thank god

Not Square Enix though.

that ”we should try to get some company try to make a 9/11 joke” tumblr post has to be a speed record for lathing the heavens

So The Walking Dead is doing NFTs now (yeah idk LOL) and watching their extremely confused average Facebook page liker try to understand wtf that even is with cryptobros trying to explain THE BLOCKCHAIN, MAN to people’s grandmas has been my entertainment for the last half hour

No, these old folks understand NFTs better than most people that buy them.

yes nfts are ugly as sin but on god i hope we’re not going to collectively forget about the fundamentally capitalistic bullshit foundations of the entire concept of nfts once they start making ones that look like fuckable anime boys

not to give anyone any ideas but if someone starts trying to sell personalized nft waifus or catboys under the guise of having them be your SO in the metaverse or whatever we have to laugh that shit into the ground before some people get too horny on main and decide to legitimize manufactured scarcity to score virtual anime ass

So this isn’t exactly what you are talking about but I did immediately think of this post when I saw this

it’s the kind of scenario i envisioned when i made this post, actually! it wasn’t just limited to horny stuff, the nightmare scenario extends to everything that could appeal to demographics besides nftbros with the aesthetic sensibilities of rick and morty and this definitely counts lol be wary of any “girlboss” shit or attempt to pander to any niche subcultures you might be a part of

This post is a perfect example of how proficiency in a language doesn’t mean you have to understand everything native speakers say, since what the fuck does this even mean

He funged the tokens, I don’t know how much simpler it can get.

It occurs to me that some people might actually want an explanation so here’s the cliff notes: --

- Money, and most forms of currency, is fungible. This just means that any piece of it is interchangeable without changing value -- one dollar is one dollar, whether it is represented by a fresh new dollar bill or an old wrinkled dollar bill or a record kept in a ledger or a record in a computer. Being fungible is one of the core things necessary for a currency to work as a currency (alongside other things such as ‘being recognised as currency by others’ and ‘the value being backed by something that can ensure reasonable stability, like a stable government’). If you’re currency isn’t fungible, then it isn’t currency -- you’re not buying with it, you’re bartering. So that’s what the “fungible” part means.

- People trade with non currency stuff all the time. People trade in favours, faith, and small numbers of resources that someone else needs more. When people trade in large value items, they usually estimate a value for the item; people might trade in high value artworks, for example. This is a pretty common thing for rich people to do as you can cook books in all kinds of ways through the trade value of unique items with no obvious parallels. Who’s gonna tell you your numbers are wrong, after all?

- NFTs -- non fungible tokens -- are the latest fad by cryptobros who are a) trying to imitate the unregulated illegal trading of the rich without understanding it, or b) running scams that bank on the idea that other cryptobros don’t understand it. They’ve basically taken cryptocurrency and made it non fungible. Cryptocurrency is ‘mined’ by making computers do really, really complicated math, and the math gets more complicated the more of it is ‘mined’. It has to be like this to keep it rare and combat inflation. But, while each bitcoin will have a different ‘serial number’ the same as each US dollar note does, bitcoin are fungible -- one bitcoin has the same value as another bitcoin. (Users frequently ‘tumble’ their cryptocurrency -- swap it with each other in a complicated, automated fashion -- to launder it.) NFTs are instead URLs, and their gimmick is that each one is different! And can be worth a different amount! You can’t just swap them; they’re non-fungible!

- To convince people that the URL is worth something, they put a ‘unique’ digitally generated picture there. These are hilariously ugly. Confused cryptobros who don’t really understand NFTs tend to become convinced that what they bought is that picture, and they ‘own’ it in some way that’s deeper and more entrenched that’s just like, commissioning art. This is quite funny because you can really upset a lot of them by ‘stealing’ their NFT (copying the picture).

- What this dude has done is not just copy-paste a bunch of NFT pictures (lots of people are doing that), but decrypted the URLs. The actual thing that’s been bought. This is extremely impressive and also completely pointless, but computer people love doing pointless things just to prove that they can be done. It doesn’t achieve anything, but it’s bound to tick off the NFT people, which is always funny.

Wow. As someone who had no knowledge of Bitcoin or NFTs and who has never had the patience to go out and decipher what they were by myself, this is genuinely the first time I have seen someone explain so clearly and in a relatively simple language as well, and so thank you for taking the time to explain!