Wisconsin Veterans Forward

What The Heck Are NFT's and WHY Should You Care? (Part 2)

May 09, 2022 Wisconsin Veterans Chamber of Commerce Season 2 Episode 139
Wisconsin Veterans Forward
What The Heck Are NFT's and WHY Should You Care? (Part 2)
Show Notes Transcript

(Part 2) Everyone is talking about NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and there are few lukewarm opinions out there. Some think NFTs are scams, or part of some large Ponzi scheme. Others are doubling down, convinced that the revolution is here to stay.

What the heck are NFT's, and why should you care? Let's talk about it.

Questions? Comments? Continue the discussion by requesting access to our exclusive WVF Facebook Group.

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Wisconsin Veterans Forward is brought to you by the Wisconsin Veterans Chamber of Commerce, a nonprofit organization that serves veterans and military families by supporting veteran owned and veteran-friendly businesses throughout the state. 

On behalf of our members, we serve as an advocate for Wisconsin’s veteran business community and promote economic opportunity for military veterans, military families, and veteran-friendly businesses.

Follow us on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/Wivetschamber

 

Intro & Outro Themes: 

Barry Dallas - I’m Gone (https://uppbeat.io/t/barry-dallas/im-gone)

Noise Cake - Light It Up (https://uppbeat.io/t/noise-cake/light-it-up)



Speaker 1:

Today on Wisconsin veterans forward. We continue our dialogue with our good friend, Manny LA, we're talking about NFTs. What are they? What the heck is an NFT, a non fungible token? What does it mean? Is it a scam? Is it the future? Is it a little of both? I don't know. But for those of you who don't know anything about it and have heard whispers or yelling, and<laugh> what a, anywhere from whispers to yelling about NFTs, uh, and you, and you wanna know what it's all about. Well, we're giving you kind of a base level crash course. And if you miss part one, you're probably don't want to hear that too. You, I, you probably already heard part one. That's why you hear, if you, if you didn't go back, we'll wait for you. We'll leave a light on for you. All right. Let's dive in. You are listening to Wisconsin veterans forward. Wisconsin's premier audio resource for veterans, military families, veteran owned and veteran friendly businesses. Wisconsin veterans forward is brought to you by the Wisconsin veterans chamber of commerce@wiveteranschamber.org. And there's a land grab too. There's there's a huge land grab, not just metaverse land, but also, um, what you would colloquially refer to as a web address, as opposed to a.com or a.org or a.edu there's dot E the S addresses there's dot crypto dot NFT. All of those, uh, the cool thing is, is once you buy, like I own Adam bros dot E and I own Adam bros dot NFT or some real Adam, something like that. Mm-hmm,<affirmative>, mm-hmm,<affirmative> once I own that, I own that domain. You can call it a domain across the board. I own it for life. I don't have to renew it. Yeah. And I own it literally everywhere. That can be my, my name across all platforms. And that ownership is verified and can't be, can't be faked and, and taken from me. So the thing about the blockchain is everything that can be verified on the, the blockchain. It can also be viewed by anyone on the blockchain. Mm-hmm,<affirmative> obviously it is coded and privacy protected, so it doesn't have my name necessarily attached to it. But you really avoid. Once we get past the kind of wild, wild west mm-hmm<affirmative> vibe of the NFTs and everybody getting scammed and stuff, uh, you know, being tricked into doing this, that, or the other, it really is safer and more secure. And you don't have to worry as, as much about your identity. Yes. Getting stolen, unless you give somebody access to it. So right now, everybody is just trying to get these, these dot E addresses and these dot crypto dot NFT addresses and claiming ownership for life on the blockchain. Yeah. It is similar to the.com grab of the, the mid to late nineties of everybody just trying to, I mean, and, and for those of us that were around and saw the transition from web one to web web two. Yeah. From the information economy to the platform creator economy, like we've seen this happen before. Yeah. And we saw resistance to it. We saw the writing on the wall and the folks who are able to capitalize on it and say, look, we don't know what the future holds for this technology, but it's clear that this is huge. Yeah. Those folks are the mark Zuckerbergs and Jeff Bezos or whatever. Uh, do you see parallels?

