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Are N.F.T.s All Scams?
Podcast

Are N.F.T.s All Scams?

Stephen J. Dubner
Freakonomics Radio, 2022
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Recommendation

If you’re like a lot of people, the mere mention of NFTs makes you roll your eyes. It’s a wildly speculative market, where people are tossing around soul-crushing amounts of money because…why? Celebrity endorsements? Amusing digital artwork featuring apes? So why are so many smart people so enthusiastic about the potential of blockchain? This episode of the Freakonomics podcast may give you a better understanding.

Summary

Vitalik Buterin is the founder of the Ethereum Project, a multifunctional blockchain system.

Blockchain has been described as a distributed digital ledger, but Vitalik Buterin has his own definition: Blockchains, he says, are “a form of money, but they’re not just a form of money. Blockchains have some properties of things like nation-states, courts and even religions.”

Buterin realized “the horrors centralized services can bring” when he was in high school and the centralized authority behind the game World of Warcraft made changes to his favorite character. He went on to study computer science and relevant mathematics during a brief stint at the University of Waterloo before he dropped out and joined the Mastercoin project. Eventually, he saw the limitations of Mastercoin, and went on to start his own blockchain project, which he called Ethereum. Ether, Ethereum’s tokens, are “fully programmable.”

The bitcoin blockchain is essentially a database of who owns bitcoin; Ethereum could be described as a “rich design space,” and Ether as “programmable money.”

Ethereum is the second most valuable cryptocurrency, trailing only bitcoin...

About the Podcast

The Freakonomics podcast is created and hosted by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner, based on their book of the same name. Freakonomics radio has expanded to include the podcasts No Stupid Questions; Freakonomics, MD; and People I (Mostly) Admire.

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