It's that simple. NFT's are the birth certificate of your digital creations. I'll go into more detail after we cover the technical basics.
NFT stands for "Non-Fungible Token". Non-fungible means it can't be exchanged for another item because it is unique, just as, one work of art, like Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" is not equal to da Vinci's "Mona Lisa', both have unique properties. Fungible tokens on the other hand can be exchanged for one-another, for example every US dollar is equal to every other US dollar. So now let's talk about the Token part of NFT's.
True NFT's are tokens (coded smart contracts) that live on a decentralized blockchain and represent ownership of unique items in the digital world. Because the blockchain is decentralized, NFT's are immutable, meaning unhackable. This is valuable because identifying the owner/creator of a digital file is problematic, because digital files can be copied and distributed with ease. Think about it like this; how can you prove who the original creator is, when identical copies of the file abound?
NFT's to the rescue! Imagine that you created an original *poem, *joke, *short story, *quote, work of art, etc., and it's on your computer as a digital file. You can mint it as an NFT (i.e. Iconic Quotes, Jokes, & Media). The NFT that represents your art, contains information about it, such as the author, the time and date of creation, a token name, and a symbol. This token is then stored onto a decentralized blockchain (if it's the real deal), and you the creator, become the owner of that very unique NFT.
Also, because NFTs store historical ownership data, they can be traced back to the original creator.
It's important to note that the artwork itself, is not stored within the NFT, or the blockchain, (the gas price would be crazy) so only its identifying attributes are, such as the hash key of the file, a token name, symbol, author, date/time, and some NFT apps (i.e., Iconic Quotes, Jokes, & Media) also include a link to your file hosted to IPSF.
Now, here's where NFT's become strange. When you buy an NFT, it only represents a creative work, again, it's the birth certificate, you don't get a physical copy of it. The NFT only represents ownership, and that is recorded on a blockchain so no one can tamper with it. Some say that NFT's give you digital bragging rights, and to make it even stranger, while the token owner owns the original artwork, the creator of the NFT retains the copyright and the reproduction rights, so an artist can sell his original art as an NFT, but he can still sell prints, unless he chooses to convey those rights as part of the sale.
Now, if selling your NFT's is all you care about, then there are better options for minting your NFT's (however, at a much greater cost). The great news is that Iconic99s is developing a new gateway to selling your NFT's directly on the Ethereum blockchain markets. This is big, but in the meantime, there's no better, cheaper way to secure/protect your creativity than to use the Iconic99s app for quotes, poems, stories, etc...
On a green note: Oasis Rose Protocol vs Ethereum, is 10,000 times greener, 1000 times cheaper, and 100 times faster, which is why Nifty Quotes in on Oasis Rose, and that said, the Nifty markets and wallets will be the game changer to this long standing Ethereum problem.
