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 The title reads “This piece is worth a Million Dollars’ Note the upper case ‘M’ and ‘D’. You change that, you get a different code altogether. I don’t blame you at this stage to think that I have lost my marbles due to the unending pandemic. Wish we could start calling it an Endemic, justifiably so, as new strains are emerging in line with the Vocal for Local philosophy.  At least a name like endemic would give us a hope of seeing an ‘end’ somewhere.

Gloom apart, I recently realized not everything around us is as depressing as it is made out to be. The uber rich are indulging in life big time continuing to collect art work and what not. Just that the art they are now collecting is in the form of NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens). So, what is it? I don’t intend taking your precious time trying to explain something I haven’t understood. Given below is a definition from the internet.

 ‘’They are essentially certifications of ownership recorded on a blockchain. Nonfungible tokens put the ownership of a digital product -- be it digital art, a video/audio clip or even just a jpeg or gif -- on that ledger. In the age of NFTs, downloading a picture is like owning a print. Having the NFT is like owning the original painting.’

Any image, gif, pdf, jpeg, tweet and even a blog as important as the one you are reading now can be traded and saved for posterity. Art has well and truly come out of the closet and one need not be a connoisseur anymore to collect one. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey sold his first Tweet for US$ 3Mio and a digital art sold for US$ 69Mio. The insanity has reached such levels that some are even selling the sound bite of someone breaking the wind for as high as US$ 400.

Looks like an idle non-corona mind is a digital workshop these days. An overload of Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, NFT etc has crept into my reading in recent times. From what little I have understood Blockchains are the backbones for all this. A stack of blockchains are made up of what they call a Cryptographic Hash Function to form a ledger which I presume will look like a paragraph of my title which by the way was generated on a platform. The last I remember remotely about Cryptography was while reading the Da Vinci Code. I must admit that even during the high paying heydays of Tech and Coding careers I have shunned this field and stayed away, a decision, that I now deeply regret as I try and put this piece of writing on sale on the NFT platform looking for some bored rich soul to buy it as a recreational activity paying a few millions in any currency. All you naysayers out there, brace yourself and get Crypto and Blockchain savvy as it will touch your daily life sooner than you expect.

This might well be one of the last pieces of comprehensible writing mankind would see as the days of writing with known scripts are nearing its end. From now on it will look like the title of mine, the advent of emojis were already a precursor to the times to come.

My apologies to the experts on Cryptocurrency like Bitcoins, Ethereum, Ripple etc. and the gurus of Blockchain and the ‘art’ and fart collectors on the NFT platform, if I have belittled your efforts, research or investments in any way. My only concern is that mankind should not find its way back to the Tower of Babel to communicate in gibberish and write/sketch using Hieroglyphics as our ancient forefathers did.