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**Crypto in Plain English – by cryptohunt.it**

Every day, we explore the world of crypto and blockchain in one minute and in plain English.

Latest Episodes:

How NFTs can actually hurt artists - Crypto in Plain English - Episode 103 - by cryptohunt.it Feb 17, 2022

Show notes

How NFTs can actually hurt artists

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Buckle up! We'll be spending the next few episodes analyzing the downsides of this new crypto world, starting with NFTs.

But wait – didn't we say they can be great for artists? After all, it gives them access to a worldwide audience and a whole lot of newly made crypto wealth.

And while that is true, where there is money, there are scams. One of them in particular is making life for legitimate artists very annoying.

It's very simple and goes like this: A scammer wants to create and sell an NFT, but they are not an artist. In fact, they are lazy and simply download another person's art from somewhere. Then that gets uploaded to NFT auction sites like OpenSea, and the unsuspecting buyer pays for something that wasn't the sellers' to sell in the first place.

It is so bad that online art gallery Deviant Art has started to scan the web and sent out more than 100,000 notices to their members about art that was plagiarized from them.

You could, of course, argue: Those marketplaces should not allow stolen art, NFT or not! And you'd be right, but since NFT fraud is as easy as copy-and-paste, computer programs have taken over. One NFT gets taken down, another one gets created in its place.

Keep that in mind when you look at NFTs next time, and stay tuned for the flip side of Bitcoin in tomorrow's episode.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Did someone draw every single one of the 10000 cryptopunks? - Crypto in Plain English - Episode 102 - by cryptohunt.it Feb 16, 2022

Show notes

Did someone draw every single one of the 10000 cryptopunks?

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Have you ever asked yourself how it is possible that there are 10,000 cryptopunks, or 10,000 bored apes? Is there someone out there, creating every single NFT, day in day out, until they are finally done?

Welcome to the strange new world of NFTs, where the traditional rules of art creation are challenged constantly.

You might have already guessed, but the answer is: Of course not. That would be an awful lot of work, even for just 100 of them.

Your keen eye will have noticed something though: These cryptopunks all look strangely similar. And that’s right! The secret method used by NFT artists is called permutation, where a computer program mixes various different parts of the artwork in many combinations.

Let’s say you wanted to dress differently for an entire week. Strictly spelling, all you would need, are two different t-shirts, two sets of pants, and a pair of glasses. But how is that possible? Those are only five items and anyway, you can’t just wear your t-shirt as pants!

The key is in combining them uniquely. Monday: Blue pants, white shirt. Tuesday, blue pants, blue shirt. Wednesday, blue pants, blue shirt, glasses. And so on. You can actually squeeze eight combinations out of those original 5 items. Add an extra shirt, and it’s 12. Another set of pants, 24.

In NFTs, the pants or shirts are called traits. All traits combined can be mixed into a full picture: For example: mustache or no mustache. Different pants. Zombie head or normal head, various hairstyles.

A simple computer program overlays all of these, and the more traits you have, the easier it is to get to 10000 or even way more NFTs in no time. All it takes then is the click of a button and a few seconds.

Mind blown? Add three pairs of shoes to our example – how many combinations do we get? Send us an email to podcast@cryptohunt.it and we’ll send 100,000 Lizard Coins to the first correct answer.

Who builds cryptohunt? - Crypto in Plain English - Episode 101 - by cryptohunt.it Feb 15, 2022

Show notes

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

If you have just a minute or two, save this episode for your next run because this is a 10 min special. This is our 101st episode and today, we’ll tell you the story of what we are working on.

In the last 100 episodes our goal was to introduce you to the world of crypto and give you the knowledge to dig deeper and make your own decisions, regardless of how much you already know or how technical you are.

And that's what cryptohunt is going to be about, so today, we are going to introduce it to you in more in depth.

Arndt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arndtvoges/

Christian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianbyza/

Please consider reviewing our podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crypto-in-plain-english-by-cryptohunt-it/id1588763088

What is cryptohunt? - Crypto in Plain English - Episode 100 - by cryptohunt.it Feb 14, 2022

Show notes

What is cryptohunt?

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto – and can you believe this is already episode 100?

Today, to celebrate the milestone, we’ll talk about a crypto project that is near and dear to our hearts – our very own cryptohunt! What is it, and who is behind it?

My name is Christian Byza, and together with my co-founder Arndt Voges and the team, we are trying to make crypto accessible for everyone.

But why? Like most of you, we always felt that getting started with crypto is really hard: All those technical descriptions meant nothing to us, and most information isn’t simply in one place - in fact, searching the web for understandable content is a pain.

At the same time, there are amazing projects out there that have the potential to change the world. But they have a hard time telling everyone about it - because they don’t have a good place to reach you and us, and because they struggle expressing what makes them special in a way that we all understand.

