NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
NFT always felt ridiculous to me, but I though I understood the mechanism: &quot;it&#x27;s like baseball cards but in the blockchain&quot;.<p>This week I learned it&#x27;s not.<p>NFT are Non Fungible Tokens, which means tokens that can&#x27;t be divided, unlike crypto currencies like Bitcoin that can be divided in Satoshis. So you exchange the totality of it, or not. Basically it&#x27;s a unique number in the blockchain you change ownership by applying cryptographic signatures during a transaction. Most of the time it&#x27;s an ethereum smart contract address + a token id.<p>But wait, where are the pics ? The gifs ? The videos ?<p>I mean, opensea.io does allow you to mint (the term for magically turning a media into an official NFT backed by the blockchain) up to 100MB of content.<p>So where is it? Not in the blockchain, obviously, it&#x27;s already fat enough with tiny transaction data.<p>Well, it&#x27;s just stored in the centralized platforms like opensea, rarible, etc.<p>Basically, the NFT is not even that piece of art, baseball card or whatever, it&#x27;s just the number linked to the proprietary, centralized, privately own trading platform that hosts the content.<p>The platform disappears, or bans you, or changes policy, or is blocked, or whatever, and your NFT is back to being a bare-bone blockchain contract number and a token id.<p>It&#x27;s even more bullshit that I though! You don&#x27;t even have control on whatever you make believe to virtually own. It&#x27;s madness.<p>But you know what, the week I spent in this weird universe was also so much fun. There is an atmosphere of creative WTF, a mix of scams, community bonding, money laundering and genuine experimentation all bathed in some frenetic craziness that reminds me of the early days of the internet.<p>Despite all that crap, I kinda like it.