NFT stands for new fangled technology,
as we all know,
and that's
what the subject of this podcast series
is going to be.
What's up fungible?
So we're just making up words now.
Hey, Welcome to the fireside.
My name is Jake.
Always a pleasure to be here with you.
I appreciate you tuning in.
This is a brand new series
that I'm pretty excited about.
We have all for the last several years
been hearing a lot about bitcoin,
I think was the first term that we heard
and cryptocurrencies in general
and blockchain technologies
and metaverse and
and now the most recent one
that we're hearing so much about,
particularly in the in the art world,
is NFT nonfungible tokens.
But before we dive into the series,
I want to tell a quick story.
A few years ago,
I would say maybe 2017 2018,
I was listening to a podcast,
a technology podcast,
and there was a guy
named Eric, something.
There was a guest on the podcast
who had a company called Vatom.
It was short for virtual atoms.
And so he
he gave this kind of case study
of what his business was doing and the
the example that he gave was you are at a
an event, a festival or something ,
and you pass the Samuel
Adams tent or Budweiser tent,
and they have this little
interactive image
on their phone
that they can shoot to your phone
and it's a bottle of beer.
So it's a Samuel Adams
bottle of beer,
and you can shake it up and you can,
you know, turn it and do whatever
and it moves and interact.
It may warm up or something like that.
And so maybe you have to go to another booth
and get a little mini fridge
or get a cousy or something like that
so that you can cool it back down.
So you kind of gamified this little
image, this little interactive image
that's on your phone now.
Then you can go to say a restaurant
or a bar
and take this little image on your phone
and shoot it to the bartender
and exchange it
for an actual beer, right?
So it's kind of like a little fun
digital coupon for a free beer,
but it's more than that.
You could also,
if you're not a beer drinker,
maybe you could trade it or sell it
on a third party marketplace.
So maybe you don't drink beer,
but you do drink Coca-Cola
so you can trade it to your friend
for a Coca-Cola
interactive image.
Or what really makes this interesting
is maybe
99 out of 100 of these little images are
are worth a bottle of beer,
but the hundredth one,
when you shoot that over
to the bartender, it's
actually worth a case of beer.
Or maybe it's worth a year's
supply of beer
or a trip to the Samuel Adams Brewery,
where you could stay for a weekend
and they put you up in a hotel
or something like that.
So you gamify it
where you don't really know
what the value of this thing is,
and it was called a vatom,
a virtual atom. Just a few months ago.
I realized that that is an NFT.
It was just kind
of the first version of that,
and we basically just gave it
a dumber name.
So fast forward back to today,
I'm scrolling through Instagram,
seeing all of these artists
doing NFT drops,
and I realize
that some of these guys are my friends,
so I reach out to them
to see if they'd be
willing to participate in a series
on NFTs, blockchain, cryptocurrency
and how it's all related
and just share their experience on what
the technology is,
how they are putting it to use
kind of some case studies
on what it was like
to go through their first NFT drop,
how they did it,
how they buy NFTs,
or how I might buy NFT,
all that kind of stuff.
So we're going to go into all of that
throughout this series.
In this first episode,
we're just going to kind of
get our feet wet.
We're going to define in layman's terms,
hopefully what these NFTs actually are,
what their potentials are,
and a little bit of how
these artists think that they may be
used in the art world
sort of going forward.
So without any further babbling,
let's jump into this episode
and hope you enjoy it.
I mean, the first thing I ever heard about
was bitcoin, like most people.
And so then I started
to look into cryptocurrency
and then what powers
cryptocurrency is blockchain technology.
So then you kind of have to dig into that
in order to understand each element of what you're
looking at.
And then NFTs are really only more recent
the past few years.
But so from from from bitcoin,
you know, like everyone, I didn't get it.
At first, I was like, OK, this is weird.
It's just some other way to pay for
stuff like dollars work fine.
But and
then once I understood
the underlying technology
and the premise,
the whole like white paper behind
why bitcoin was created, I
I had an epiphany moment.
You know, I had that typical
aha moment where I was like,
Oh my God, this could potentially
be revolutionary actually for the way
human beings transact with each other.
But the whole crypto thing
that I got into back in
early 2012 before everything exploded.
But the NFT space, I really did.
I kind of about three,
but I
seen it coming about over the last year
and looked into it and stuff.
But I was so
involved in the crypto space,
just on the investment side of it
that I was like.
