Pylimitics

Continuations is a newsletter/blog by Albert Wenger that has a fascinating button at the top right: Collect. What it evidently does is “Mint this entry as an NFT to add it to your collection.” An NFT is a “non-fungible token,” which means that it’s a digital object that’s uniquely identified and recorded in a permanent transaction ledger. The ledger is digital too, and is obtusely called a “blockchain.”

An unlimited number of people can create an NFT out of any of the posts on Continuations. Each NFT is added to the person’s private “wallet,” another digital record thing. From there you could open it and reread the post.

It seems like a more complicated way to make a bookmark. A bookmark, though, depends on the original page still being available, and the NFT is a local copy (at least I think it’s local). So maybe it’s more like a way to copy and paste the post. Depending on the tools you’ve set up, collecting an NFT might be simpler than copying and pasting the content.

I’m still not sure whether saving a blog post as an NFT is useful, and I didn’t do it because I don’t have a “wallet” configured. so I have no place to put it. Also each collector “pays” a trivial (maybe even less than trivial) amount in cryptocurrency, and I don’t have that configured either. Clever idea though.