Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) What Are NFTs? With CoinDesk's Brady Dale

Episode Date: March 6, 2021

I don’t think this one requires any in depth intro. The great Brady Dale of Coindesk, walks us though the whole NFT phenomenon. What are NFTs? How do they work? Why are people so crazed about them at the moment? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Meme Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough. Again, I don't think this one requires much in terms of in-depth intros.

The great Bradydale of Coin Desk is just going to walk us through the entire NFT phenomenon. Enjoy. Hey, thanks for answering the bat signal, as always. Sure. I love this topic. It's like vindicating for me because when I first started, well, yeah, I was writing about it before anyone. And everyone thought these things were stupid. So it's just like all of a sudden, everyone's like all into them.

And I'm like, ha ha. Do you want to consider us recording? And that can be the first comment right there. Sure. Yeah, sure. So I was trying to get a virtual background of a people piece, one of those pieces that is being sold at, and I think Christy's right now. So yeah, like, am I wrong?

that NFTs have essentially been around a long time, like this isn't necessarily new. It's just that it's taken off. That's what's new? Yeah, yeah. I mean, some people date it back to rare pephe's. I don't understand them super well. Most people date it to Cryptopunks, which is 2017. And that was before their, before Ethereum had a standard for these things, the RC-721. So yeah, they've been going for a long time. And basically, you know, I'm already getting us into like the explaining what this is, but am I wrong in assuming that basically this is sort of like the promise of Ethereum sort of fulfilled? Like Ethereum was not just money, but money and contracts.

And beyond that, like almost a programmable like software layer that's underpinned by the blockchain? Yeah, I don't know that Battalick had, At Talek definitely had finance in mind when he wrote the theory in white paper. I'm not sure if he was thinking about things like collectibles. I can't remember that being in the white paper. I haven't looked at it for a while, though. But, you know, the point of it was if the world computer can do things Metallic didn't think of.

So, yeah, I think it does fit that. Okay. So in one of our Clubhouse experiments this week or last week, we were, of course, what are the two things that people talk about in Clubhouse? they talk about Clubhouse and they talk about NFTs. And so the way that I brought it up was like if you're a liberal arts major worth your salt, then you probably read Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. And like he uses in that piece the literally the Mona Lisa, which a lot of people have been using to explain what's going on here with

especially the NFT art. In fact, actually, one of the quotes from one of the people that bought Beeple's piece recently, the one that set the records, he says, and the quote is, you can go to the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa, and you can have it there. But it doesn't have any value because it doesn't have the provenance or the history of the work. And so on a very basic level, Walter Benjamin said that in the age of mechanical reproduction,

does that devalue or make more value the actual thing itself, right? You can have the Mona Lisa on a placemat and a pizzeria, but there's still only one. And so taking this even further in a digital world where there's zero marginal cost for creating another digital copy of a thing, this is actually providing provenance to digital goods, basically. Yeah, I think it makes it more valuable. And an example I like to use better than,

the Mona Lisa, I'd never use that example, is I think Ansel Adams photography is a better example because, you know, he famously took his photos into art galleries and sold prints like they were paintings. And that was weird to people in much the same way because it's just like, well, it's just a print

of this thing. You could make a thousand. You can make them it really. It wouldn't change anything, you know. But he was like, no, I did, this is a very special photograph and I'm going to sell it the same way of painting sells. And the market has decided that Ansel Adams was right and that certain photos can be valued that way and having the original one that Ansel Adam says is the one is worth

to people and his photos don't sell for what the Mona Lisa would sell for, but they sell for, you know, plenty. Right, but also, I mean, like that has been standard practice now for decades, especially for photographic art where, like, maybe you say this is one of 100 or one of 20 or something like that. But even, you know, Warhol did that. There's how many of the mouse and there's how many of the, because he was doing screen printing. again, it is sort of like a mechanical process.

