lpetrich
Contributor
Former US First Lady Melania Trump launches NFT venture | Arts and Culture News | Al Jazeera
Fungible = interchangeable.
NFT's are an offshoot of cryptocurrency, and here is how cryptocurrency works.
Each kind of cryptocurrency is essentially an accounting ledger, a list of transactions: transfers of some amount of the currency from one user to another. This ledger is replicated across all the users of that kind, or at least many of them.
Here is what blockchain is. Cryptocurrency transactions are grouped into blocks, and each block is subjected to a certification process before it will be accepted.
Each block has a hashcode calculated for it, a sort of scrambled summary of it. Algorithms like MD5 and SHA are hashcode algorithms. Along with the transaction data is a "nonce value", and that value is selected to make the hashcode below some selected value. For an unsigned 32-bit hashcode, the maximum possible value is about 4 billion, and if one wants a nonce value so that the hashcode is less than 1/1000 that or 4 million, one has to look through 1000 possible nonce values to find a good fit. That is a very compute-intensive process, and powering that process is what requires the huge electricity consumption associated with cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Blockchain has an additional bit of security: each block contains the previous block's hashcode. That means that if one wants to alter a block, one has to alter not only that one but all the later ones. A further bit is mutliple users all having their own copies of the blockchain.
Ethereum has an additional feature: "smart contracts", little bits of code that can be executed by Ethereum software to do various things. Their data is in the Ethereum blockchain, along with Ethereum currency transactions. Among the things that one can implement with smart contracts is a cryptocurrency system, and several such Ethereum-based token systems have been created.
Non-fungible tokens are thus like smart-contract data, and some of them are implemented with Ethereum smart contracts.
Her husband once pilfered from one of his charities, using some of its money for his personal use: Donald J. Trump Pays Court-Ordered $2 Million For Illegally Using Trump Foundation Funds | New York State Attorney General
Fungible = interchangeable.
NFTs had a breakthrough year – What’s next for them? | Crypto News | Al Jazeera - "Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) drove 2021’s most-hyped art sales, but the tech underpinning them raises environmental and long-term value concerns."
NFT craze: Why are non-fungible tokens all the rage? | Crypto News | Al Jazeera
NFT's are an offshoot of cryptocurrency, and here is how cryptocurrency works.
Each kind of cryptocurrency is essentially an accounting ledger, a list of transactions: transfers of some amount of the currency from one user to another. This ledger is replicated across all the users of that kind, or at least many of them.
Here is what blockchain is. Cryptocurrency transactions are grouped into blocks, and each block is subjected to a certification process before it will be accepted.
Each block has a hashcode calculated for it, a sort of scrambled summary of it. Algorithms like MD5 and SHA are hashcode algorithms. Along with the transaction data is a "nonce value", and that value is selected to make the hashcode below some selected value. For an unsigned 32-bit hashcode, the maximum possible value is about 4 billion, and if one wants a nonce value so that the hashcode is less than 1/1000 that or 4 million, one has to look through 1000 possible nonce values to find a good fit. That is a very compute-intensive process, and powering that process is what requires the huge electricity consumption associated with cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Blockchain has an additional bit of security: each block contains the previous block's hashcode. That means that if one wants to alter a block, one has to alter not only that one but all the later ones. A further bit is mutliple users all having their own copies of the blockchain.
Ethereum has an additional feature: "smart contracts", little bits of code that can be executed by Ethereum software to do various things. Their data is in the Ethereum blockchain, along with Ethereum currency transactions. Among the things that one can implement with smart contracts is a cryptocurrency system, and several such Ethereum-based token systems have been created.
Non-fungible tokens are thus like smart-contract data, and some of them are implemented with Ethereum smart contracts.