I don't have the energy to start
researching something completely new.
I don't know how it works.
Blockchain is essentially
the technology
that allows
for secure
and decentralized records of transactions
without needing
a third party,
decentralizing being a big buzzword here
and without the third party being like,
really the big kicker here
on what makes a blockchain
technology blockchain.
So this makes it pretty much difficult,
impossible to change
any data in the blockchain.
You could think of blockchain
like just a long
ledger of things that happen.
That's public in that everyone can see.
And because everyone can see
and technically everyone kind of owns
a bit of it
that it
that's what makes it impossible
to change without it being validated
on another
like node essentially
I kind of relate it to internet 2.0,
in a sense.
And that's that's always the best way
I could explain it.
I remember years ago
the eighties nineties
when everybody had dial up and all that
and nobody understood the internet
nobody understood any of that.
And we looked back and everybody wished
they invested in the internet
or got in early and did all of that.
And so I understood
as I was getting crypto
and sort of researching
all of that more and more,
I realized that's the wave of the future
as far as looking at it.
It's bigger
than the internet, in a sense,
because it involves so many other things,
whether it's the economy,
you know, just currency like
everything, the internet of
whether it's
mortgages on homes
like there's
just so much
moving parts to that whole thing.
So I undersstood in a sense,
it was as big
as the internet was back
in the eighties and nineties.
So then when it comes to NFT,
meaning non-fungible token,
So like a bitcoin would be a fungible
token. Is that right?
Like because there's nothing
that separates
one bitcoin from
from another,
nothing that makes
one distinct from another
what makes it nonfungible
is that it is distinct from another
unit, a unit.
OK. Yeah.
So how the NFT relates to
to the blockchain,
it is a unit, an entry in that ledger
on the blockchain, but it is unique.
In what way?
Well, so yeah, so NFTs came
from the way I understand
them came to be
because of blockchain
technology enables NFTs,
because the nature of what blockchain is,
it's a way of like permanently
and publicly recording
every transaction that happens.
So it's trustless.
you don't.
There's no middleman
and there's no trust involved
because it's publicly
and permanently recorded.
And that data that's recorded is shared
among every single computer
running that network
or running that blockchain.
So there's a sense of
permanence and a sense of uniqueness
that enables NFT technology
to even be a thing in the first place.
So I think NFT is,
you know, it's it's it's
basically like a little cookie of data
and that like that individual,
you know,
clump of clump or cookie of data is
unique and different
from every single other possible
set of data or little cookie of data.
So it's basically
like a digital collectible in a way
the same way people might hunt for,
like the rarest Beanie
Baby, you know,
and there's only like one or two of those
that were ever made in a Beanie
Baby factory,
and it's the same concept
just applied to digital data.
Yeah, I mean,
I think that one of the things
that really
interests me about the NFT stuff
is it's essentially going
to get rid of the library of Congress,
you know, back in the day
and send in like
images to the Library of Congress.
And then
they would basically say, OK,
these are copyrighted.
At this point,
we don't even need that anymore.
You can make an NFT of your artwork,
and that's basically proof
that your artwork.
So I assume that down the road,
we will just be
creating an art piece of our artwork
just as a
as proof of the fact that we own it.
And of course,
if you wanted to sell it at that point
or lease it out
or whatever or license it,
then obviously you can do that.
It's
just just being able to copyright
it, work is pretty amazing
I had a buddy of mine
who was a client
and a good friend of mine,
and he had messaged me and
said, Hey, do you
ever think about doing NFTs
And I was like, I looked into it,
but I have no idea.
I'm so busy and all of that
maybe we could jump on a call
and explain it to me.
And so I got a call with him
short of three months ago,
and he's a computer programmer,
software engineer, all of that.
So he really understands the tech space,
the smart contracts, the coding,
all of that.
So he started to explain it
and it was like, OK,
so.
We spoke about it earlier,
explained everything to me
when I was like,
So you kind of mean like this
and he's like, No.
So I was like, OK,
explain it to me again.
We went through and it was like,
OK, well,
what if I did something like this?
And he's like,
no And so after about three
or four of those,
I finally clicked and I was like,
All right,
I kind of get it now
because it's completely decentralized.
It takes power away
from central institutions,
which most of us don't trust anymore
or just downright don't like anymore. So
it's peer to peer.
It's decentralized, it's
more or less grassroots from the ground
up,
at least in its
original vision and scope.
