How To Responsibly Own An NFT w/ Will Lucas

show Squid Games. There was this coin, this token that was put out based on that whole theme that when a bunch of people invested in that particular token, the people who built that project ran off with the money. And again, in the world of decentralized cryptocurrency assets and etcetera, there's nobody to screen to when you get scammed. If you got scammed, you got scammed. Pro her Ownership and Care of an n f T. Like I thought that title was pretty sweet. So let's talk about this today.

This episode is gonna be a little bit more technical than we're used to when we're having these conversations on this particular podcast, and so I thought it was necessary to have this conversation because we're talking more and more about n f T s and in order to be like really good at this, Like it's one thing to

know the terminology. It's one thing to understand what the n f T is, but it is another thing to understand how you can get got when you talk about n f T s. How to understand the value of an n f T And like what does it mean to like have a digital asset that is not sitting like on a hard drive, like sitting in front of you right and so I have like this lacy um rugged hard drive. It's like a to tear to terror body drive sitting right in front of me right now.

And this little to terror body drive. You know you've seen these. Some of you guys have these little orange or they're they're silver drives where they have orange like bubble stuff around him. And what we are used to is having like a JPEG or like the jpeg like an image or a word document or an MP three file stored on a drive like this or like a little thumb drive or maybe we're a little bit more sophisticated and we're used to storing those sorts of files

on like Google drive or on drop box. So today we're gonna talk about storing an n f T, what the implications are of how an n f T is stored, and why you want to know how an n f T is stored? And can you get got We talked about this on an episode ago talking about the rug pool. We're gonna talk about that today. And so by the end of this episode today you will be a little bit more equipped to own an NFL team and to

keep your ENMT safe from the boogeyman. This episode may like span several episodes because then it is a real, really important conversation. But today we're gonna talk about three things. We're gonna talk about the mid two thousand's that will make since in a second. We're gonna talk about file coining, which is a token, and we're gonna talk about I p f S into planetary file system. Those sound like way out of here. If you're non technical, don't get scared.

Don't be scared. Uh, this episode is not meant for like, this is not meant for computer scientists. It will make sense in the second I promise you if you just stick with me. So a lot of you guys are more aware or have experience with distributed decentralized file storage than you might realize. And so actually before I get

that far, I kind of jump ahead of myself. And so it is important to understand with an n f T, what you don't want is an n f T to be stored on like blue host or like even a WS or drop box, which an n f T could be stored on those those file systems, those centralized servers, they could be stored there. You don't want that. In this episode, you're gonna understand why you don't want that.

What you want is an immutable, permanent, forever system that stores your digital asset and you never have to worry about if you're gonna get rug pulled if your thing that you paid good money for money that you've earned, money that is rightfully yours. You earned this dollar, and you spent this dollar on a digital asset. You want to be sure that the asset is gonna be there

forever in the day because it's a part. The value of an n f T is like the age of the thing, and so it's gonna be really, really, really amazingly cool in fifteen years. Let's say, like a Fortnite skin was an n f T, and they put out a Lebron James or a Spider Man n f T as the Fortnite skin in one and I bought it in one and there was only ten thousand of them. That's all they produced. If you got it, you got it.

If you didn't, you missed out. And then now the year is and I have that Spider Man, that Lebron James skin on Fortnite. That's it's still a thing in Fortnite is but it's this big, you know, metaverse. And I have a skin from back in twe that was produced. That's that's probably gonna have some value because there's no more. You can't go back in times and say I have a Lebron James skin on Fortnite and fake it. Because the blockchain is immutable, you can't change it. You can't

fake it their provenance. There is a chain of custody of this particular n f T, of this particular skin that can you anybody, anybody in the world can go and see this forty plus character address that says where this n f T came from. Every n f T has an address on the block chain that anybody can look at and see the record of the chain of custody and tell that it was a legitimate Fortnite created Spider Man skin. Everybody can see it. I can't fake it.

