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.
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