NFTs nonetheless have to mature to the purpose the place while you say NFT, folks don’t take into consideration frothy overpriced JPG pictures, 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 might be accomplished, as I unpack beneath.
However one thing that has but to be popularised is NFTs for the phrases folks have written on a web page. Stephen King stated 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 eternally. This leads me to query why anybody isn’t already doing this.
Textual content within the written type might properly lend itself to NFTs of:
articles
poems
brief tales
novels
concepts
There may be already an extremely buoyant marketplace for first editions of books, so certainly there are collectors who can be interested by proudly owning the primary manuscript of books by well-established authors.
Much more powerfully, when somebody has what they consider to be a breakthrough or revolutionary concept, 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 occasion. Somebody can merely seize their concept, create an NFT of it, after which forevermore show that they have been the primary individual to seize the concept.
Nonetheless, my view is that we are able to go each larger and less complicated—we want an NFT format that helps any enter textual content file, it might 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 needs to be a textual content file.
Entering into the specifics—how do you choose a format for the supply textual content of those NFTs? If we wish to maintain as near the supply as attainable—the typewriter equal, and the supply work is simply phrases, I might argue that is Markdown.
The great factor about Markdown is that, not like plain textual content, it offers simply sufficient formatting to fulfill the wants of most writers—daring and italic emphasis, footnotes, headings, numbered and unnumbered lists.
So that is all good in idea, however art-based NFTs are visible and folks can present their possession, this doesn’t work with a textual content file. Moreover, what if they’ve footage, pictures or charts that should be represented? These are all legitimate concerns.
PDF is an open format that might be used, nonetheless, like with visible content material, a number of toolchains can be utilized to generate them, every producing a barely completely different digital doc. Whereas phrases in a markdown file might be thought-about the knowledge coming straight from the writer of their rawest type (fortuitously with out the entire typos).
No matter which format is used, creating NFTs of this work might 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 method wherein they will show they have been the unique individual to register that IP, which for inventive people is a option 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 technique of innovation, how folks select to execute these concepts is what turns them right into a actuality, however at the very least you might be clear on the place they initially got here from.
