In 2010, a mutual friend of ours actually told me about bitcoin for the first time. I'd heard about it before but this was the first time somebody said to me, "You need to go and check this thing out". So I did. I can't say I understood it immediately, but I was fascinated by the idea and I started engaging with it.

I think there's a lot of misunderstanding around the word blockchain. If you look at Satoshi Nakamoto's original whitepaper on bitcoin, which probably needs little introduction now, it doesn't mention the word blockchain once. That word didn't exist when Satoshi Nakamoto wrote the white paper. Unfortunately, it's become jargon that's been misused by management consultants and enterprise software companies that are trying to sell the narrative that bitcoin isn't important but blockchain is.

Ethereum really enabled so much in the crypto world. Vitalik Buterin, Charles Hoskinson and the other founders of Ethereum really imagined an application of the blockchain technology that went beyond what bitcoin was trying to achieve with a hard money asset. Based on the work done in Etherium and the fact that there's such good tooling and a solid programming language and solidity, Ethereum has paved the way for decentralised finance or DeFi. 

NFTs are an almost obvious thing to use blockchain and cryptocurrency technology for - they've been around for years. So, NFT stands for non-fungible token. It's basically a digital asset that represents ownership of something unique. 

Because, for the first time, I could, for example, prove the provenance of a piece of art in a way that's immutable and cryptographically secure. So if you look at the traditional art world, provenance is a difficult thing to establish. There's a lot of fraudulent activity. How do I know this painting is the original?

The same thing that blows my mind about NFTs is what blows my mind in cryptocurrencies and digital assets more broadly which is that we've taken a way of transacting peer-to-peer without trusted third parties, to lend a line from the original Bitcoin whitepaper. This is kind of how we used to transact in ancient tribal societies, but that was a transactional regime that couldn't scale. We needed central banks and banks and authorities to help us scale economies and society. But what cryptocurrency gives us, for the first time, is a way of transacting peer-to-peer again in that ancient way but at scale. And that, to me, is a massive idea. It also almost forces things to be more inclusive. It forces things to be fairer, and it's precipitated the most profound transfer of wealth in human history.

It's actually remarkably simple, especially in the case of digital art. So you've got a JPEG that you've taken. No geniuses, it's not the original. The original is sitting on the sensor of the digital camera, but an artist has produced this digital work. You can then go to a platform like OpenSea that makes it incredibly simple to upload the file onto the Interplanetary File System or IPFS so that it's stored immutably online.

Then you mint an NFT or a range of NFTs - you might say, "I'm doing a print of ten" or, "I'm minting ten NFTs for this particular artwork" or "I'm making it unique and doing only one". You can decide whether or not you want to get paid royalties every time it's resold, which is fantastic.

There are some very interesting projects that are worth talking about. A friend of mine is doing a music project where he's using SuperCollider, which is a programming language for sound. He's training an AI to write music. So, the music is being generated by an AI algorithm and it's then minting the music as NFTs and the community are voting for their favourite songs or pieces of songs by buying those NFTs. Then this algorithm is learning what kind of music is most popular and writing new music.

The biggest security threat in any use of cryptocurrency, and this is true for NFTs as well, is that somebody compromises your private keys. Either because you don't have them, they are with the central authority and that gets hacked or because somebody has managed to steal your mnemonics or you've left them somewhere or done something stupid. So that's always the biggest risk.

A lot about the way the art world operates now has changed. Value is subjective and art has always been crazy. It's been an expression of humanity itself - good, bad, ridiculous, absurd. And all of that is being manifest now in the NFT world. But NFTs certainly aren't causing a problem that wasn't there before. They're solving a lot of problems that were there before but they're not creating new ones.