NFT's ?
Ah yes I hear rocks are the hot thing now. about as useful as all the other NFT stuff. I still don't get buying a PNG image, fight me.
You're not buying a PNG image, you're buying the hash of a PNG image. You're right to not get it. We can still fight if you'd like.
This really is an offshoot of the most interesting part of the math behind Bitcoin (and PGP, and SHA etc) to me personally, as useless a divergence as it is.
SHA-256 allows us to feed an algorithm virtually any data and it will produce a single number out of a finite, but enormous set.
It's just that this number is so big that it has the property of not being guessable. Just because it's mega large. And from so large a domain that collisions (two different input data producing the same result) although absolutely possible, will (probably?) never happen practically. This along with reliable ways that a person can prove that THEY know the secret number, but without REVEALING it we have a system with which we can do all sorts of odd things.
The really neeto part is we are dealing with such large numbers that as far as we are concerned with our ~70-100 year lifespan, and all the processing power we can muster they will ACT as if they are from an infinite set, though they are not. So we get all the advantages of a limited set of data, with many of the advantages of an infinite set just because it might as well be infinite as far as we are concerned.
This allows us to do new things.
I find it fitting that many NFTs are monkeys, or rocks, lol. Because it is our monkey brains at work here. Putting values on ephemeral things. And rocks are one of the oldest forms of value we have.
I cannot say whether "NFTs" will continue to be valuable. I find myself hoping not. Simply because it is being interested in something shiny, but really missing the point.
It's like we have invented the wheel, but are currently obsessed with using it as a table.