<== An Outsider Look at HIVE ==>
NFT Showroom
NFT Showroom is a program that allows digital artists to display and sell their creations. The program creates non-fungible tokens which people can buy with HIVE.
As I love to support innovative ideas, I purchased a small number of NFTs from digital artists. As I see it, buying digital art from artists help supports the arts.
The problem is that there is no reason for people to buy NFTs from me. Here is my NFT Showroom gallery. Since I have little money, I bought the cheapest items I could find in the showroom. This shows my transactions.
I fear that NFT showroom has one fatal flaw. While it is fun to buy from artists. There really isn't a compelling reason to buy from speculators.
I've decided to give away my NFTs; so the gallery is shrinking in size.
IMHO, NFTs have little value in and of themselves; however, one might be able to work NFTs into games and other systems. For example, one might have a competition where the prize is an NFT that the host of the competition is willing to rebuy.
An NFT might represent the winner of a competition. In which case, the NFT would follow the victors of the competition from year to year.
I would not recommend buying NFTs as an investment. It is a fun way to to support artists.
An Intro Into NonFungible Tokens
Lets face it. Techies like long funky words. The term "nonfungible" stands out as one of funkiest words of web 3.0.
The term "fungible" means that the items in a set are interchangeable. HIVE is a fungible coin because the first HIVE has the same value as the last HIVE. HIVE are interchangeable. The value of HIVE is based on the value of the coin as a whole and not on the value of a particular coin.
The term "nonfungible" refers to items that can be differentiated. Any unique ID could be used as a nonfungible token.
Techies not only like funky words. They love geeky ideas. A hash function is an important class of programs in the computer world.
Computer files are really just long strings of bits. A bit is either 0 or 1. A hash functional will add up the 0s and 1s in a long file and output a fixed length string that represents the file.
Hash functions play an important role in computer security. For example, an operating system will calculate the hash of a computer program and match it to a database to make sure that no-one has messed with the computer file.
Crypto enthusiasts realized that they could make a compelling mechanism for selling digital art.
An NFT program such as NFTShowRoom will invite digital artists to share their creations. They will assign a unique ID to each piece of art and take a hash of the digital file.
The real value of the NFT is the unique ID. The hash is a gimmick. The inherent flaw in the NFT market is that there is an infinite number of potential ids and an infinite number of hashes.
Since there are no intrinsic limiting factors, NFTs fail as a strong investment.
