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Hi everyone, and welcome back to Geek Time. This is Brad. Hey, Lulu, how are you going?

Actually, it’s Geek Time advanced.

Geek Time advanced, that’s right.

Hey, Brad. So last time we were talking about NFT.

Yeah, so we're gonna kind of talk a little bit about the speculative nature of the NFT as an asset, like the stock market.

Speculative, basically, means you're taking a lot of risks.

NFT just sounds like all speculation to me because it doesn't have any real, in a traditional sense, any like real sort of value.

Right. In some cases, it does have value because it can give you like a commercial right to use something. But when it comes to, some of it is just you buy a piece of art and you're hoping that maybe someone will want to buy that from you later at a higher price.

But it's still different though. If I buy an actual painting, I can hang it up in my room for people to see. And later on I can sell that actually that very tangible piece of painting to other people. But NFT, I can't hold in my hand.

And if I lose the file, I lose all of my money, right?

If you lose the file, you lose everything. Like it's connected to like when you look at it, it doesn't have any value unless you have a buyer. That's the one thing like that one makes it quite speculative, right? You can't sell it unless you have a buyer; when it comes to the stock market or something like that, you buy a stock, there's a value that's inherent in the company. But when you have like a piece of art, may not have anyone that wants to buy that at any point ever.

So it doesn't have any intrinsic value in that way. Because I know you, I know you invest in stock market and even in crypto-currency, what about NFT, would you in the future ever consider investing in NFT market?

I don't think I would ever actually buy any NFTs, unless that NFT carried some sort of licensable rights that I could use.

Okay.

Like if it was just… maybe like a song, if I can…the NFT gave me the right to use a song or something like that.

But you will only buy it if you can profit from it, not just because you really like this artist that you would buy an NFT.

Probably not. I'll buy the T-shirt from someone.

All right, probably much cheaper. When did it all start?

This started about 2011, as when they think the first NFT was actually made, could have been before that. But this was like the first time that anyone has like recorded knowledge of an NFT that I've seen.

Someone made an art piece of art at GPEG, basically. I don't know if that was the actual file, but it was a graphic piece of art that they sold as an NFT; and then after that, there wasn't really a whole lot.

But in 2015, Ethereum started selling like hexagon tiles to their world. They sold all the hexagon tiles for something like $1.4 million. Not a piece, but the total.

But still, I mean that is a very very new concept. Why do you think NFT, since it was pretty much created, the whole concept was created 5 or even 10 years ago, why do you think was all the buzz about NFT now like in the past year or so?

I think what it has to do is mostly the fact that crypto-currency has taken off so much. And when you look at crypto-currency like...

Bitcoin, Dogecoin…

Or Shiba coin, yeah, like they're these coins and you can buy them online, but it's really just a coin, right? There's no other… nothing else to it. You buy a coin.

No artistic value.

Right. You just have a coin and that coin can go up and down in value. But there's nothing backing that coin. And so like whereas if you have an NFT like it's a piece of art, there's something actually there that you can have whether it's a piece of art, a song, a scene from a movie or something like that.

But honestly some of the NFT that I've seen, art is a probably, I would say questionable term.

I think there was one where a guy recorded all of his farts for a year and then sold an audio file or video file of all of his farts for the year.

Because like we've discussed before, it's all based on if there's anyone who wants to buy it, right? If someone wants to buy it, then it has a value. It's not really like art that needs to be appreciated. If people wants to buy, then you can sort of cash in on it.

So if you are buying it and it does have some sort of value as far as like a license, then does have some sort of value underneath it. You might be able to find a buyer for it more than what you bought it for, and so you could sell it. Or like the other issue, you might may not have a buyer for it at all.

Exactly, but I guess a lot of people, a lot of speculative investors are just trying to probably gamble on if this is the next big thing.

Yeah, you might buy a $10 NFT now, and that might be worth $100,000 in a month.

Exactly, look what happened to crypto-currency, right? But apart from being a type of currency investment tools, what other possible uses does NFT have?

Nike has just started like they have patented technology that they use to kind of prove that their shoes are real, because they don't want people like making copies of like one of their specialty shoes.

