NFTs nonetheless must mature to the purpose the place whenever you say NFT, individuals don’t take into consideration frothy overpriced JPG photos, however as a substitute a digital asset that represents one thing tangible. Writing might be not thrilling sufficient to offer that change, however it’s enjoyable to consider what could possibly be finished, as I unpack under.
However one thing that has but to be popularised is NFTs for the phrases individuals have written on a web page. Stephen King mentioned that writing is the purest type of artwork—you are attempting to seize ideas in your head and externalise them in prose earlier than they vanish again into the neural pathways from wherever they got here, doubtlessly gone endlessly. This leads me to query why anybody isn’t already doing this.
Textual content within the written kind might properly lend itself to NFTs of:
articles
poems
quick tales
novels
concepts
There’s already an extremely buoyant marketplace for first editions of books, so absolutely there are collectors who could be keen on proudly owning the primary manuscript of books by well-established authors.
Much more powerfully, when somebody has what they imagine to be a breakthrough or progressive thought, why not create an NFT of this thought on the web page? In some respects that is analogous to making a commerce mark or patent, however with out the necessity to work with a 3rd celebration. Somebody can merely seize their thought, create an NFT of it, after which forevermore show that they had been the primary individual to seize the thought.
Nonetheless, my view is that we are able to go each greater and easier—we want an NFT format that helps any enter textual content file, it could possibly be a small tweet-length piece, a brief story or perhaps a novel. Like how with the present crop of artwork NFTs, the asset in query is a picture file, for textual content, the asset in query ought to be a textual content file.
Moving into the specifics—how do you decide on a format for the supply textual content of those NFTs? If we need to hold as near the supply as doable—the typewriter equal, and the supply work is simply phrases, I’d argue that is Markdown.
The good factor about Markdown is that, in contrast to plain textual content, it supplies simply sufficient formatting to satisfy the wants of most writers—daring and italic emphasis, footnotes, headings, numbered and unnumbered lists.
So that is all good in concept, however art-based NFTs are visible and other people can present their possession, this doesn’t work with a textual content file. Moreover, what if they’ve photos, photos or charts that must be represented? These are all legitimate issues.
PDF is an open format that could possibly be used, nevertheless, like with visible content material, a number of toolchains can be utilized to generate them, every producing a barely totally different digital doc. Whereas phrases in a markdown file will be thought-about the knowledge coming straight from the writer of their rawest kind (thankfully with out all the typos).
No matter which format is used, creating NFTs of this work will be thought-about a type of mental property registration utilizing the blockchain. When somebody creates a brand new work in any format and generates an NFT of it, they’ve a approach through which they’ll show they had been the unique individual to register that IP, which for artistic people is a method to attribute concepts formally to themselves.
However we mustn’t lose sight of the truth that concepts are only one a part of the broader strategy of innovation, how individuals select to execute these concepts is what turns them right into a actuality, however at the very least you will be clear on the place they initially got here from.