So it's important to remember that there is an n f T is like a line of code that rev for inces an asset. And so if you've ever saved a jpeg, let's say you took a picture on your your phone. I have an iPhone UM whatever the newest one is is the max I have that. It was like a thirteen fourteen fifteen. I don't even know with whatever the big the newest iPhone is. I have this iPhone. I'll take a picture. I air dropped this picture to

the desktop of my MacBook Pro. It's gonna give me if I write click on it, I can get info and it'll tell me a whole bunch of stuff about that picture. It'll say where the picture was taken, which kind of camera the picture was taken with, where the picture was taken, It'll tell me the name of the file that is actually the picture. So let's say it's I m G nine zero nine one dot jpeg or whatever your photo gives you. You don't really pick that,

it just gives it to you. All of those things are called metadata, and so within n f T, the n f T is the smart contract. It is all the things that point to that specific set of metadata and the rules associated with it. So we can also add in of evan just the things we just talked about, the where the photo, this, where the photo was taking, the file name of that photo, the camera settings that photo had. It also associates who owns this thing. So

there's a chain of custody. So from the beginning of it being minted to the present day owner, there will be a record of provenance, a chain of custody which says these are the journeys, these are the travails this particular n f T has taken it. It was owned by this person, it was owned by that person, It was on by this person, It was sold on these dates, and it is currently owned by this person who bought

it on this particular date. All right, So I'm way off topic because this is so fun for me, because I could do this all day. So this is so fun for me. So let's talk about the the mid two thousands, as I promised we would. If you remember, if you are in an eighties baby, your nineties, baby, you will remember bit torrent. So bit torn is where I probably stole seven oh two's album, you know, or I probably stole an album by Donnell Jones, or like you know, I don't know the Chronic two thousand one.

It was something like that, isn't is. It was a software that you could download in in order to like steal the album that you wanted, you had to download this piece of software called bit torn and from all over the world called cedars. There were these people who had the album on their computer and you could download it for free. It was effectively like a pirrating piece of software where you could download movies, you can download you know, music, you can download files, et cetera. Center

And so we were bootlegging using bit torrent. And so there are two sides of the coin on bit torrent.

There were the cedars. They were the people who had pieces, you know, these were files, these were you know, if if you were a part of the Cedar network, the swarm of bit torrent users, you were a person who had the album on your computer that was connected to this bit torrent system and you were sharing inside of the bit torrent network that particular file with anybody else who joined the swarm, and so if I was a person who just joined the swarm and I wanted the

seven oh two album, I could join and plug in and say, Okay, all of you sedters, I'm a leacher, give me the seven oh two album. And so I would wait until all of the files from all these ten thousand computers in the world gave me all the files, all the pieces of the files that I needed in order to when it was fully downloaded, I can listen

to the album. And if I did not turn off bit Torrent after the whole file was downloaded, after I got all twelve fourteen MP three's which made up the album, I don't even know because I don't know how many songs on the album, but they were all MP three's individually. If I did not turn it off, I automatically became a seater instead of a leacher. A leacher pulls the

file down. A seeder is somebody who's part of the network that gives the file to other people who are trying to get it, and so the blockchain effectively works this same way. There are people out there in the world who are on what is called a decentralized storage network. And this is a network that has you know, in number of users. And I'm I told you this was like it's gonna dip into the water of computer scientists. But I'm gonna stay out of it. I'm not gonna

put my whole foot in. Let's say there is you know, a hundred or a thousand, or ten thousand or a million computers out there in the world ran by people who want to contribute to the blockchain. They will say, okay, we want to be a part of this decentralized storage network, which means that remember I told you about the little USB thumb drive, little stick that I brought with me. I plugged into the back of your computer, and I took a dock that was on that little thumb drive

and I put it onto your computer. That decentralized file network is the opposite of that, because on that network, I have to file the entire dock, the entire word doc on my thumb drive. But on the decentralized file network, in this respect we're gonna talk about file coin, the entire dock is stored on a thousand computers in the world, ten thousand computers in the world. A hundred thousand computers in the world, all who make up a piece of

the blockchain. They are all using their computational power to both host and store this document. So this same file, this one word document, is broken into pieces, a million, a thousand, a hundred pieces and stored on all of these computers. And in order for me to get one complete download of that word document, all of these devices have to give me their piece that they are storing. So if I google decentralized storage, this is the response that I get. I don't know what you get, but

this is what I get. It's it says the centralized storage is defined as control old by several local offices or authorities rather than by one single one. And so again, that Lacy drive, the one that I love. I love my Lacey drives to terror bytes. I can drop it in this generally okay solid state, but I take that Lacey drive. If I lose that Lacey drive, my document, my jpeg, my MP three is gone, is out of here.

But if it's on a decentralized server, it's on a decentralized storage network, It's still out there in the world because it's not just stored on one local authority. It's not just stored on one single drive. It's so it's stored on a hundred a thousand, ten thousand drives around

the world. So if you're gonna own it n f T, what you want is your asset, your digital asset, to not be stored on somebody's Lacey drive, to not be stored on somebody's server in their basement, to not be stored on somebody's blue host or or a WUS account. Because if it's stored on their a w S account, let's say they don't pay the bill to a WS, guess what happens to your n f T. Because your n f T, again is just a reference to a particular file, but the file has to be stored somewhere. Somewhere.

