LogFAQs > #985942387

Mist_Turnips posted...

No one does. Everytime someone explained them it actually managed to make less sense.

It's not that hard to understand. Blockchain is basically a ledger. Like signing your name on a form saying "I was here". The way it's built makes records extremely hard (impossible?) to falsify, thus it can be used for things like money. ie: Bitcoin.

And NFTs were just that concept applied to other things like digital art. It's basically just a normal picture but with ultra secure code saying "Yup, that's mine." The idea being that, while anyone could just "download" it, they could never "own" it. They don't have the ledger that proves they own it. In the same way that I can go download a photo of the Mona Lisa, but cannot own the original work.

But like. There's a few key differences between a jpg that was never anything more than a jpg and the literal Mona Lisa. So it was a terrible idea and the vast majority of people didn't care about how many digital certificates you owned stating how many apes you collected. With no one other than the scammers buying into the ecosystem it was obviously going to crash sooner rather than later.

Unfortunately, AI has too many uses (both nefarious and not) to go the same way. Your grandma was confused by all the young'uns obsessing over ape pictures. But she loves AI generating family photos into Ghibli styled "masterpieces". The scale here is several orders of magnitude different.