So there's multiple copies of all these war halls, but they're numbered and you specifically know the provenance and things like that. And those are the only official ones, even if there's 30 of them and all 30 are basically identical. And to continue on your point about, does it make it more valuable? I think it does because one of the things which

makes artworks valuable is how many people have seen them, how many people know them, right? And so people say like, oh, I can download these JIFs really easily. Who cares? It's just like, no, that actually makes them more powerful. If there was some really amazing jiff that became like a mega meme, you know, if Casey Green did his, this is fine, you're the dog in the burning room, that's from this web comic gun show in like 2013. If he did an NFT of this is fine and said this is the like canonical, this is fine, people would be very excited about owning that.

And it would and it would probably be worth a lot because everyone knows that meme. And you could be like, yeah, this goes back to the guy who made it. Well, didn't they already do that with the Nyan cat? Didn't that sell recently? I think, right. Yeah, it's basically the same thing. Yep, totally. Actually, we're going to come back to this concept of memeified art and things like that.

But the thing that I first started hearing about this was the NBA Top Shot taking off. And so, again, if we're starting out here just trying to establish conceptual foundations here, I saw a quote and I couldn't find the piece that I saw it in, but someone's like, you know, if you bought a LeBron James rookie card, it's, you know, a photograph on a piece of cardboard, right? So in a sense, if you buy a video of a LeBron James dunk, that is conceptually and in a lot of ways better than, because the random photo they choose for his rookie card isn't cool. this dunk is cool. It's more representative of what he does. So in a sense, when you look at it through that lens, it's like, oh, yeah, some of these other collectibles that we take for granted are kind of dumb.

And this is more compelling almost. Yeah, I would really, you know, I'm very not into sports. It's like kind of a joke in the office. Like when Top Shots first came along, my editor was trying to get me to write about it. And I'm just like, oh, sportsball. But like, I really encourage folks to go look, even if you don't care about basketball, go look at the top. Shop shots page. They've done a really nice job on those things. They're very cool. They have these like effects. There's stats built in these like these cubes. It's been around. Like, yeah, they're really cool. And like, to your point, it's like they do more than a card does. So why not treat them as valuable? Okay. So that's the conceptual stuff. Like let's get down to what's happening right now. Do you have a sense of why it's taken off? I feel like now that I've done the research,

it was starting to take off in the fall and into the winter. I'm sure in crypto, circles were way more aware of it than when it finally trickled down to folks like me. But why do we have, was there any sort of tipping point or was there some new marketplace that made it easier for people to do it? Or like, do you have any sense of why now and why it's catching fire? I think it's two, well, I think it's three things. I think top shots is really powerful. I don't know if it would have happened if top shots hadn't happened.

You know, I think they did a really great job. It's a company that's really well funded. I think it excited a lot of normal people and that got the rest of the crypto world interested. I think we're in a bull run, and so people have made a lot of money, and some of it feels almost like free money to them, so they're playing around, they're enjoying things, they're buying stuff that they just like. But I think the other really important facet here goes back to our last conversation, which is to centralized finance. And one of the last big stories I did during the defy's boom of the summer was about the marriage of NFTs and defy. And that was before their big mainstream hit.

But even then we were seeing like CryptoCumpunks, for example, become extremely valuable. Like they were out of many people's reach. They weren't having these giant sales like we're seeing now, but they still were like quite pricey. And like this company art gallery, art gallery had come along and was allowing like fractionalized ownership of Cryptopunk. So groups could come together and like buy a Cryptopunk and then like a hundred people would own a piece of it, which like people liked. And we saw other things like that.

So a lot more people were finding ways to basically create equity in NFTs, which of course, once that was happening, that brought more liquidity in the market, more liquidity, drove up prices for the best stuff. And so I think that five wheel got going and then top shots made a lot of normal people start to learn about the concept. And then we're here today. To me, that's the story. But I think it started with defy. And it's not, so right now it's collectibles and art that is getting the sort of mainstream attention. But it's also, it's NFTs, you can use them in games.

What we thought would be the big thing? Everyone thought games would be what would make them take off. Are there other use cases that are obvious or people are starting to play with beyond? So we've got art, games, collectibles. Well, actually, you know what? Let's save that because that's another thing. And we're going to talk about at the end my making an NFT. out of a podcast episode. But in doing that, like, you know, I did it on Rarable. And so I encourage

people to go to Rarable and check out some of the art that's on there. That's why I wanted to have it in the background so that you could get a sense. What are your thoughts in terms of the quality of the art that's on there? I mean, there's obviously people like BEEPL that have had sort of mainstream art recognition beforehand. But it is, and I'm not saying this in any pejorative way, because I kind of love the fact that it is memeified stuff, that it is, I can't remember remember the coin podcast, they were talking about like a Final Fantasy character in a Lamborghini or something. It's stuff like that where it's like it's really sort of memey sort of game-cultury stuff. It is, it's almost turning memes into art.

