By Jade Kaukau
Digital Social Director
Kia ora e hoa, it’s time for another Aunty Digi yarn!
The world of Social and Digital is like a Gemini, it has a dark side and a light side. Despite its duality, it can bring so much joy and weirdness.
On that note, grab your coffee, wine, or treat because this time around we are getting into the world of crytpo and NFTs as well as some weird, cool news from the interweb.
To kick things off, we’re jumping straight into the nitty gritty with a bit of crypto chat.
NFT
NFT stands for non-fungible token, which means that it is unique and cannot be replaced with something else. For example, one Bitcoin is fungible - trade one for another Bitcoin, and you’ll have the same thing. A one-of-a-kind piece of art is non-fungible, a human is non-fungible – you can’t trade the Mona Lisa for a Monet or Lady Gaga for Madonna because they’re two different things.
Most NFTs are part of the Ethereum Blockchain and can be any digital asset, like drawings, videos, GIFs or music. They can be bought and sold just like physical assets and are held in digital wallets which any person can have in an unlimited amount.
It’s commonly used to sell digital art, also referred to as crypto art, but people sell tweets and even memes.
Crypto
The shortened version of Cryptocurrency, it’s a digital or virtual currency that can be used to buy goods and services. It’s secured by cryptography making it nearly impossible to counterfeit or double-spend. The first and most well-known crypto currency is Bitcoin which launched in 2009, since then competitors like Ethereum and Dogecoin have popped up.
Basically, the internet created its own currency to trade online, outside of the usual banking approach which is both controversial and disruptive. I highly recommend looking into it when you can, because it will become more mainstream and will become part of online financial literacy.
Blockchain
This is a digital ledger, a system of recording information that makes it difficult or impossible to tamper with. It's a ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems on the blockchain. Each block in the chain contains several transactions, and every time a new one occurs, a record of that transaction is added to every participant’s ledger. The decentralised database managed by multiple participants is known as Distributed Ledger Technology or DLT.
This means that if anyone changed one block in one chain it would set off alarms and be obvious it was tampered with. If you wanted to hack a blockchain system, you’d need to change every block in the chain, across all the distributed versions of the chain.
On to the latest on the wild web and digital landscape:
Exhibit A & B:
These are the safe for work versions.
Feel free to send us an īmerā anytime for a cheeky chat about all things digi social.
See you all in 2022 for another round!
Aunty Digi