Former New York Times reporter: Why are NFTs fascinating?

The added bonus of leaving The New York Times is that I can finally play with Crypto. Although I still have many concerns, the high popularity and fun of NFT still surprised me.

I remember back in 2017 when I saw Fred Wilson talking about the NFTs he discovered, which seemed to me just a silly and expensive online card game — a fraternal Keynesian version of a beauty pageant at best. However, after I bought a few NFTs, it suddenly dawned on me why so many people liked it.

I admit, this field is full of scams, and I think 95-99% of them go to zero. However, NFT also gave me an intuitive understanding of the innovation of Crypto for the first time, and also understood the meaning of holding special digital items. With a digital item like an NFT, not only can you transfer it between ecosystems, but if you can prove that you own the NFT, you can also do some interesting things with it. At the same time, NFTs are not controlled by any company and they cannot take away my access to the item. Unlike homogeneous tokens that can be replaced with each other, each NFT is a unique item. However, if you want to hold NFT, you can only use your own wallet at present, and cannot be escrowed to a third-party institution like other Crypto transactions.

I've seen Moxie Marlinspike and others questioning all the centralized infrastructure behind the NFT industry, but a lot of innovative on-chain projects are also addressing those questions.

It's true that NFTs are sometimes just a picture, but it turns out that picture is more likely to get people's attention than a stock ticker, because even if you sell the ticker, it can be easily bought back (even if it's backed by a company) quotation machine). Certain communities that grew out of NFTs are really unpleasant, but there are also some NFT collections that have developed their own weird and interesting communities on Discord, where community members can find their own sense of belonging and have the same interests as people to communicate with.

For digital ownership, many important legal issues related to digital ownership have not yet been answered, such as whether it can be right-clicked to save and so on. And there's a bigger question behind this: Is this field really worth the investment of time and money for talented young people? A friend of mine spends far more time on Crypto trading than he thinks, and once said, "I know very well that wasting my time on Crypto doesn't do me any good". But NFT is what allows you to pursue higher returns almost crazy, ignoring other interests that may be more valuable.

Among other things, if NFTs are not denominated in dollars, people are more willing to pay more, like buying chips in a casino. That friend of mine also said, "I paid $7,000 tonight for a photo of a young man holding a sword. I've never spent that much on a thing in my life."

However, in the NFT space, many projects are not purely for making money, but want to innovate with the concept of digital identity and digital ownership, thereby exploring new ways to build digital games, brands, communities and economies.

The rapid development of NFTs is like an upgraded version of the ICO boom of 2017. Most of these projects have failed, and it seems that decentralization has only emerged to create more kinds of fraud, but there are also several ICO projects that have become multi-billion dollar VC projects. All the elements in ICO also appeared in the NFT world, but because NFT is less difficult to understand and more practical, unlike most of the Tokens created by people in 2017, people can quickly understand and judge its underlying technology, and distinguish Good or bad.

I have also encountered scams in the NFT market, when I signed a fake NFT and my money was swept away. But I've also had some success with NFTs, like I've bought a few Doodles and an Azuki. I sold these NFTs and used the money to try out more novel and innovative projects, such as NFT Worlds, a metaverse similar to Minecraft, where many large NFT communities have built their own territories.

I also learned a lot of interesting things while playing EtherOrcs, it seems to be one of the most serious and respected NFT projects out there. Not only that, but I also learned about Anonymice, Realms, and TreasureDAO through EtherOrcs. This last project has fascinated me over the past few weeks thanks to a tweet from Bram Kanstein