I'm just curious about what from what you've been observing, what people think of the actual quality and creativity of, especially the. art that's being sold and bit up right now. I mean, I can only give my opinion, you know, I'm a little bit of an art collector. I mean, not fancy, but like I buy drawings from people. I've done it for years. My apartment has, you know, drawings all over.

I think I have, you know, what, decent opinion on these things. And I think there's some really cool stuff getting made. In fact, one thing I'm really pleased about to, I just sort of a recent discovery of mine actually was, I did this really silly NFT story in 2018 called like, unbelievable tokens, seven NFTs that you can't believe. And that had some very weird NFT

projects on there that like you know like one of just NFT is a weird sound sort of procedurally generated music and stuff like that but one of them i gone i went to super rare i think it was it's early days it's one of the marketplaces and i just found one nfti of like an artwork and it was sort of a it was a little it was sort of a joke about twitter it was sort of this physical joke about twitter it was like this body kind of you know a weird but you can tell it was human and it had like a twitter bird bouncing around inside the head is the jiff and i don't know i mean it wasn't super deep, but I thought it was a good work. I mean, it expressed something about the internet and about crypto, Twitter, and all that kind of stuff in a really simple way. And so I

included that as just like one work of art. Didn't really think a lot about it, but I went back and looked at it. And I realized that that artist is this, is this, I think a woman named Hackatow. She goes by Hackatow online. And she's become one of the big NFT people. And I was really pleased to see that, like, you know, I spotted a work that stood out for me when somebody was, you know, not that big of a deal, but they are now kind of one of the more prominent NFTE creators. And I think she continues to do things which speak to the crypto community and people want her stuff because of that. So I think it's good.

I mean, art is meant to help us emotionally interpret our circumstances. So obviously, an art that's native to the internet will help people emotionally interpret the internet. So it makes sense that it's meaning. It's still meaningful. It's still iconic. Again, if people are interested in exploring the story, Who are the big sort of marketplaces right now? I said I'm on Rarable.

You said super Rarable. If people want to check out what's out there, aside from Top Shot, where should they go to look for this sort of stuff? OpenC is kind of the OG. They sort of were the first in to be like a marketplace. Rarable, going back to your question, but also why this is big, Rarable became big last summer because they released a governance token, which you got if you ever used them.

that was a part of the whole story of Rarables Rise. There's the, I think, I'm kind of forgetting the name. Was it Zora that NeonCat was sold on? I guess I would just suggest folks like Google, like where was the neon cat, NFTE was sold? I think I want to say it was Zora, but they'll probably yell at me. That's probably wrong. Zora is an NFT platform.

But that one is a really nicely curated one. And so that one's a really good one to look at if you're looking for like the really, like a more curated select. of things. Yeah. When we were DMing about this before we got on the air, you were talking about something about the relationship between the blockchain document and the content that it points to being something that's really important. What does that mean?

So, like, I think folks think because most NFTs right now are, you know, some kind of digital work, you know, usually an image, sometimes a GIF, some time a video. sometimes a song. I think they assume that the object, the content, lives on the blockchain, but that isn't actually true. The NFT is a non-fungible item

that sort of serves as a deed for that thing. And there's a field in the NFT standard called the token URI field that just points to the file somewhere out on the normal, internet well it doesn't actually be the normal internet anymore but I'd actually do a story about this where I was I just suggested people be cautious because if they want to be able to show that they have a canonical a canonical work it could be dicey if it's on a traditional web address because the traditional web points to

locations online and those locations can go away as we know fortunately now with blockchain technology with products like the internet interplanetary file system which is also related to the whole file and also R-Weave, now we can do content addressing. So the file can just have a hash of itself. So even if there were a million copies, it would know that it was authentically, it was hashed to the file that's blogging the token URI.

