Kayvon Tehranian's talk at TEDMonterey 2021
How NFTs Are Shaping the Future of the Internet
Non-Homogeneous Tokens (NFTs) are not a scam.
NFTs are not a flash in the pan, but the cornerstone of the future of the Internet. But in order to see its future, we have to go back in time.
It was 1992. The World Wide Web (WWW) is only three years old. That's what it looked like at the time.
Throughout human history, we have achieved global sharing of resources through the World Wide Web for the first time. No matter where our bodies inhabit, we are free to collect and share information. Most people at the time didn't understand what it meant when a computer was connected to the internet. In fact, many people once thought that the Internet was a scam, or just a flash. But some early Internet pioneers saw the potential of this emerging technology.
One of these Internet pioneers, John Perry Barlow, sees the opportunities and dangers inherent in this emerging digital world.
Back in 1992, he came up with a predictive puzzle based on cyberspace. Explain it in my own words:
If what we have can be copied infinitely and sent around the world for free in an instant, how can we protect our possessions? How do we get paid for our brainwork? If we don't get paid, what can we do to ensure that we can stably create and publish any work in the future?
The Internet has changed a lot since 1992. The Internet itself is a living and evolving technology. As early Internet proponents predicted, the Internet is increasingly becoming a necessary part of our lives. Today, a person's work, wealth, relationships, personal identity, etc., often rely more on the digital world than on the physical world. But Barlow's puzzles are still racking their brains.
The concepts of personal assets and ownership in the physical world have existed for centuries, and now they are infiltrating the digital world. We have tried to impose copyright, DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), DRM (Digital Rights Management Scheme) and floating watermarks on the Internet to protect our ideas and limit their dissemination. None of them worked.
Why?
As Another famous Internet pioneer, Stuart Brand, said: Information aspires to freedom! It wants to travel the world effortlessly, without obstacles, without burdens. This is why the internet was initially successful.
Since 1992, trillions of photos and videos, even cat memes, have been uploaded to the Internet for free.
What business models are paying for these actions? ad.
Advertising has become the internet's default business model not because we want to, but because it pays the bills. Today's largest and most profitable advertising agencies control much of the value of the Internet, not the people who actually create content.
On today's Internet, our mental work is unpaid. Even our content is "hijacked" as soon as it is uploaded to the server. These services not only squeeze profits from our content, they also have control.
Until the advent of NFTs.
NFTs are a technical breakthrough. It gives us a chance to get rid of that broken system.
You might ask: What is an NFT?
It is a certificate of ownership registered on the blockchain, and this certificate is obvious to everyone.
It's not much different from the deed you get when you buy a house in the physical world.
It's just that the contract proves your ownership of a file on the Internet.
Copyright or floating watermarks are old antiques rooted in old times. NFTs differ from them in that NFTs are pure digital natives. It was born of the Internet, born for the Internet.
RATHER THAN SIMPLY PORTING THE OWNERSHIP MODEL OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD, NFTS IMPROVE IT.
In the physical world, ownership drives out other people and prevents others from enjoying what you have. If I sneak into your house uninvited, no one will welcome me. Yet the digital space is so vast that it is infinite, exponentially growing, and lightning-fast. The unique ownership system offered by the NFT reflects this expanse. With NFT, even if something belongs to me, it doesn't prevent others from enjoying it. On the contrary, the more an NFT is discovered, appreciated, and well known, the easier it is to add value.
For example: the rainbow cat, a highly recognizable cat meme.
Since it was uploaded to the Internet 10 years ago, it has accumulated hundreds of millions of views. Because of this mass spread, when it was auctioned as an NFT, it sold for 300 ether, which equated to more than $600,000.
People who own this NFT now will not stop everyone from liking, sharing, and re-creating the Rainbow Cat. Rainbow cats can still roam freely online, as usual.
The difference is that while rainbow cats are getting hotter, the price of its NFTs is also rising. Because of NFT, Rainbow Cat creator Chris Torres got paid directly from his creations. And whenever this NFT is resold, he continues to get paid.
This is all thanks to the royalty system included in the smart contracts that manage NFTs. NFTs are software that can be compiled. A system as complex as royalties and requiring a lot of law and manpower to implement in the physical world can now be represented simply with a few lines of code.
This represents a groundbreaking innovation that applies to any industry that relies on copyright payments to survive, such as publishing or music. Just as bloggers and MP3 restructured these industries decades ago, NFTs will spawn the next evolution .
The Internet removes our geographic limitations, and NFTs remove economic limitations. Yatreda is a team of Ethiopian artists who have created beautiful portraits of these heroes and heroines of Ethiopian history.
Sell these portraits as NFTs. In one weekend they earned 13 ether, equivalent to more than $40,000. Instant payment, no customs, no foreign exchange, no international transfer. An art team from Addis Ababa (ddīs bebā) now pays for the same economic means as artists in Los Angeles, New York, and London.
While Rainbow Cat and Yatrida's NFTs are both created and sold on the same platform, they are much more than that – remember: information craves freedom! Unlike the current Internet, on today's Internet, information can only be obtained through basic applications and network platforms.
NFTs are portable. They are not encapsulated in the company's private servers, but in an open, transparent, decentralized peer-to-peer network.
Of course, you don't need to understand this complex decentralized structure to figure out the supreme potential that NFTs can unlock for humans. Once the value and ownership of digital is no longer exclusively controlled by a few groups, entirely new possibilities emerge. In other words, 30 years later, NFT has finally solved the puzzle of John Perry Barrow. This is not science fiction, and NFT technology has played a lot of role. The next generation of Internet pioneers is already using NFTs.
Over the next decade, NFTs and the property rights engraved in their code will reshape everything we know about the Internet. What will an NFT-based Internet of the future look like?
It will be a network that is not controlled economically by the platform, but by the creators.
A network that allows our ideas and ideas to be directly supported.
A network of freedom of information, and we exchange our minds for rewards.
Source: TED public account