803e3b
- Among many other things, NFTs are governance tokens.
- There's no technical difference between the NFTs you use for art, and the NFTs you use for governing smart contracts. Any new smart contract could just decide to be governed by the people who hold CryptoPunks or some other NFT.
- More philosophically: just by creating an NFT and giving it to people, you bind together the group of people that have it, because they all now possess a share in this thing you've created. Which means they all have a common interest in making those shares more valuable. Which means that they're incentived to work together to make that happen. They're incentivized to form a community, even if they were previously total strangers! (the incentive may not be strong enough to dominate the many other incentives we all have, but it does exist, in a way that wasn't the case for that particular group of strangers a moment before).
- You can also think of NFTs as giving you the ability to formally record membership in a community. Lots of organizations keep membership lists; now they can do it on the blockchain. What kinds of organizations benefit from having rigorous membership tracking? Mostly the reason you'd need this is that members vote on stuff.