Instead of checking out the hottest assets or the latest Elon Musk price pump, the news this week is about the latest trend in crypto. It’s cool to talk about how well Bitcoin is doing and which new company has put BTC on their balance sheet, but we think it’s also important to cover how real people and some forward thinking companies are using crypto.
If you’ve followed the latest crypto trends, you’ve probably heard of NFTs, Non-Fungible Tokens. These are types of tokens on the Ethereum network that have a limited supply. For example, you could have a NFT trading card with 10 numbered tokens. The trading cards are valuable because only 10 of them can ever exist. Alternately, 10,000 trading cards, or even just 1.
The point of an NFT isn’t necessarily to have a certain number of items, the point is that there is a fixed amount and whatever number is chosen at the beginning, there can never be any more.
NFTs can represent all sorts of cool items, from real estate to trading cards to digital art. An NFT token could even represent music rights to a song or a Tweet. The possibilities are endless and NFTs are starting to become quite popular.
The most visible example of this is in the world of Art, even the prestigious auction house Christies is getting in on the movement with a piece from the famous artist Beeple that is currently bidding at $3.5 million. Banksy, another famous artist, turned his artwork “Morons” into an NFT and sold it for $100,000, then burned the original.
The total market cap of the NFT sector is just over $4 billion. That’s pretty significant considering that this genre hardly existed forty-eight months ago.
Getting into the nitty gritty details of the who and what of NFT’s is beyond what we can do on this program. What we will talk about though is the Potential of NFTs. This is what I think is one of the most exciting aspects of this new technology, and that is, it’s returning power to the content creators themselves. Digital artists, musicians, filmmakers, novelists, journalists and content creators of all sorts are going to be able to use NFTs and other smart contract based technologies to get paid directly for their work.
YouTube disrupted the record labels and now decentralized finance is going to disrupt YouTube and other traditional publishing platforms. To be honest though, we’re still not sure exactly how this new blockchain economy is going to work. It’s really like the late 1990s with the internet. Those who understood the technology recognized that the internet was going to change everything, but it was hard to predict exactly how it would all play out.
Crypto builders are creating new digital economies that are faster, more efficient, more empowering, and more inclusive than what we have now. If you’re already here today that’s pretty cool. You’re getting involved at the ground level and everything is just going to get bigger and better in the years to come.
One of the most common criticisms of Bitcoin is that you can’t buy anything with it. Honestly, it’s a fair point. BTC is definitely not very good for small purchases. The fees are too high and the wait time is too long. However, what about spending Bitcoin on a shiny new car? If you’re buying a car it doesn’t matter if you spend $5 on a transaction and have to wait an hour. It’s still easier than sending a bank transfer or delivering a paper check from the bank.
That’s why we think it’s pretty cool that HGreg, a dealership with 30 locations throughout North America, is going to start accepting Bitcoin as a payment method. That’s not the end of the story either. HGreg is planning to keep a portion of all the BTC that they receive on their balance sheet.
What can you buy with your Bitcoin? Just about any kind of car you want. HGreg sells everything from the proverbial Lamborghini right down to the used Toyota. If Bitcoin goes as high as some people are predicting, 1 BTC will be enough to get you a mint condition Porsch 911.
Speaking of buying stuff with your crypto, the Dallas Mavericks are going to accept DOGE coin! The meme-based cryptocurrency has been getting a lot of attention since Elon Musk started pumping it a few weeks ago and Mavs fans can now buy sports gear and tickets with their DOGE.
There are more examples of how to use your crypto to purchase everyday things such as groceries from whole foods on Purse.io to booking your vacation on Travala.com. So there you go, next time someone tells you that you can’t buy anything with crypto you can show them the 2 Bitcoin Lamborghini that you’ve got your eye on.
It’s truly an exciting time to be involved with crypto since we’re witnessing the very first stages of DLT technology changing the world. We hope you had a great week and have some good plans for the weekend. Spring is just around the corner and even though BTC is taking a break, the pauses in big bull markets don’t tend to last long.
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