---
# System prepended metadata

title: NFTs - tl;dr
tags: [content, tldr]

---

# NFTs - tl;dr

Hello! welcome to another installment of tldr with me, Ben

Today I'm going to cover NFTs!

What are they? 

How do we use them?

Are Bored Apes really that bored? Yes.

## Overview

F stands for Fungibility. 

How interchangeable is something? 

Think about the difference between a rock and THE ROCK.
That's fungibility.

If I drop a quarter and you drop a quarter, it doesn't matter which quarter I pick up or you pick up, right? 

They're interchangeable or fungible.

But if I drop my drivers license, and you drop your drivers license, they're both the same TYPE of thing, but each one is unique. They're NON-fungible.

Ok so we're up to speed on FTs and NFTs - 

They're unique digital assets we call tokens, which can be pretty much anything you can imagine in web3. 

Right now the most popular usecase for NFTs is art, but really they're certificates of authenticity and ownership!



## What Does This Mean?

What is ownership? How is it given? How is it taken away? 
Usually by some sort of authority, right? 

I can own land, but the government could decide at any time to seize it or worse, a foreign military could invade and take away everything I own.

Now on the web, I may think I own images I have online, but really, it's Instagram or Twitter or whatever platform they're on who ultimately controls them. 

They can delete them, make money off of them - anything they want really. It's out of my control.

But now in web3, we have programmable ownership. 

This means through code, we can define how we own something. 

And we can define how that ownership is maintained and transferred. 

A government or invading army can't take it away. They can't shut down the open web, because it's decentralized. More on that in a future episode. 


## How Does This Work?

An NFT is created, or minted, by a program called a contract. The contract basically gives each NFT its own unique id. 

When the NFT is issued to someone it just means the contract maps the unique id to an account id. 

That's it!

It's just a list of unique ids that map to account ids

The NFT contract doesn't care if the unique IDs point to images, or drivers licenses, deeds, wills, movies - whatever - The sky's the limit

And as long as the NFT contract follows certain conventions and standards, you'll always be able to see the NFT you own in your crypto wallet.

--- 

FTs are just slightly different. They are also controlled by a contract, but there aren't account names and there aren't unique ids.

The contract just has a number -  the total supply of that fungible token. 

I can create a contract for a Ben token and set the total supply to a million. 

and every time I mint a Ben, that number goes down.




## Possibilities

In web3 you can use your crypto wallet, your account id, to log into various web3 applications. 

And any tokens in your wallet are accessible by those web3 applications.

If you have an avatar and you buy clothing NFTs for it, that clothing is accessible wherever you use your account id. 

Maybe the NFT is clothing in one game and represented as a a type of car in another game. There's a lot of flexibility, because it's all code.

elections, ticketing, proof-of-attendance, original work like screenplays, art - even food orders

can all be verified and authenticated onchain by anyone in the world at any time. 




## Conclusions

Wow! Thanks for watching. As always, please let me know what you think. Feedback includes

"Amazing!"

"I learned so much so fast!"

or just a bunch of heart emojis

alternatively, these work too:

"You talk with your hands too much"

"Get a teleprompter!"

"You look tired"

and many more

See you next time
Until then, I'll see you on chain!



###### tags: `tldr` `content`