In OneZero. More on Medium.
It took three hours, a partial understanding of some esoteric concepts, and $1,300, but I did it.
I created an NFT (well, four, to be precise).
You might’ve heard this term. If not, you will hear a lot about it. It’s the acronym for a non-fungible token, which is 2021-speak for “possibly, but not definitely a speculative mania.”
These “tokens” represent digital files with a key attribute: they are one-of-one. NFTs first emerged in 2017 with a project called CryptoPunks, which freely offered 10,000 unique digital avatars designed by an algorithm. Some had rarer attributes than others, like ones that…
During the first era of the internet — from the 1980s through the early 2000s — internet services were built on open protocols that were controlled by the internet community. This meant that people or organizations could grow their internet presence knowing the rules of the game wouldn’t change later on. Huge web properties were started during this era including Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In the process, the importance of centralized platforms like AOL greatly diminished.
During the second era of the internet, from the mid 2000s to the present, for-profit tech companies — most notably Google…
Blockchain technology is probably the best invention since the internet itself. It allows value exchange without the need for trust or a central authority. Imagine you and I bet $50 on tomorrow’s weather in San Francisco. I bet it will be sunny, you that it will rain. Today we have three options to manage this transaction: