It's a fancy website. But do you think the website would explain on their home page what "NFT" means, how it works, and what the goal of the website is? No, of course not. I guess that would be old-fashioned...
Edit: Thanks for the explanations about NFTs. I know that search engines exist. My point was that the website does not state what it's all about.
Crypto-currencies, for the most part, attempt to be fungible — all ethereum is the same and can be used for the same things. (There's a real argument to be made that BTC is not quite fungible). This is an important property for money to have. Shares in a company are fungible too, as are, say eggs (I can ask you for an egg today, I can give you another egg tomorrow, or I could give you the same one back if I haven't used it)
NFTs go in the exact opposite direction. Token are unique and not interchangeable. This models things like art, or real estate. If I lend you the Mona Lisa, you can't settle that loan by returning Guernica.
NFTs are really interesting in terms of the sort of applications you can build on top of them, but, as usual, the bro investor community around crypto is just milking the novelty factor for money.
There is absolutely no way ensure uniqueness. Any transaction on the blockchains can be called as a NFT if anyone says the transaction id makes the NFT unique. There is inherently no difference between any other token or coin or transaction and an NFT until unless there is an on chain mechanism to ensure uniqueness of the METADATA associated with the NFT. AFIK there are no such implementations of the NFT which ensures the uniqueness of the METADATA.
You're essentially paying for some unique random numbers that can change ownership.
A token contract (or any contract) is unique by address. To simplify the ethereum nft standard specifies that the token can only have one owner. This is what is called an NFT.
NFTs don't need smart contacts, they could be part of the protocol. As an example you can create a Cardano token with a maximum supply of 1.
An external representation or as you call it "metadata" only serves as a representation of the token contract address (and therefore creation address) and state of the contract which returns your public key as owner.
Unless the "metadata" is another NFT it cannot be unique by definition - digital uniqueness relies on ownership by asymmetric key cryptography.
Think of it like a freshly printed 10 dollar bill - it's all unique because of the serial number, and there's no two bills with the identical serial number (in theory on bills... in practice on crypto it is truly unique)
Does the "proof of ownership" actually map onto anything in the real world? It sounds like people are paying out the nose for a notion of "this is mine" instead of "this is mine, and the courts will back me up." Who's actually respecting these ownership claims to justify the cost?
How is this any different from those "name a star after your sweetie" scams?
But for now, it's more profitable for people to keep them actually unique and ride the wave of ridiculous money.
And no, it's not really any different than selling naming rights to something that can't be owned, and selling it to multiple people. I'm sure those certificates have a number on them, too.
Like normal tokens that doesn't stop people from attributing goods (PRQ), value (BTC) or rights (Deal with it NFT).
Compared to selling physical named rights buyers can verify supply, see previous prices and sellers can optionally take commission on every sale.
Serious question as I'm confused by your confusion since HN is overrepresented by techies who know how to google <anything> ...
I also didn't know what "NFT" was last week and I simply googled it:
https://www.google.com/search?q=nft
It's the 1st result. Is that google result misleading and that Foundation.app website and everybody in this thread is talking about another "NFT" I'm unaware of?
My point was that this website does not explain at all what the website is about. Instead, it contains some mumbling about "bringing digital creators, crypto natives, and collectors together to move culture forward".
I understand that part. I don't know that the philosophy of that website is about either. However, I was replying specifically to your "don't know what it stands for":
>I've heard the term "NFT" a lot in the past days. However, I still don't know what it stands for.
If there's an unknown acryonym, it seems the common sense thing to do is google that acronym. That's what I was confused about in your comment. In fact, you've gotten several sub replies to your that restate what the topmost google result says the 'N', 'F', 'T' stands for. And those replies may themselves been informed by google several days earlier!
Whether NFTs make any economic or financial sense or what this thread's website is about ... is a different topic from what the acronym's letters expand out to be. So I guess my question can be put in a more general way: Is running across a random acronym on HN or discussion forums that I don't know and then Googling it a flawed approach?
(Because that's what I've been doing for decades and it seems to work.)
>I actually did duckduckgo it, that's not the problem.
And I just checked the DDG results and top result also says "non fungible token", so I'm still confused as what the purpose of the 1st paragraph in your comment "I still don't know what it stands for" is about. Why didn't the DDG result let you omit the 1st paragraph?