So it's good. One of the things I was sort of recommending that story is if you're gonna buy an expensive NFT if you care about it over time. Yeah, yeah. It's worth looking to, it's better if it's content addressed, if it's unlike RWeave or IPFS, and if it's on some random website that the creator could just take down. Because even if you still have the file, you don't have kind of the same provenance claim then,

you know, if the only authentication you have is pointing to a web address that's gone now, you know? Right. If I'm spending half a million dollars on a GIF, I'm going to make sure that I, well, not only it, it sort of gets to that question of, oh, if I have a GIF, what do I put a video screen on my wall and that's how I display it. But no, it would be more important to be like, well, this is where it lives. This is where the actual version of it lives, as opposed to, like you're saying, it could just completely disappear. Yeah.

So are there other companies in the space, are there other big companies in the space beyond the marketplaces? Yeah, there's starting to be, you know, so like there's this NIFTX and NIFT X, like with an, like one has an E, Like one has an E, one doesn't have an E. And both of those are doing fractionalized ownership, which is, you know, interesting. There's some projects that are working on bringing, I think Zora is doing this, bringing like uniswap like functionality, so decentralized exchange-like functionality into the marketplace. So that's pretty cool. And the one that I think, so there's this question of like, why do these things have actually have value?

Is it real? Is it all going to go away? I think one that just had funding, I think, last week, which. says to me that like there is a segment of the market that thinks that this value is real and is worth banking on is Niftyfy. And so Niftyfy is is a lending company that will appraise your NFT and then make a loan against it with the NFT as collateral. Which to me, you know, when folks are willing to start making loans against a piece of property all digital, that's like real value.

And it's hard to argue that something isn't real. Well, I mean, I guess that gets into the conceptual thing again. Like, it's real if someone's willing to pay for it, but then, you know, what is money and, you know, take a hit off the bong? The, there's also the real world applications for NFTs beyond just the provenance of like a collectible or a piece of art though, right? Yeah, I mean, well, they're starting to be. I mean, people are working on that. So for example, there's this company, um, persistence, which which is working on sort of tracking shipping invoices with NFTs. And I guess these things, I don't really understand it. But in the logistics world, those invoices are actually worth real money.

Like, that's how trade finance works. You know, like you could have an invoice that says you'll get paid for shipping something in six months and you can actually sell it on to somebody else. And so that's why that's, you know, valuable to do. And that's all done in a bunch of centralized structures now, but they're trying to break it out. And NFTs would be a good way to do that. You know, in D5, for example, there's this big protocol, yearn, which people make a lot of money in. And but sometimes, you know, defy is crazy and things

fall apart. And so they've started offering an insurance program in there where you can insure against smart contract failure, which does happen sometimes. And those insurance policies, because they have a lot of moving parts in them and you cut a specific deal, are represented by NFTs. And so that's another example. And the thing that I really think would make sense to move on to NFTs. And in some places are experimenting with this. I don't think it's really happening anywhere yet. It's just land title would make a lot of sense as NFTs. I mean, if anyone out there's ever bought a house, you know, that's a mess. Or even cars, selling cars, used cars, things like that. Yeah, that could be too. And then you really know the person really has it. You can look on

the blockchain and chase it all the way back to the, you know, the guy. Well, not only that. Wait, wait, wait. See, we're coming up with the use case right here. If you're selling a used car on the, in the NFT or in the blockchain as well, you could have sort of like the Carfax report or like, you know, the maintenance history of the car and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. The you also, I mean, you mentioned this before. It's funny. You made me think of Barabonds. Like every Hollywood movie sort of has that as a plot point as like someone's stealing the Barabonds or something. So it's like, hey, screenwriters, you need to update this stuff. But you were also talking about how you're mentioning like slicing up

these pieces of art and fractionalization and things like that. So there's also tons of scenarios where defy can intersect with NFTs. Yeah. Well, let's bring this back to art. Here's my hot take also on fractionalization. You know, I don't think that, I don't think you, I don't think crypto punks, I don't think individual crypto punks are the work. I would actually argue that the entire body of 10,000 cryptopunks is the artwork. You know, because these creators came together and they came up with the software.

that would procedurally generate this series of punks. So to me, the whole work is the entire 10,000 together. And then everyone who owns one has fractional ownership in the work of art that is cryptopunks. I would say the same thing for hash masks. If you guys have heard about a hash mask, that was the last big pot procedurally generated. Can you wait, can you? Yeah, I have heard of hash masks, but I don't know that I ever investigated. Explain what hash masks are. So hash masks, man, hash mask is one of those things.