And so that's also
what blockchain technology is.
It's basically
a way of running the internet,
where it's decentralized among all of us.
Rather than coming through
a centralized server
like Amazon Web Services
or like Google Analytics, it bypasses
huge, powerful data collecting middlemen
and just makes it peer-to-peer.
Like anyone running a node
or running a GPU
or CPU can participate in it.
What I think is going to happen down
the road is all these.
All these places that share images
are going to essentially require
those images to be NFTs
and show ownership
before you put them out.
So like you were saying,
we kind of
lost ownership of our artwork
in digital media or
to any digital media of any
digital
visual media
like think about it like this.
Like if I put it,
if you created a meme, right,
and I shared this meme on my Instagram
and people laugh at it
and think it's funny ,
then they start following me
because they
have a bigger platform than you.
And then all of a sudden
my digital currency goes up
because of something you created,
and I just screenshotted it
and threw it up on my Instagram.
So I think what's going to end up
happening in
the future
is when you create an image,
whatever it is,
there's going to be a verification
process across the board.
You'll be able to, of course.
I mean, I assume what they'll do
is they'll they'll make it.
So you can, of course,
make it open
where anybody can share it
or you can charge a small fee.
Maybe it's a penny
every time someone shares your meme
or you can sell it to someone. know,
you create a
mem and someone is like,
Dude, I want that meme
we'll give you $5,000 for it
, you sell the meme to them
and then they can use it
on their platform.
But the cool thing is, is like
it almost gives the power
back to the artist
because when you create
a piece of artwork,
these other platforms
arent able to build off of your back
without your permission
or without paying you
on some sort of level.
There is that concept of owning
a fractional of a share of physical goods
such as, you know,
high end cars or,
you know, collectibles
and things like that.
I know the NFT space.
It is not moving
into that direction aggressively,
that's not the modern trend,
but it is utilizing
the concept of an NFT to own,
you know, factionalized
shares of physical objects,
which is what makes the idea of NFT
very interesting
is because
while right now
people mostly see it as you know,
pictures of monkeys
and things as you right
click and save
so people think
the idea of NFTs are quite ridiculous.
But this is kind of the
the early phases of the dotcom boom
where, you know, everyone's
like throwing up
those like, really terrible looking blog pages
and they're playing with like, you know,
html making, like, really
funny looking on MySpace.com.
But once you start to become deeper
and deeper in this world
and we start to understand
what the technology is
and what we could really do with it
is just start to become more refined.
And just just like you mentioned,
you know, taking fractional shares of the Mona Lisa
or, you know, tying these,
you know, the idea of you own
a physical, good or physical asset.
You purchase,
you know, a new car,
like a new Lamborghini,
like a very high end sports car,
and they give you this,
you know, badge of honor via NFT.
So wherever you go in the digital space,
you always have the badge.
So for some reason,
if you want to flex that badge and say,
Hey, I'm a Lamborghini owner,
but I'm not driving it right now,
but you can see
my badge
is validated on their profile or,
you know, their wallet or their profile
in the metaverse.
It's actually that, you know,
they're tied to this.
So I think that's
what makes it even crazier
as we move forward.
And even have
had the Metaverse discussion
because very is very new to current
internet is set up
for massive data collecting
huge behemoth corporations to just like
get their hands on every piece of data,
every piece of content
and claim it as theirs.
And then just sort of like,
rent it back to you, you know, basically.
And so
if you
take them out of picture
and you as an artist
or creator, sell
or engage directly with your audience
by selling them an NFT on
on an open source platform
where anyone can go
sell that, sell an NFT to anyone,
you know you're giving that data
that experience
that that engagement
directly to your audience
or your fan base.
And so it's basically taking power
out of this giant data collecting beast
that is just trying to like,
sell it back to you basically.
Know they collect
everything they know about you
based on your activity
and who you say you are.
And then just sell it back to you,
you know, so
you can actually empower yourself
as a creator through NFTs
and sell that directly to your audience.
Basically,
it thanks again
for joining me for this
very first episode
of our tattooing and NFT series.
Episode two will drop next week.
I'm gonna start using the term drop
from now on.
I've never really done that before.
If you are not already,
make sure to sign up
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when that episode goes live.
Also, head over to firesidetattoo.com
and see what all we have going on there.
Thank you guys, as always,
for supporting what we do.
Thank you to my guests.
And we'll see you next week.