Speaker 2:

Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 1:

That time. And right now, switching to web three and blockchain

Speaker 2:

It's yeah. It's almost like a second chance at technology. Right. So if you missed it on the first go around with, with early internet, you know, I, I, I grew up around that too. It was in, it was in college at the time, and I remember it being so novel and foreign, you know, and you felt like you had to be this tech wizard to get involved with that. Right. You know, and I think

Speaker 1:

There's a barrier to entry.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. You know, you had to learn coding and all these other things, but with web three, now they're referring to, as web three, third version of web is it's much more accessible. I don't have to be a tech expert. I don't have to be, you know, no special coding. There are platforms that you can quickly learn and be able to purchase an NFT or, uh, so the barriers of entry are much easier to get into. Um, I just think that people are still real trying to learn what the value of that NFT, um, that, you know, space is right now. So yeah.

Speaker 1:

Well, and 99% of NFTs just for the right. I mean, you can buy an NFT for a million reasons. You can buy an Ft because you wanna support the artist. Cause as you said, that artist is going to receive a lifetime royalty every time that that piece is sold, uh, to another party, uh, the original artist will get anywhere from a one to 10% royalty, depending on how they set the thing. Um, you could buy an NFT because you wanna be part of a community. There are some, your, your gym could have a gym membership, NFT that you buy, and that gives you access to the gym and its services and its trainers. And then you can sell it to somebody else when you're done with it. And they don't have to worry about sales anymore. And you, you can get your money back. Uh, there's, there's a million reasons why you could do it. You just like the art, you wanna be part of the community. You think that it will increase in value and you can sell it and make a profit that there there's you, you like the, the, the vibe that it gives off of exclusivity and coolness, there's a million reasons why, and then there's gonna be a million reasons why one will want to own an NFT that we haven't even thought of yet.

Speaker 2:

Correct. Yeah. And there's still, you know, people are still IDing on that. I would say the other aspect is, you know, being able to protect information, if it's your information, if it's a valuable or collectible, uh, you wanna be able to say that, you know, if it's, you know, somehow in the market or somebody, somebody grabs that or tries to, you can protect that through your, you know, the NFT, the, the blockchain technology associated with that. Um, I would say the, you know, certainly membership is a big, um, advantage. Uh, some, um, very exclusive restaurants in New York are now selling NFTs. They get VIP access. Nice. You know, and you don't even, it doesn't even pay for the food. It just pays for access<laugh> and you'll, you'll have people that say, Hey, how do I get in on that? How do I be part of that? So you'll also have some of that as well, but, um, but you know, beyond that, you know, if you're an owner, you, you, you know, you want to be, uh, maybe granted privileges or access or something to that effect, if it's first rights to art collections or our gallery openings or whatever it might be, you have that, um, you know, through the NFT. So

Speaker 1:

Right on what would you say to somebody who says that, and that NFTs are a Ponzi scheme or a scam

Speaker 2:

<laugh>, um, you know, I would say do some research on your own, you know, look at the technology, look at who's who's, who's, um, kinda leading discussions on it. Um, mm-hmm<affirmative>, you know, um, some of it, yes. I mean, just like any industry, there are bad players out there mm-hmm<affirmative>, uh, but look at the, the broader landscape of it and maybe the possibilities of what it could bring. Cause I don't see it just as the board yacht, a, you know, ape club or any of those, you know, it has so much more utility and that's the thing, you know, you use a CRE word of utility. What, what value does it bring? Not from a maybe financial, but a value proposition

Speaker 1:

To that. Right.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Well, I mean, and also it wouldn't hurt to have a board a that is worth<laugh> one and a half million dollars right now.

Speaker 2:

Right, right. Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

What would you, what would you say to somebody who is interested, but has no idea where to start?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I would say, you know, there's a lot of the social media channels have, have experts that are really trying to educate, uh, you know, uh, beginners. And I would, you know, I learned a lot on like, uh, LinkedIn, there are a few, uh, oh yeah. Experts out there. They're, they're just publishing educational material. They're, they're providing videos and white papers. And just trying to push that content out for, for knowledge. Um, you know, Twitter is another space that, you know, crypto web three have taken over<laugh> they really have that chatter. There just be careful. Cause you can go down rabbit holes pretty quick there. Uh, but I would say you, LinkedIn to me seems much more academic, more of an academic approach about NFTs and web three. Right. Um, but you know, and I think people are still writing books about it. They're still doing their research to publish, but you know, and, and maybe dip the toe in the water around how do I create a wallet so that I can purchase NFPS and create those collections. Maybe make sure that you're not, you know, putting all your eggs in one basket either, you know, you're dabbling. It's not something that you're gonna retire on, you know, or bank on. So I think those are, those are some of the, the kind of beginner steps I would, I would recommend. So

Speaker 1:

I would be really scared to write a book on NFTs of the space right now. Cause it's just, it's changing. It is changing so fast. Yep. And if anyone dives in to the space, uh, just be skeptical of everything. Yeah. It doesn't mean that the whole thing is a scam. Just because, I mean, if you look at the beginning of web two, the, the Nigerian prince who wants to give you his fortune, that email scam right. Is only famous and, and you know, is a trope and everybody knows about it cuz it worked on thousands of people. Yes. But now, right now we just know better. We know we get that email mm-hmm<affirmative> and we delete it. Or we get the email that says this prescription for only 3 99, or this person wants to talk to you. You just delete it. It's junk mail right now.