As soon as I saw it, and I did see it early, I saw it. So the way hash masks, there's a lot of levels to hash masks, which is interesting. So externally, the team that made it and they're anonymous, but they got a bunch of artists together and asked them to make a bunch of different components, like to paint backgrounds, to paint faces, to make bodies. And then they use software to combine all these things together to make, I think, I think it's like 60,000 hash mats or something. I'm not sure. I mean, there's a lot, though.

And so they procedurally generated all of them. So again, I think that the work of art is all the hash max has. masks again. So then they did the sale where you all anyone could buy was a basically a token that said you will get one of the hash masks when they're released but you didn't know which one. And the sale got more expensive as more people heard about it. So it started off I think it was like 0.1. The second phase was 0.3th and that's when I heard about it. That was about $400 at the time. And and I really I was a that had been a long week, but I really strongly consider dropping what I was doing and doing one more story in a Friday afternoon

because I knew it was going to be so hot because these things were so cool. But the thing that was really cool about hash masks, the thing that I was just like above and beyond its aesthetic appearance that I knew was going to make them hot with people, is hash masks incorporated a thing I talked about on my last appearance liquidity mining. And so if you own a hash mask for I think a 10-year period, you will get this token, the NCT token, and emitted to you, you know, periodically over that whole time. And what the, all the NCT token is good for to the smart contract is you can burn some of it to change the name officially of a hash mask that you own.

So obviously, every time someone changes a name, there's a little less NCT in the world. And what the artist said is when the last NCT is burnt, then the work will be complete. And there's a finite supply. And like, I was just like, well, that is a very cool application of blockchain technology. and that's an invitation to owners to participate. That's going to get people excited. They're also going to speculate on the NCT. So as soon as I saw that, I was just like,

this is going to be the next crazy project. And I was right. But I didn't do the story. Oh, well. Well, let's talk real quick before we wrap up about, so yesterday I minted a podcast episode I did. That, again, until proven otherwise, I think it's the first time that someone's done that for podcasts.

people have been doing albums and songs and stuff, which is neither here nor there. So first of all, what it did is it got me to actually set up a wallet for the first time. So now I've got the wallet in my Brave browser. I've got it on my phone. I was surprised how easy it was to then, because I have some Ethereum on Coinbase, but I figured it would be way too complicated to try to figure out how to get it out of there. I just did a debit card thing.

That was super, super easy. I was surprised at how easy that was. But then the actual, so then every time you do a thing, like you set up the thing, there was like three steps. And every time you do a step, like first you set it up, then you mint it, then you, like, it took at least two tries every time because then it has to, I'm assuming it's writing it to the ledger or something. So number one, it wasn't foolproof on those steps. And thus far, the people that have been bidding have been all reaching out to me. And they're like having similar problems. Like, yeah, the first time I tried to put a bid in, it didn't work and I don't know why.

But then also I'm out this number of dollars in gas fees. So awful. That's the other thing is that so like it may be all in, it was $60 in gas fees that I paid to create this thing. Now, again, that's because one of the times it failed. And I lost, you know, 15 bucks in ETH that I don't know why. So, right, as has been mentioned on the show before, the fees are absurd. Because even like right now, the bidding is the equivalent of $10 for one of them. If you did that, I guarantee you your gas fees would probably be $15.

Yeah. It's terrible. You know, there's a lot of things happening here. There's a lot of new blockchains that are coming along right now. They just don't quite have their NFT infrastructure worked out yet. I mean, like Tezos, for example, there's this, there's this Tezo's colors in an FTE you can buy right now and they're all just, they're just the colors. You know, and you can buy those.

