People don’t want to run their own servers-absolutely right! Recently the founder of Signal, a popular privacy chat app wrote a piece about his exploration of the technology and its merits, which was a good sign that mainstream tech companies are getting interested in the technology behind Bitcoin and blockchains for the first time, and not just for their get-rich-quick appeal.įirstly, Moxie is by and large correct in his piece (which if you haven’t read, go ahead and do that now, I’ll wait), as he laments about the term ‘crypto’ being misappropriated by certain elements of anarchist society, making the catchy term to mean all things digital assets and blockchain token related. ‘Crypto’ used to mean ‘cryptography,’ and since that term literally means ‘secret writing’ or ‘writing in code’ it carried with it the mystery and allure to those who wanted to appeal subconsciously to everyones desire to do stuff in secret, or out of sight. Perhaps that means to avoid paying taxes, or perhaps it means buying illegal recreational drugs, whatever. But certainly the ‘crypto’ term caught on, more than even ‘Bitcoin’ (meaning ‘data based money’) thanks to the former term being more inclusive to all the other Bitcoin copycat projects which used to just be called the pejorative ‘alt coins.’ This property may be physical, or digital in nature, such as digital art, or an in-game virtual good. Since these types of tokens are only used to allow online trading of the associated property or item, it is likely not going to be classified as securities under existing laws. But that in and of itself does not mean all uses of the technology can be absolved of any shady intent. NFTs are very loosely blockchain tech used in order to associate a digital unique token to a real world piece of property. In the middle of what can only be deemed the NFT (aka ‘Web3’) craze these days, it is good to see that finally some blockchain token applications are arising which doesn’t use the token as a fund raising mechanism (see ICOs and how they will all be getting in trouble with the SEC soon).