Bitcoin, Blockchain, NFT, sorry, all Greek to me and I don't speak Greek.

A very good friend paid me a compliment the other day. Well, I felt it was a compliment. Something along the lines of "You know a lot about some mighty strange things. What on earth is this Bitcoin and Blockchain thing?"

I have to be honest, despite reading up on it over the past couple of years, I haven't a clue what either Bitcoin or Blockchain is all about. You might as well accuse me of being an arboriculturist who thinks a hedge-fund is something blackbirds save up all their hard-earned twigs to nest in. All a mystery of gargantuan proportions. 

To me, bitcoin and blockchain is something to enable the vaguely technical, otherwise bored and money-greedy who don't themselves like having to work for a living to take as many normal Joe Soaps for an untraceable ride as they can, to pay for their yachts, fancy cars, Rolex watches and designer clothes. Oh, and for the awful teeth that don't suit their face that they pay a fortune for in Turkey.

Now, according to the experts, the aforementioned blockchainy thing is run from and by computers in their spare time. They do all the data handling in the "cloud". Now let's be clear. The cloud is not a cloud. Neither is it in the sky. It is more than likely a mountain of redundant old Ask Jeeves Windows 3.1 computers, connected together in an Amazon-sized warehouse somewhere in Northamptonshire. What those computers are actually doing I have no idea. Apart from knowing that they deem answering Ask Jeeves questions to now be far below them, especially with all that potential blockchaining to do.

All I do know is that should you connect your PC to the blockchainy thing to "mine" cryptocurrency, the financial return for your effort is currently far lower than the cost of the electricity you use. Because everyone now wants a piece of the action. And it appears there are only so many pieces available. Where those pieces are, again, I have no idea. And who ultimately owns those pieces in the first place, well, it might as well be the late Walt Disney.

Which brings things nicely to the newest craze to hit people in the wallet, Non Fungible Tokens (NFT's to use in-speak), which sounds like a magic sponge for removing stains that you might buy on the spur of the moment from your local pound store. In simplistic form, an NFT is a bit of a digital picture (or other), or to be more efficacious, a "unique digital identifier that cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided, that is recorded in a blockchain". Yep, blockchain again. A bit like HR. Hangs around not really achieving much apart from costing we mere mortals a fortune to sustain it.

To explain from first principles. A bitcoin is 'fungible', in as much as no matter what you do with it, it remains a bitcoin, very much similar to its legal tender counterpart, the humble pound coin. A pound coin in circulation is a pound coin, unless you decide to put it in a 9ct gold mount and sell it as an item of jewellery. You might achieve several hundreds of pounds in profit, but the pound coin nevertheless remains a pound coin, worth just a pound (inflationary purchasing power aside).

A non-fungible item, on the other hand, is unique. One of a kind. Now this is where it starts becoming complicated and clouded, probably more in essence connected with some reason to part you from your money and then ensure as many people as possible, who don't actually do anything for you, feed off your money. Because in creating uniqueness and non-fungibility, NFT traders are selling any sort of digital crap, creating and assigning, what in essence is, an artificially created value to infantility that is of absolutely bugger all value. Very much in the style of the Emperor's new clothes. Except, it was only the Emperor back then who was making a total fool of himself.

It has a slight touch of the "Britain's got Talent" about it. Some shouty, pointy chap gets up on stage, demonstrating ably that there would most definitely be no "rap" without the word "crap". Suddenly, the four judges are falling over one another to parrot how heartfelt, relevant, deep-meaning, crucial, current and Syco-bank-account-relevant the performance actually was. How it brought one pretty judge with nil dress judgement, and the other, with less than zero lip judgement and preferring to emulate the look of a duck both to floods of tears and weeping on the comedian's shoulders, will always be one of life's little mysteries. The comedian, meanwhile, was no doubt whispering "what utter, complete, tuneless, b*ll*x" to himself, while smiling warmly, with a touch of vomit, towards the act.

Yet people are falling over themselves to get a piece of the crypto action, or "craption" as it has become known. Despite the huge recent failings, and Nationwide bank announcing at the time of writing that they are limiting the amount of crypto currency their customers can purchase. 

You can create an NFT yourself. In fact, you have potentially millions of them already stored on your mobile phone as photos. And probably of much higher quality than the crap that the arty-farty crypto sheep are falling over themselves to get hold of.

BUT, like anything connected to any new initiative on the internet, if you want to DIY it and go NFTing, it'll cost you money to do so, and there is of course no guarantee whatsoever you will gain any form of return for your spend. 

And yes, I am an old cynic.