Let’s face it, when the average person hears “NFTs,” they think of pixelated apes being sold for ridiculous amounts of money. The press only covered the artistic side of things. While that’s an amazing part of the story, that’s only a small part of a much bigger and more transformative puzzle. Dismissing NFTs as mere digital art is like dismissing the internet as just email. You're missing the forest for the trees.
The real promise of NFTs isn’t that they exist as digital proof of ownership, it’s that they can redefine ownership digitally. This isn’t a pie-in-the-sky idea for tech bros. Seize the initiative with your online presence! Together, we can open the doors to an amazing new era of innovation that we can barely begin to conceive today. For too long, we have leased our digital selves from opaque, corporate entities. We’ve surrendered our accomplishments and our very existence to them. NFTs offer a way out.
Own Your Identity, Not Rent It
Picture a society where you own your online identity, instead of it being in the hands of Facebook, Google, or other unknown entities. We think that’s the promise of decentralized identity with NFTs.
At the moment, your online persona is spread out over a million different services. Every single one of them contains a shard of you, and they can all cut off your access whenever they feel like it. Imagine the stress of being banned from a service you rely on daily. One misspelled word and poof, decades of networking, writing, and camaraderie vaporize in an instant.
NFTs offer a solution. If you represent your identity as an NFT, then you’ve got a self-sovereign identity that you yourself both own and control. This NFT can now store verifiable credentials – picture this as a digital passport that has verified, tamper-proof information about you. What those credentials look like might surprise you. They can be things like your driver’s license, your professional certifications, or even your membership in an online community.
Protect your personal information from being shared with every website and app. Simply display your NFT to allow access exclusively to what they really want. No longer worrying about data breaches that leave your personal information at the mercy of hackers. This is a huge deal.
The unexpected connection here? Consider, for example, the advent of the personal computer. Prior to the advent of personal computing, no computing power existed outside of highly centralized mainframes owned and operated by large corporations. The PC revolution ended IBM’s monopoly on computing, democratizing that power and putting it directly in the hands of everyday individuals. Decentralized identity using NFTs are the next phase in that revolution allowing for more democratized digital ownership.
Verifiable Credentials, Real-World Impact
Say goodbye to physical diplomas collecting dust in a drawer. Now picture your academic degrees, professional licenses, and certifications living as NFTs on a blockchain. That's the power of verifiable credentials.
This goes beyond the mere value of convenience and also involves public trust and government efficiency. The ability for employers to instantly verify your credentials without having to call universities or licensing boards is attractive to employers. No more faked resumes or inflated qualifications. This helps curtail identity fraud and speeds up the hiring process.
Students can also get an advantage. They can no longer hide behind their lack of easily demonstrable accomplishments, providing the public with a much more transparent and trustworthy picture of their skills and knowledge. It's about unlocking access. Imagine one of these people in a developing country receiving that certification online. They can immediately demonstrate their skills and readiness to any employer around the globe, all while bypassing the need for established institutions or intermediaries. NFTs can democratize access to opportunity.
What about the risks? One of the more significant challenges around them is assuring and upholding the security and integrity of these credentials. We’ll need very strong technical standards and protocols to support these kind of measures against forgery, enforcing that only the right issuing, trusted institutions can create verifiable credentials. We need to recognize the worries about privacy and data security.
Community Governance Rewritten By NFTs
Forget top-down decision-making. Imagine communities collectively managing digital assets and making decisions about their future through DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) powered by NFTs.
It’s very common to use NFTs to represent membership in a DAO. Simply by holding one of their specific NFTs, this gives you voting rights and gives you a seat at the table on how the community grows and thrives. This new technology can be applied to everything from digital art collections to virtual land ownership to decentralized online communities.
At the moment, most online communities are overseen by a single dictator or tiny cabal of moderators. This creates an environment ripe for censorship, bias, and lack of transparency. DAOs provide a more democratic and transparent alternative.
Now picture a global community of artists and collectors that’s using a DAO to collectively curate and govern a digital art museum. NFT holders jointly vote on which artworks to buy, how to display them and how to distribute the profits. This significantly increases the power artists have to control their own brand and image, while putting collectors at the center of the curation process.
DAOs are not without their challenges. Developing and administrating them can be daunting. They need a deep commitment to participation from community members. There are legal and regulatory ambiguities related to DAOs.
NFTs aren't a passing fad. They’re a radical change in the way we conceive of ownership in the digital realm. They’re not just about increasing government efficiency. They’re at core about empowering citizens, fostering innovation, creating a more open, transparent, and equitable digital society.
Yes, there are risks and challenges. The upside is too big to pass up. To do that, we have to accept a culture of experimentation, encourage innovation, and create the future of digital ownership, one NFT at a time.
Yes, there are risks and challenges. But the potential rewards are too great to ignore. We need to embrace experimentation, foster innovation, and build the future of digital ownership, one NFT at a time.