Speaker 2:

It's going to be true. It might be right. A lot of times it is. Right. So yeah.

Speaker 1:

And now there's so many people who see that right now there's a sensitive period before mass adoption of this technology and, and this, this, this movement that there are bad actors trying to take advantage of they're out there, there are scammers an abundant amount of them. That doesn't mean the whole thing is a scam. And it doesn't mean that you should avoid trying to learn about it cuz it's important.

Speaker 2:

Yep. No great points. Um, yeah. Do your homework, if you know people in that, in that particular field reach out, uh, you know, test, test the waters with, with other, you know, other friends or colleagues about that too, so. Yep. Um, yeah.

Speaker 1:

And I'm a big fan of the NFTs for newbies podcast. Uh, rich Cardona and Heather parody, rich Cardona is a veteran helicopter, pilot Marines and Heather parity's military spouse. It is the, be the most listened to NFT podcast in the world. They just passed a million, uh, streams after only like seven months or something crazy. Yeah. They're the good people. That's a great place to start cuz neither of them knew anything about NFTs at the beginning and they're like, you know what, we're gonna learn how to do it and we're gonna learn how to do it in public<laugh> and we're, you know,

Speaker 2:

So that's great.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. That's pretty funny. Well, any parting thoughts? I mean it's impossible to cover all of this mm-hmm<affirmative> in 25 minutes time. Sure. But, but really I think what we wanted to do was, was just say like, look, it's not a scam, there are dangers, but you should probably at least gain a cursory awareness because it's not going anywhere. Do you, did we leave anything out? No,

Speaker 2:

No. I think that's really important to point out is, um, that I always say the Gene's out of the bottle, like there's no putting this back in. It is con continue to scale and um, you know, and people are gonna be, be more interested involved with this space. I do see it becoming more broad based in Def different industries. Um, you know, the restaurant industry, there's already a pathway there through, you know, Gary V's club out in New York and uh, you know, there's other, uh, organizations that are standing up NFTs as fundraisers as well, potentially. So for

Speaker 1:

Absolutely.

Speaker 2:

And so it, but it's, it does start with community. What kind of community are, are you trying to build? Mm-hmm<affirmative> around trying to build around this and that's where you can have some, maybe sense of security. Like people are in it for the right reasons. Um, they're not trying to scam people. They're not trying to, trying to quick buck, so yeah.

Speaker 1:

Good stuff. Hey, appreciate your time, sir. Um,

Speaker 2:

Thank you

Speaker 1:

Manny. Laura, everybody ask you to hang on the line for just a minute. I'll talk to you afterwards. Well, there's there's your crash course. Blockchain is a distributed digital Le ledger. Cryptocurrency is compensation that is given to minors to process those distributed ledger transactions at a, at a base level. Uh, and it is expanded from there. Um, it is digital currency. That is that ownership is solidified on the blockchain and NFTs are non fungible. That means they are not transferable immediately for a Fiat currency. They can obviously have a monetary value. Um, but you couldn't use an NFT at a bank right now. Um, you can use some cryptocurrencies at some banks. You can't use an NFT. That's why it's non fungible. And that is basically an ownership of a digital asset that is proven on the blockchain. And it is more than just a JPEG. It is the, the tech behind it, the metadata attached to it that gives you perks or no perks or whatever. So there it is. There's your crash course. Just know it's something you gotta know about cuz someday you're you, you know, if blockbuster was still around your video, rental membership would be on the blockchain. Your Netflix would is gonna be on the blockchain someday. You're gonna have to verify through meta mask. Mark my words, if in 10 years, that's not the case. Come hunt me down. We'll have a conversation. Hey, hold me. Hold me to that 10 years, man. Hunt me down, mark. My words, appreciate you tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to Wisconsin veterans forward brought to you by the Wisconsin veterans chamber of commerce. Please visit us@iveteranschamber.org. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast, leave a rating and review in whatever platform you're listening through.