# What is an NFT?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [February 2, 2022, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801 "2022-02-02T15:33:14Z")
**Posts on this page:** 17
**Page:** 6
### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [February 27, 2022, 7:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/102 "2022-02-27T19:08:38Z")
That just sounds like a Kickstarter with extra steps.
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### Author:  [@Richard\_Pearse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Pearse)
#### Post date: [February 28, 2022, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/103 "2022-02-28T02:32:58Z")
When is Star Citizen jumping on the band wagon?
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### Author:  [@Mr.E](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.E)
#### Post date: [February 28, 2022, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/104 "2022-02-28T22:01:41Z")
I wouldn’t be surprised if Cloud Imperium (maker of Star Citizen) does something Crypto/NFT related but companies like that and Valve are actually pretty incentivized against getting into the NFT market because they’ve been running their own digital goods markets for years. Why sell an NFT of a ship for Etherium when you’ve been doing fine selling digital ships for real cash? Why make NFT items that players can sell to each other when you’ve been running CS:GO and DOTA 2 markets for years?
There is an actual answer to this, which is “To cash in on the fad before the bubble bursts” and that’s why you see other game companies like Capcom and Square Enix and Ubisoft which are a bit less financially secure get into it. But it’s been well proven for years that there’s no good reason why a game company should actually embrace blockchain-based tech, if for no other reason than it’s more lucrative when you own the market.
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### Author:  [@Richard\_Pearse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Pearse)
#### Post date: [March 1, 2022, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/105 "2022-03-01T01:01:18Z")
> [@Mr.E](#):
>
> Why sell an NFT of a ship for Etherium when you’ve been doing fine selling digital ships for real cash?
I thought NFTs were sold for real cash?
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### Author:  [@Mr.E](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.E)
#### Post date: [March 1, 2022, 2:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/106 "2022-03-01T02:04:30Z")
Definitely not. You have to pay for NFTs with cryptocurrency, every time you see headlines about a NFT being bought or sold for various amounts of USD those headlines are translating the amount of cryptocurrency involved into the real money based on how much the crypto is worth at that moment.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [March 1, 2022, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/107 "2022-03-01T02:32:44Z")
You can buy or sell an NFT with whatever you want, or give it away for free. The transfer of the NFT is done via blockchain, but the other side of the transaction can be anything.
That said, the folks who like NFTs probably like other cryptocurrencies, too.
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### Author:  [@UDS1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS1)
#### Post date: [March 1, 2022, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/108 "2022-03-01T03:16:55Z")
Nitpick: they don’t like _other_ cryptocurrencies; they just like cryptocurrencies. An NFT is not cryptocurrency; the whole point of it - to the extent that it has a point - is that its unique. Whereas one of the defining characteristics of a currency is that its units are not unique, and are completely fungible. One dollar can always be substituted for another dollar.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [March 1, 2022, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/109 "2022-03-01T22:23:51Z")
OK, then, “other blockchain-based stores of exchangeable value”.
But I’m not so sure that being fungible is inherent to the notion of “currency”: Some of the key features of bitcoin, for instance, would only actually work if (contrary to fact) people treated it as nonfungible.
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### Author:  [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)
#### Post date: [March 1, 2022, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/110 "2022-03-01T22:26:15Z")
> [@UDS1](#):
>
> One dollar can always be substituted for another dollar.
Not if it has a serial number that people find more interesting than some other serial number. Which is really not all that different from how NFTs work.
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### Author:  [@peccavi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/peccavi)
#### Post date: [March 1, 2022, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/111 "2022-03-01T22:57:30Z")
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#):
>
> Not if it has a serial number that people find more interesting than some other serial number. Which is really not all that different from how NFTs work
My dad used to keep a stash of dollar bills in his wallet specifically for playing [Liar’s Poker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_poker) at the local bar.
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### Author:  [@UDS1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS1)
#### Post date: [March 2, 2022, 12:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/112 "2022-03-02T00:03:15Z")
But once a dollar is valued and bought/sold because of its serial number, or a coin because of its date of issue, or whatever, it has ceased to function as currency. Its function as currency pretty much requires it to be fungible.
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### Author:  [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)
#### Post date: [March 2, 2022, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/113 "2022-03-02T00:08:04Z")
Right. And an NFT is a cryptocurrency designed to be useless as a cryptocurrency. They’re all just numbers on a blockchain (for the common case of Ethereum NFTs, exactly the same blockchain as the fungible currency).
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### Author:  [@UDS1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS1)
#### Post date: [March 2, 2022, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/114 "2022-03-02T01:32:43Z")
Aren’t most cryptocurrencies useless as cryptocurrencies? 😉
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### Author:  [@naita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/naita)
#### Post date: [March 2, 2022, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/115 "2022-03-02T16:12:39Z")
> [@Chronos](#):
>
> That just sounds like a Kickstarter with extra steps.
Having watched the whole two hour video posted previously in the thread that seems to have been a feature of most of the various series of NFTs trying to copy the “Bored ape” craze. The flimsiest of kickstarters, with “investor” participation into what the end product will actually be. Because that is such a recipe for success.
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### Author:  [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)
#### Post date: [March 3, 2022, 11:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/116 "2022-03-03T23:31:22Z")
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#):
>
> Right. And an NFT is a cryptocurrency designed to be useless as a cryptocurrency. They’re all just numbers on a blockchain (for the common case of Ethereum NFTs, exactly the same blockchain as the fungible currency).
Not exactly. An NFT is just a digital proof of authenticity. Like a numbered signature or watermark.
Take the “Bored Ape” example. They basically created 10,000 images of cartoon monkeys and sold them as NFTs. There’s nothing inherently valuable about that, other than a bunch of celebrities bought them and there is apparently a whole community built around Bored Ape stuff that’s only accessible to owners of a Bored Ape NFT.
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### Author:  [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)
#### Post date: [March 4, 2022, 12:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/117 "2022-03-04T00:03:07Z")
> [@msmith537](#):
>
> An NFT is just a digital proof of authenticity
So is a cryptocurrency. Just an entry on a public ledger. In the case of the NFT, the ledger entry points to a URL. For normal cryptocurrencies, it’s a transaction record.
It’s a little too esoteric to ever be popular, but you could imagine some crypto transactions being more valuable than others, simply because the transaction hash was more interesting (it had a 123456789 in it or something).
The Bored Ape thing sorta straddles the line between NFT and currency. One could see it as a cryptocurrency with 10,000 units, and an autogenerated picture instead of a serial number (but it’s still just a number inside acting as the seed for the picture generator). Some of them are worth more than others based on the picture, but they all equally “purchase” the right to be in the community.
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### Author:  [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)
#### Post date: [April 27, 2022, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-an-nft/958801/118 "2022-04-27T18:09:28Z")
The YouTuber LegalEagle just put out an interesting (and long) video on what an NFT is (and, more importantly, what it is not). It seems likely that many people think they are buying something they aren’t and have very little legal remedy over their purchase:
[ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6aeL83z_9Y)
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