That’s why we are building cryptohunt, and we are almost ready to show it to everyone. It’ll be a website where every crypto project is explained, ranked, and reviewed by us and the community. And to make easy learning a priority, we’ll also offer small courses about the great currencies and tokens out there, teaching you what makes each of them special. And if you ace a mini quiz, you’ll even earn a few dollars in their tokens.

So, what’s next? First, we are launching with limited access to learn from early feedback. If you want to participate, join our waitlist at cryptohunt.it. We hope to see you there!

And tomorrow, we we release our first interview between my cofounder Arndt and myself - so you get to know us a little better - and we do an exception and will speak more than just a minute.

NFT Deep Dive: What does minting an NFT mean? - Crypto in Plain English - Episode 99 - by cryptohunt.it Feb 11, 2022

Show notes

NFT Deep Dive: What does minting an NFT mean?

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Welcome to our last episode in the mini series on NFTs. Today, we’ll explain what minting an NFT means and how you can do it too.

Minting means nothing more than creating an NFT. The word stems from old German and means making a coin - and in fact, central banks use it to describe the process of literally printing money.

When an NFT is minted, it is simply created on the blockchain. Nothing complicated: it just includes a link to the original JPG or GIF and other optional information, such as residuals that you, the creator, might get from every subsequent sale.

So, you have that amazing idea and some clever art that’ll make for a hopefully very successful NFT collection? The easiest way to get started as a creator is to use a marketplace like OpenSea.com to mint your NFTs and list them for sale.

It is almost as easy as posting on Twitter, and each marketplace has great tutorials. But there is one caveat that is not intuitive: some blockchains have very high fees, and those also apply to minting NFTs. Ethereum is the current standard, but transaction costs of hundreds of dollars per NFT may make it useless for your project.

Luckily there are alternatives. OpenSea itself let’s you choose Polygon as an alternative with no fees. And Solsea.io or Solanart.io operate on Solana, which will only cost you cents in minting fees.

And with that we say: Best of luck! Let us know if this inspired you to create the next cryptopunks, we’d love to podcast about it!

NFT Deep Dive: How did some NFTs become so crazy expensive? - Crypto in Plain English - Episode 98 - by cryptohunt.it Feb 10, 2022

Show notes

NFT Deep Dive: How did some NFTs become so crazy expensive?

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Today we look at the reasons that some NFTs have become so crazy expensive, with the example of the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is an NFT collection created by four founders going by the synonyms of Gargamel, Gordon Goner, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, and No Sass. The collection contains 10,000 NFTs of cartoon apes and is valued at almost $4bn in total.

But how did that even happen? It’s all about the right concept, the right timing, and great marketing.

The creators realized that the world was suddenly full of people who got rich through early investments in crypto currencies, called “apes” among insiders. And those so-called apes were sitting there, ready to invest in something new. Hence the name “Bored Apes”.

And so the concept was born. Combine that with an exclusive online community for members, and you have the perfect status symbol for the rich.

But things didn’t take off immediately - first apes sold for less than $200 a piece. But over time, famous people started to buy them, among them Eminem and Jimmy Fallon. And at that point things started exploding, and you can’t get one for under $250,000 anymore.

And now that you know how some NFTs have become so popular, maybe it’s time to make your own for fun? Next time we’ll walk you through that process, called minting.

NFT Deep Dive: What are NFT collections and how are they created? - Crypto in Plain English - Episode 97 - by cryptohunt.it Feb 09, 2022

Show notes

NFT Deep Dive: What are NFT collections and how are they created?

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Bored Ape Yacht Club or Cryptopunks: You might have heard these collection names in the news. But what exactly are those and how do they work?

Welcome to the strange new world of NFTs which we'll cover in more depth in this week's mini series.

NFT collections are a group of digital artworks based on the same concept, with each of them distinguished by specific traits. Let’s unpack that!

It helps to look at traditional art. Picasso and Warhol for example, two of the most influential modern artists, created collections long before NFTs were a thing. They created a series of paintings in one run, all focused around a specific subject. Or a series of numbered prints, where things like colors varied from piece to piece.

NFT collections are like that too, but they accomplish it with computer aided design, cranking out not 10, but often thousands of slightly different art pieces per collection. Cryptopunks, for example, are all pixelated images of cartoon faces. But when they were created, variations were made with a computer program: There are zombie faces for example, ear rings, hair styles, and many more. And because that scales easier than painting by hand, the program could spit out 10,000 cryptopunks into the collection.

Once minted, those are all on the blockchain, you can actually compare those so-called traits within a collection - how many have a Zombie face for example, and how rare one with a hat is. And the more rare the combination, the more collectible they tend to be.