In the n f T smart contract, there is a reference to a file name that says something like I m G nine O nine to to do one to dot jpeg. But let's say where's the j peg store. It has to be stored somewhere. So what you want is your n f T to be stored somewhere where Billy is not hosting this thing on his own and if he forgets to pay the bill it goes away.

What you want is for a hundred people or thousand people, ten thousand people to all have copies and they all you know, it's it's very unlikely that ten thousand, a hundred thousand everybody's computer is gonna go down, but it's a lot more likely if one person in Wisconsin, their computer may go down, and then your n f T is gone. That's why it's so important to do your research and find out who's behind the building of this particular n f T project. And so let's talk about

two of the most common UM platforms. I don't even want to call platforms. Let's call them decentralized platforms that n f T s gets stored on. And these things have value in and of themselves. And so file coin is one. There are others UM and I'm only gonna talk about two on today's episode. But file coin it describes itself as a decentralized storage network to store humanity's most important information, your n f T. If you spent

a dollar on it, it's important to you. So what you want is for that n f T to never go away. You know, God forbid, somebody sticks a huge magnet next to my Lacey drive, which disappears all the files that are on my Lacey drive. With with file coin, it's kind of like the same thing. There is no magnet that exists, well unless like a sonic boom, there is no magnet that exists that can just go wipe out the record of my n f T from all the computers in the world that are story is so

with file coin, it is a decentralized storage network. It's data UM in this case, your data that is stored on multiple computers or servers which are hosted you know, like by people like or companies that participate in the blockchain. So these are people all over the world who participate in the activity of storing you know, a copy, a record, a piece of your particular digital asset, and they get

paid to do so. And so I'm only going to dig into this for like a really really really brief moment, because this is not the episodes go into how foul coin um participants are incentivized, but just to give you a really really quick taste, foul coin works because there are people around the world who want to own, who want to earn i should say, cryptocurrency, and in this particular case, f I L like file coin, the file coin token, and so if I want to earn that

particular token or you know, alternatively, you know, you can think of like a bitcoin or an ethereum or light coin or a doge coin or et cetera. In this particular case, I earned the f I L A the file coin token for participating in the activity of storing your digital asset. And so it's ap peer to peer network, you know, so if I drop out of the network, there's still you know, thousands of other computers in the

world who are storing that particularly digital asset. And so using file coin, I pay to store my files on that network. And if I'm storing other people's files on my particular portion of the whole chain, I'm getting paid to do so. So there are incentives involved. And so I'm gonna say this particular part and probably the most basic terms I can think of it. And you know, people who are like super you know, excellent at this will say, what you missed a part, But this is

like the most basic way I can explain it. Let's say you bought a computer that has two terabytes worth of storage on it, but you only work in an office and your documents are like eight kb, eight killer bytes per document, and you've got a hundred of them. So now you have eight hundred kilobytes worth of computer space. You know, computer computational power used to store information. But your computers to terabytes big, you like, your storage capacity

is to terabytes, right, you're not using any of that. Basically, you don't even scratch it in the surface of what you could store on that computer, what you could do because you have all this wasted space. It's just like like Airbnb and like Uber in a way. In this way this makes it in a second, I'll give it more directly in a second. But let's say you've got all these terabytes, You've got all these gigabytes that are

free on your computer that you're not using. It's wasted space. Effectively, you could put those that that wasted space up on the file coin network and say, you know, instead of just having all these extra terror bytes sitting here taking up space on my device, I'm gonna put them use and I'm gonna allow other people to nap in my my hard drive. It's just like Airbnb and Uber in that way, you have this extra bedroom in your house.

It's the garage, the room above the garage. You've got this basement that you were not monetizing, but you've got you know, three bedrooms and two people lived there, and you've got this extra room that you're saying, Yo, like, if if I could, you know, house somebody for the night, I can make a hundred dollars. So instead of letting that room just sit there and chill, let me put it up on Airbnb and let me get people to come sleep in this room. I don't know them, but

it's you know good. I mean, Airbnb has terms of conditions, so I want to trust Airbnb to you know, like moderate who's coming in my bedroom? So I'm off on attention. But so it works effectively to say. Way, so you've got all these extra terra bytes, all these extra gigabytes on your device, and you're saying, instead of letting those things sit idly, all that space sit idly, let me put it up and allow other people who don't have space or who need space on the blockchain to use

