The Future of Digital Ownership: NFTs and Virtual Reality

In this episode of the Koinos Group podcast I interviewed Tim Copeland, a journalist at Decrypt whose mission is to demystify the decentralized web. Tim has interviewed Vitalik Buterin, Changpeng Zhao, Roger Ver, Justin Sun, John McAfee, Craig Wright and other high-profile figures in the space. In this discussion he uses his bird's-eye-view to share his thoughts on the current state-of-the-art and where he sees things heading.

There were three major topics in our conversations; NFTs (obviously), the value of running blockchain nodes, and the role that digital assets will play in virtual worlds. We covered a lot of ground in our discussion so the video has been broken into chapter so that you can skip to the sections that are most interesting to you.

Listen to the podcast

The Value of NFTs

One of the nagging challenges with NFTs is how we will connect them to real world objects. As many are aware, but many others may not be, the actual image or video that is connected to an NFT generally lives on someone's centralized server and not "on the blockchain."

While the use case is compelling and seems to be attracting a lot of attention at the moment, the incongruity of an asset whose value is based on decentralization but which also requires centralized servers to function, threatens to undermine its utility as far as spreading awareness.

Virtual Worlds

In Tim's mind the real value may be realized as the adoption of virtual reality increases. While we may not be able to connect real world objects to NFTs, more and more of the real world might transition into the virtual world where objects can be connected to decentralized assets.

Tim sees NFTs becoming a kind of "ticket to ride" where by holding the NFT users will be given access to privileged spaces where they can have unique experiences.

I had a great time interviewing Tim and think he had some really interesting insights. He'll be publishing more columns every Monday so be sure to check decrypto.co and follow Tim on twitter @timccopeland.