But there's not a ton else beyond that that it's coming. You know, there's some on Pocod, there's someone's some others. There's this one project, Unifty, which is a nice little startup, and they are good at helping you do it on the X-Ky chain, which is a side chain of Ethereum. And it's, everything's just cheaper there. And then you can bring it off the X-Dy chain if you want, and that will cost you a bunch you gas, but you also could just leave it on X-Dye for a long time until Ethereum chills out again. So, but yeah, gas is a nightmare. It's making things very not fun, and that's why Dapper Labs was

smart to build the flow blockchain. That's not what top shots are running on. And so people aren't facing those kinds of fees when they buy top shots because it's not, it's not on Ethereum. Okay, I did not know that. That's interesting. Yeah. All right. So let's wrap with this. This is being recorded on Thursday. Brian, can I tell you one other fun? Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Your podcast thing made me think of. No one's done this yet, but this was an idea, a guy he used to work for us who's still in the crypto space, June Wong. This is an idea he had, which I bet he'll build at some point, but I think it's cool. And it relates maybe to the podcast thing. Like as a podcast you can do some version of this. But like, what if somebody made an NFT where like if you do something,

the people would give you the NFT and it actually can't be moved? Like it can only ever go to one wallet. So like one of the June's idea was, for example, we could do this for consensus. We could give people an NFT that just said they were a consensus 2021, and it would just, it would be fixed that wallet. It doesn't move again, but you get, but it allows you to have like a badge of attendance because people care about that kind of thing. Right. Right. You could do it for, you could do it for your guests on your show. Like I was on Tech Meen Right Home, you know, you could do it for concerts, for hipsters. You want to really prove that they knew they were cool. Well, not only that. I mean, just, you know, proving that an episode has been listened to. I mean, that's important to

advertisers to a certain degree. Or like, you know, hey, I did read this book. You know, what if you on a Kindle book, you got all the way to the last page and it like confirms, yeah. Kindles should be crypto wallets. If they were, you know, if they were, we could have a secondary book market and, like, you would no longer be able to read the book on your book because the token had moved. Oh, yeah. Jesus. You know, they, this was an idea I had a million years ago. Like, yeah, Kindles, electronic readers, they should be crypto wallets. It would be amazing. God, I, I never thought about that in terms of even like, you know, IP protection and things like that.

But that's what we're talking. We're talking about ownership of digital goods and things like that. Okay, so this is Thursday. So this morning, the news came out about Square buying title, which, you know, is neither here nor there in terms of a larger story. But everyone's assuming that the, can you hear my dog in the background? Everyone's assuming that this is some sort of play, maybe not about NFTs, but something crypto-related,

because it's all about, you know, Twitter has been doing all the stuff for getting creators paid, and, you know, Square itself has been big in, like, you know, doing crypto trading and things like that. So, first of all, what's your take on if this makes sense? if like can you see this right you're saying no all right go ahead i'm going to stop uh so i don't think it makes sense i don't think that they're going to do nfts you know everyone can tell me i'm wrong

when you say i'm wrong but it's not that jack and square has been into crypto jack and square has been into bitcoin and bitcoin is no good for nfties um and it's zero percent useful for that right and jack has has seen yeah that's true i even mentioned that on the show today that oh he and j z made that you know, $25 million dollar Bitcoin fund to expand Bitcoin. But right, it's not like Jack has been an evangelist for Ethereum all this time, at least that I'm aware of, yeah. He's only been, he's very clearly Bitcoin. He's Bitcoin, Bitcoin.

I think this is, you know, I think Jack's a cool guy. I've liked watching his career. I think, you know, Twitter and Square, really interesting companies. But I just think there's a certain point in a rich guy's life where he wants to be a publisher. He wants to be a part of the conversation. and Jack decided to skip, you know, buying a newspaper, which was what most rich guys do,

and he bought a music distributor, because that's what he cares about. And because there are a million songs out there about Cash App, and he loves that. Well, okay, that's something that I didn't even touch on, because I mentioned it on the show before, the way that they, they're going to be teaching in school for years,

the way that they made Cash App take off. I mean, it was literally reaching out to hip-hop artists and influencers and things like that. And literally doing money drops in the sense of, we're giving away $100,000 right now. So I can see that angle too where it's like, well, maybe this is just sort of lead generation and like customer acquisition just getting closer to the source,

which is like celebrities and culture and music and stuff. I mean, that's a really expensive way to do it, I would think, but I could see that angle a little bit. Yeah. I think title's doomed, I think, but I think it helps square and cash a lot to have Jay-Z on the board. So, yeah, I'm not going to be wrong. Okay, so I ended the show with this today, which you wouldn't have had a chance to listen to. But I kind of, my experiences over the last 24 hours, like one thing I didn't know was that, you know, the NFT, I put it up for bid.