space on my device. So file coin is a coin that you can invest in if if you believe that the future of storage of digital assets looks like decentralized UM means to do so you can invest in technology like file coin, and there are others. I want to be clear, there are others that you can invest in that says, you know what, I'm going to pick a winner. I'm gonna pick a success story in the arena of decentralized storage, and file coin is one of them, one

of the top two. The other is the Interplanetary File System I p f S and and honestly, for me, like if if an n f T is not hosted, served up on either of these two, like if it's not served up on a decentralized platform, I'm not buying it. I'm not buying n f t s that are not stored on some sort of decentralized platform not doing it

because they could go away. You get RUG pulled. You can get RUG pulled, I'm not saying you will, but you can't get RUG pulled a whole lot more likely because there's an n f T, there's a digital asset being stored on a device, a piece of hardware that could go away at any time. That's just not smart. And so I'm doing my best to not get like super super duper deep in the weeds here and get

like super technical. But these services are also like complimentary, so like foul coin, you know, is not mutually exclusive. You have to use just one of them, like foul coin is like for more like long term like let's say you have a folder of like your financials for like the past two or three years, like you might

want to store those and like a foul coin. But if you've got a digital asset, like in a piece of art that you want to be able to move and transact quickly quickly, you might want to store that on something like the I p f S, which you know is designed for you know speed, for quick retrieval and for like for getting it out there. This distribution. It's not it's not stored like file corn like like foul coin is for storage, I p FS is for distribution.

Let's get it out there into the world. So it's important when you go to purchase in n f T or you're going to mint inn n f T, you know how where where that n f T is stored, and how you're going to store that n f T. And the most important, you know, the most long term valuable methods of storing it is to decentralize this storage of said n f T, and so if I'm gonna buy an n f T and and we've been using open c as um, you know, one of the most common ones we talked about it at least in this

podcast is like the Amazon of n f T marketplaces. You want to be sure if you look under the metadata on open sea that it does not say centralized or something like editable, because that means it is not likely stored on a decentralized server, and you open yourself up for um the opportunity for not to be available

in the long run. It that says just goes away because the server that it was stores on stored on no longer exists, or somebody didn't pay the bill, or you know, it's more likely to be hacked if it

is stored on a centralized server. What you want is it to say something more like frozen, because that means that it is then stored on a decentralized storage platform like a file coin or like I p f S and so it's it is important to know, and I'm at the risk of getting super duper technical, it is important to know that file coin was built using the open source technology of i p f S into planetary

file system. But with an open source purely you know software you like, you can't make money using that because it's open source, is free for everybody. But so improvements and usability and user interface, etcetera. Like all that is built in order to monetize things that can be open source. So file coin is one of those things. File Coin uses i p f S technology, but it is in addition to i p f S technology in order to create more value and you know, to to broaden the

usage in the mainstream. So users of file coin technology will pay I mentioned before, they will pay in order to host serve their assets, their digital assets. Those MP three's, those JPEGs, those pins, those shifts, those MP four's on you know, other people's unused computer space, the space that they are not using. Again, they have all these terabytes, they're only using a few gigs or megabytes. That's a

lot of space that's going unused. They pay for it to be stored there, to be able to be retrieved, there to be able to be distributed using it. And those miners, those people who store these things who allow it to be you know, sitting on their computers their devices, who allow their things to be accessed by other people, they get rewarded in the form of these tokens, these f I L these field tokens or file these tokens UM.

So whenever you pay for those storage services, you're paying the rate that the person who computer power or space you're using, whatever they charge, that's what you're paying for. So I hope this episode has given you a little bit more information than you already knew on the proper care and feeding of an n f t UM. It is super important that when you guys are out buying these things that you understand the integrity of that particular project.

And that is everything from where the project is being stored to who built it, the executive team, the engineering team behind it, and the longevity of that particular asset. Because these things are digital assets, and if the idea of the whole idea of a digital asset or an asset of any kind is supposed to appreciate, it is supposed to gain value over time, and where it's stored, who built it, All those things play into the potential

long term impacts of your n f t's family. Black Tech Green Money is a production of black and the Afro Tech Black Effect podcast Network and Nightheart Media and its produced by Morgan Dabon and me Little Lucas with traditional productions before by Love Beach and Marissa Lewis. Special thank you to Michael Davis Jermaine Hall. It's a car savan Jan you know, like the wine. Yes, that's his real name. Learn more about my guests and other technistuff

as the innovators at avrotech dot com. You join your Black Tech Green Money. Leave us a five star rating on iTunes. Go get your money. Peace of love,