So collectible in fact, that those Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs combined are worth $3.6bn dollars right now, and the Cryptopunks $2.4 billion.

And next time we take a deeper look at the history of how they became so expensive.

NFT Deep Dive: Where do I browse and buy NFTs? - Crypto in Plain English - Episode 96 - by cryptohunt.it Feb 08, 2022

Show notes

NFT Deep Dive: Where do I browse and buy NFTs?

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

By now, you’ve probably asked yourself: Everyone’s talking non-stop about NFTs, but where can I actually see one with my own eyes?

Welcome to the strange new world of NFTs which we'll cover in more depth in this week's mini series.

A great place to start are NFT marketplaces. You’ll see what’s popular, and can sort by price, just for fun. The largest of the marketplaces is “OpenSea.com”, “sea” spelled like the ocean. There, NFTs are usually organized by collections of similar artwork from the same creators.

Spend some time on it and you’ll notice a couple of strange things – because NFTs are publicly accessible, an NFT doesn’t have to be listed for sale to get bids. For example, you can see all 10,000 cryptopunks, and if you have the spare change, even try and snag one.

Before you do that though, notice the little diamonds in front of the prices? That’s right - the prices are in Ethereum, not Dollar… And each Ethereum is worth over $3000 right now.

But even if you found something affordable you like – keep in mind every bid costs you a few hundred dollars in Ethereum transaction fees, whether you win or lose that bid.

That’s why buying NFTs on Ethereum is only useful for very expensive items, where a few hundred for fees don’t matter. Other blockchains are more efficient. For example, take a look at Solsea.io, a similar marketplace for Solana-based digital artwork.

With that – happy NFT browsing! And stay tuned for the next episode tomorrow, where we dig deeper into NFTs.

NFT Deep Dive: Why pay millions for a simple JPG that anyone can just download? - Crypto in Plain English - Episode 95 - by cryptohunt.it Feb 07, 2022

Show notes

NFT Deep Dive: Why pay millions for a simple JPG that anyone can just download?

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

If you are new to the world of NFTs, you have likely asked yourself: Why does anyone even pay for something they don’t physically own? And why even pay at all, when anyone can just download the same JPG for free and look at it all they want?

Welcome to the strange new world of NFTs which we'll cover in more depth in this week's mini series.

There are of course the obvious reasons to pay for an NFT that we touched upon before, like investment speculation and wanting to support artists. But there is more to it, and to understand that we have to look at a shift away from physical to digital ownership.

While previous generations wanted to own houses, cars, and boats, the younger tech-natives tend to care less about those. Instead, they live their social life increasingly online, and status symbols are moving there too.

Owning an NFT in itself is what creates the pleasure, and the ability to share it with the world is a big bonus. An expensive cryptopunk NFT for example makes for the perfect bragging rights on Twitter. It's like owning your own Picasso, but instead of hiding it in a vault, you can safely and proudly show it to the entire world.

And that's what matters to a new generation, many of whom have made very good money in the crypto market. Showing off ownership is important, exclusive access is not. And with that much crypto money floating around, you can see how NFTs have filled that void.

What is Facebook’s crypto currency Libra and what happened to it? - Crypto in Plain English - Episode 94 - by cryptohunt.it Feb 04, 2022

Show notes

What is Facebook’s crypto currency Libra and what happened to it?

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Did you know that Facebook was working on their own crypto currency? Let’s dive deeper into that project and the reason why it is now shut down.

The project was initially launched in 2017 with the goal to bring digital payments with very low fees to everyone, especially the underbanked. Depending on where you are tuning in from, you may not be aware: But many people do not have access to dependable bank accounts and have to waste billions of dollars in fees on services like Western Union.

Facebook, together with a consortium of payment providers such as Square and Visa and large merchants such as the Bookings group, set out to change that.

Libra, or Diem as it was rebranded to, had the goal of creating a digital stable coin backed by real world currency to guarantee its value. For every Diem you would exchange, the operators would buy a real world asset of that value.

To keep complexity low, the decision was made to centralized control. While Diem was technically supposed to be on a blockchain, only a few approved partners would be able to mine it… and pocket the transaction fees.

The project was troubled from the beginning though. Very quickly, the largest partners all left the consortium. The US government was also getting worried about Facebook's market power in creating an unregulated de facto US dollar alternative.

Under the pressure, Facebook eventually scrapped the plans earlier in 2022, citing regulatory hurdles.

But that doesn’t mean nobody is solving the original problem though. Stablecoins like USDC already exist, and blockchains like Celo are tackling the problems of the unbanked world, and in a decentralized way as well.

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Crypto in Plain English – by cryptohunt.it

NFT Deep Dive: Why pay millions for a simple JPG that anyone can just download?

What is Facebook’s crypto currency Libra and what happened to it?

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