Totally Fungible Tokens

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are an exciting new application of Blockchain technology that allows us to burn down a rainforest every time we want to trade a string representing an artist's signature on a creative work.

Many folks are eagerly turning JPGs, text files, and even Tweets into NFTs, but since not all of us have a convenient rainforest to destroy, The Daily WTF is happy to offer at alternative, the Totally Fungible Token

What Is a Totally Fungible Token?

A TFT is a unique identifier which we can generate for any file or group of files. It combines the actual data in the file(s) with a Universally Unique Identifier, and then condenses that data using a SHA-256 hashing algorithm. This guarantees that you have a unique token which represents that you have created a unique token for that data.

How is this better than an NFT?

There are a few key advantages that TFTs offer. First, they're computationally very cheap to make, allowing even a relatively underpowered computer participate actively in the token ecosystem.

In addition, this breaks all dependencies on the blockchain, meaning that you don't need to use or spend cryptocurrency to create, purchase, or trade these tokens.

Most important: much like NFTs, a TFT is absolutely worthless, but we're not promoting these as some sort of arcane investment instrument, so there won't be any sort of bubble. The value of your TFT will remain essentially zero, for the entire life of your TFT. There is no volatility.

In the interests of efficiency, this also performs terribly on large files. How big is too big? That depends on your browser! Enjoy finding out what's too big to encode!

Generate a TFT

Use the button below to browse for a file on your computer, and this will generate a unique token showing that you generated a unique token. Feel free to share, sell, or trade these tokens with your friends! No information about your files is in the token, so it's guaranteed to be completely meaningless! Give it away, sell it, just write it down on a napkin, your TFT is yours to use as you please!

Token:

Grab the source and tweak the algorithm yourself!. Also, for convenience, there's a dedicated TFT page which, long term, is probably a better tool than this article, since you'll be wanting to play with TFTs for a long time yet, I imagine.

Potential optimizations include: streaming the file conversion so we don't have to have the whole thing in memory, or just replacing all of this with a random number, which would likely be just as good.

The TFT for the tft generator code is tft.js;dbbbf23d24502dba96913f18fa031203977b48db090a4a52ff6258a2c3bceecc, so enjoy!

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