and so if someone buys, if I right now accepted the highest bid, I'd get the equivalent of 10 bucks, right? So I make money by transferring ownership of this digital good. But I also set in there, and I wasn't aware this was possible, that every time in the future, it trades hands, I get 20% of whatever the sale is, right? In perpetuity. And so it's like, this comes down to, I know this is sort of basic stuff in terms of smart contracts and stuff, but okay, so I can imagine that as a song where, you know, if it's, you get, we're talking about micro payments here, like the thing that people have always tried to crack, but no one ever has, you could see a scenario where you create a thing where that, that, that, that, half of a half of a half of a penny

for every stream that people get, that is on some form of a blockchain. And then like you could even, you know, program it so that like, you know, everyone always says, well, I should, the, the percentage of what I pay to Spotify should go to the artists that I listen to most. So again, all of that stuff can be on the blockchain or artists selling these albums. Again, like if you listen, if you pay me $10 for it and then you give it to someone else and they buy it for $10, I still get $2 from it. Or, you know, if you pay it, if you pay $10 for it and then every time you listen to it, that's when I get the penny.

And then like if you don't listen to it a certain amount of times, the money goes back to And that's the beauty of it is, like, again, I had never had a wallet before, but the fact that this stuff can just happen, if I hit Accept right now, that $10 just shows up in my wallet, I don't have to do anything. It's just there. And like, so that's sort of frictionlessness. Now, again, we've mentioned the fees and the gas and all that stuff. But that frictionlessness is pretty fascinating to me.

Yeah, the fees are going to go away. I mean, that problem is a, it's a temporary problem. There is a company that's working on that. They're called Audias, they're cool little company. They've got some fun people who are a part of them. But, you know, I do think that the companies that try to make their moat by being great to creators don't have a history of winning. It's the companies that make their moat by having a lot of content, cutting a really good deal

for consumers. Those are the ones that win. And so, like, that's why I'm just in the immediate term, I just don't really see those models winning until like something makes like a Spotify or Apple Music like want to incorporate something like that the people who already have the like the supply of content people want because I've used Audius it's a nice app but it doesn't really have like things I'm crazy about it. You know so it's just like that's that's the problem but it is an interesting idea. It's a super interesting idea.

One note on your deal that you have where you made it on Rarable right? Yeah. I understand it like that the deal that you have where you're maintaining the 10% just so you know, I'm 95% sure I'm right about this. You log it in the NFT and the marketplaces just honor that. It's not like it's actually enforced by the smart contract. Oh, okay. I think it'll get there someday, but right now,

and people have told me that it's just hard to do that for various reasons, but everyone just honors it because it's good for everyone if they do. Nobody wants to piss off the creators. And so if the deal's in there, they do it. But I don't, but like if, if like I bought the podcast and then I just sold it to my buddy directly. Right. It wouldn't automatically put the $2 into my account, right? Yeah, exactly.

I might not even notice that thing was there. The marketplaces will notice it because they're wired to notice it, but we wouldn't necessarily notice it, you know. Okay. We'll see, Brady. This is why we had you on to learn about these things. So thank you, sir, as always, for educating me and educating the audience. Oh, oh, what do you want to, people should look you up where and read your stuff where and follow you where? Basically everything's on Coin Desk.

That's the main thing. Follow me on Coin Desk. I'm on Twitter at Brady Dale. That's not bad. But yeah, just come to CoinDesk and a lot of other great writers covering all kinds of good stuff. But if you want to follow stuff about NFTs, I'll probably be the one that's doing it. And, yeah, I would love to see people reading it and hit me up if they have questions.