What are NFTs and how Blockchain Smart Contracts work #Metaverse

Plain English – well, Plain Australian! – chat about NFTs and Blockchain work in virtual worlds.

Intro to NFTs: In this lecture I compare #Blockchain to Assessors of Art or Land Assessor, NFT (non fungible Token) to Provenance (art) or Certificate of Title (Land) and also talk about how we create scarcity and timegates out of 1’s and 0’s. If we can duplicate digital items ad infinitum why do we need a rare piece of art? The audience for this video are CEOs and Executives, PR and Marketing – not necessarily technical developers.

Transcription and Time stamps of What are NFTs video

[00:00:00.550]
Hello, my name is Laurel Papworth and I’m a Metaverse and cross reality consultant, primarily to government and corporates and also a lecturer at university and some other bits and bobs. But anyway, today wanted to go through NFTs or Tokens, what they are and how they apply to the real world with a nod to the blockchain and a nod to virtual goods and virtual services. So, quick video. I don’t have any notes, so if I make a mistake, my words get tangled, I’ll put them here on the screen.
[00:00:40.550]
We start with the real world and we have to look at how society creates social constructs for authority and trustworthiness and to certain extent, transparency. So authority and trustworthiness is critical if you’re going to do something like buy a house. And if you buy a house, there are kind of three key steps that you should probably know about. One is there is an assessor that belongs to land’s title, local council, something like that, who has been to the property, measured it out, marked it on a map. Usually they put where the sewage and the electricity and stuff is coming in and not one millimetre more is yours.
[00:01:26.760]
So this land is then virtually represented in the assessor’s document and that leads to a certificate of title. The certificate of title is what you actually buy when you buy a house. The certificate of title is non fungible, which means if you decide to break off part of the garden and give it to the next door neighbour, you can’t just rip off part of the certificate and give it to the neighbour. You have to do. And trust me, I went through this because we had to subdivide our land.
[00:01:57.720]
You have to go through back to the assessors, get everything assessed, signed off, get the certificate, the middle thing, and then you can disengage from that block of land with NFTs blockchain, which, by the way, has little to do with cryptocurrency except for authority and trustworthiness. Blockchain is the legal contract, so it’s the part of creating virtual spaces that can have legal contracts within the virtual worlds, if you like. The guy that created Bitcoin had a background in legal contracts, which is why it’s part of Bitcoin and then the Altcoins and other cryptocurrencies. But generally, when you’re looking at a decentralised currency that doesn’t have an assessor, that is the government, you need to have other processes in place to provide that authority and trustworthiness. So blockchain is the part of the agreement, which is the assessor part.
[00:03:03.530]
This belongs to this person and no one else. So it’s that sort of an agreement. The NFT, or the token itself, is the certificate. So once the assessment has been and you get the certificate of title. This is the same thing once Blockchain has been through.
[00:03:18.510]
Then there is a token or a certificate issued. And then that token is then available to members of the community as a token to get into a virtual club to listen to Elon Musk talked about Tesla. Or it’s a token to buy a piece of artwork which may or may not have monkeys on it. And if I was to say art, do you have an art assessor that comes in and says, yes, that painting that you found in grandma’s attic is the Mona Lisa, the real one, then you have Providence, bill of Sal and all the documentation that goes to prove provenance that’s the NFT and then the item itself is the painting or whatever. Now, other people can have that item.
[00:04:06.900]
They might buy posters. They might take a photo with digital items. Of course they can download those pictures. But typically, we’re looking at an assessor, which is a blockchain, and it’s an algorithmic generated, mind decentralised authority providing that certificate, the NFT, which then proves that you are the one and only owner of the item, unless, of course, you buy one of 100 or it’s gated in some other way. Why is this important?
[00:04:40.050]
Why aren’t these important? Why do we need to come to grips of tokens? It has to do with the fact that the digital world is ones and zeros and inherently has no intrinsic worth. So unlike food that provides sustenance during a famine, anything that’s a cryptocurrency or token has no inherent worth and definitely has no inherent worth because through the virtual space, everything is ones and zeros. If that virtual world, that augmented layer, disappears, your tokens have gone with it.
[00:05:19.190]
I’m interested in this from the aspect of how do we create value out of nothing? How does community come together? How do these social paradigms get created where we say, that’s worth something? How can I get an authority to authenticate it? And how can I get Providence and a token to prove that it’s mine?
[00:05:45.540]
Because I value that, and I want that. And constructing value is something that humans typically haven’t done terribly well. But I think if we work together to create value in these and their artificial worlds, whether they’re augmented or virtual or mixed reality, we are going to find a way to reset our value systems, and that’s going to be a more massive change than even I can comprehend, and I can just get the glimmer of the edges of it. So remember, if you buy a painting, you need an assessor to give you provenance so you can get the painting. If you want a digital painting, you have to get an assessor, which is decentralised blockchain to give you a certificate, which is an NFT, and then you can have the digital painting.
[00:06:57.650]
There are issues, and I do want to hit that before we finish. There’s been hacks of NFTs, there’s been hacks of the blockchain, and nothing is permanent or impermeable.
[00:07:11.930]
But then again, if you’ve ever bought a Chanel handbag that turned out to have fake certificates, and there’s about six things you have to look for if you’re assessing a handbag to see if it’s a genuine Chanel. Not that I know. I’ve just worked on luxury goods projects like fafets and stuff like that. Then you need an assessor to come in and reassess that object and make sure that the certificate you’re saving is correct. But, yeah, as we create value out of ones and zeroes, and as some of those prices go through the roof, it’s well worth watching.
[00:07:47.170]
The impulses, the energies that are coming in to find ways for humanity to re express value is going to be, I don’t think, a long process, but it’s going to be a fairly thorough one. Look for Time gates, this is only available for this time and watch the prices go up. And even though it’s fake, it’s digital, it could be available to you different languages, but if it’s Time gated, and if it’s Scarcity Gated, there’s only one of these. There’s only ten of these. Again, it’s digital, there could be 500 million of them, but you’ve got one of ten, and that makes it more valuable.
[00:08:30.350]
So always keep an eye on those kinds of things because they’re super interesting. I think the next series of videos, because I can’t do them quickly in one video, take too long, it’s going to be Monetizing the metaverse. Monetizing cross reality. What are the revenue streams? This is dear to my heart because I’ve been following it for 20 odd years.
[00:08:52.850]
How do virtual worlds make money? How is it that this one server, one Shard, made as much GDP as Nigeria, all that kind of stuff? So, yeah, let’s do Monetization next. See you in the next video. Thank you.

Resources and Links for Metaverse NFTs

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Im currently putting out one-to-two educational videos on Virtual Worlds, Currencies, Gamification, Metaverse, Cross Reality (XR) etc a week, and one Metaverse News video. Each video takes research, then recording, then editing, then promoting on social media. A sponsor/benefactor/Fairy Godmother 😛 would be muchly appreciated and ease my life considerably. Please let me know xxxx

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