Re:‘Disaster Girl’ has sold her popular meme as an NFT for $...
by cyphar on Friday April 30, 2021 @10:17AM
(#26993774)
Bitcoin is technically non-fungible because the transaction history of a coin is public information (I imagine if someone got ahold of Satoshi's coins they would be worth more than regular Bitcoins -- even just in terms of sentimental value). But for most practical purposes it is basically fungible.
Re:‘Disaster Girl’ has sold her popular meme as an NFT for $...
by jrochkind1 on Friday April 30, 2021 @11:41AM
(#26994892)
Sure, good clarification. And fungibility can definitely be contextual, depending on context and requirements. Fungibility is really always about "enough people think it's fungible for their purposes and have agreed to treat it as fungible, so it is."
That's not what "fungible" means. The "non-fungibility" of NFTs means that each one is a unique token, it doesn't have an "exchange rate".
Fungible means "able to replace or be replaced by another identical item; mutually interchangeable," it doesn't have any meaning about the price of making a copy/reproduction/another instance.
An ordinary quarter is "fungible", if you're paying me a quarter for a piece of candy, it doesn't matter to each of us which quarter you use, they are all interchangeable. (and that doesn't mean either of us can make a copy of a quarter for free!) An ounce of gold is fungible. A bushel of the same kind of and age of wheat is fungible if you're a commodities trader.
Every bitcoin is worth the same as every other bitcoin, at any given time they have an exchange rate with other currency. That's what "fungible" means. An NFT is just a unique token on it's own, and is not worth the same as any another NFT.
(I don't actually think the market in NFT's makes any sense, not trying to explain it as something sane, just the word "fungible").