They are Collectibles.

Yeah, because people are collecting these, like a lot of people don't wear their Air Jordans or whatever shoes they're buying nowadays.

Yes, they paid a lot of money, so those are collectible shoes. But this whole using NFT as sort of like patenting method, how is it different from the olden day authentication code?

It's not much different, like except for this isn't something that you could you would be using to go on to authenticate a program.

It's basically the same thing, but it's like an encrypted file. You have to actually go online and you actually have to use the block chain to unencrypt the file to show its authenticity. But other than that, it's the same, right? When you go online to authenticate your game, you type in the code that they gave you, and then they say is this a valid code, has it been used before? And they say it's fine, right? You have so many uses, right?

Yeah.

It's a very similar idea. But this is rather than just being a string of digits. It's an actual file.

I'm assuming you can…because last time in the basic episode, we talked about the use of NFT in games to like as a part of a virtual land or virtual properties or items. I suppose you can also use NFT for almost like a title deeds.

There are a few issues with that, but like right now there's titles that are like someone has a piece of paper that proves that the owner of a land, right?

But what happens if there's a fire in that, that file that things get destroyed, right? You can't really have a backup of that, whereas with like a file, you can have several backups of it. Once you use it, once you enter on the block chain and you modify the file or sell it to someone, you no longer can use your file. Your file becomes like basically it's not really destroyed. It's just no longer usable because it's already been sent.

Nullified, almost like.

And so that code is then given to someone else and then they can make copies of it. So you can have like a copy in a storage place, somewhere or in a SD card somewhere. And so you always can have like several backups.

But then we're going into the whole crypto-currency or block chain technology, but that's a whole other world.

So we've talked about all of these basics or more advanced topics about NFT. I would like to finish off by talking about some of the problems, some of the issues and worries and concerns.

If we look at like a lot of the issues that people are talking about, when it comes to any type of block chain technology is environmental, when computers are trying to in like decrypt something, they have to have like a decryption key, but still they have to actually decrypt it, and so that takes up a lot of cycles on a computer which makes the computer work a lot, which makes it use a lot of electricity.

Unless you're using electricity, that's coming from a renewable source, you're using something that's creating a lot of…

Environmental… like emission.

Yes.

I never thought about this way. So it actually is environmentally unfriendly use Block Chain, at least for now, maybe in the future then we can crack that.

Yeah.

If you look at some places, they're trying to put a lot of block chain computers in places with like dam, so they can use like hydro-power, wind power, solar power. But that is a big issue that they're looking at for the future. But other than that, some other issues could be like files, right? File will degrade over time like it's just basically a bunch of zeros and ones and it's almost like your DNA, every time you move a file from one place to another, there is a possibility of translation errors.

So even if it's kept in a completely digital environment, it still has the risk of being degraded over time.

Yes, when you have like a CD, you have all your data on the CD, but that CD is made of material that degrades over time, when you have like…sure it will last a lot longer than other files and it may probably over last person.

But if you move the file from one place to another, it can get corrupted.

Because when you say CD, that is still like tangible, you can touch and feel that sort of thing, they degrade much faster.

But even if, from the beginning to the end, it is just stored digitally, it's still. the files might get corrupted.

Yeah.

Especially considering NFT is one of those things, once you lose it, you lose the value forever. There's no way to retrieve it.

It's gone.

If you lose the password or you put the password into the wrong too many times, it won't ever open, it will lock forever.

This is the whole point of decentralized, because you have nowhere to go to retrieve your password. Yeah, I should never get into the whole NFT things. I'm someone who constantly needs to retrieve her password.

I think that ends our little NFT talk. We know this is a really complex issue. If you are an expert in this field or if you are interested in this field, share with us what you know. So maybe we can also learn more. And if you know nothing about this, tell us what you want to know. Maybe in the future we'll talk about that.

And if you plan to invest in some NFTs, let us know which ones.

Please don't buy a year or so fart sounds.

Yeah.

All right. Buy something meaningful.

Good bye now, we'll see you in the next Geek Time. Bye, Brad.

Goodbye.

Bye.