The Water NFT
Drink up, small st. bets
Water, perhaps the most valuable resource, life-sustaining matter, commodity, whatever you want to call it, is an asset that like gold can neither be destroyed nor created. I’m lying — it can be both vaporized and extracted in a lab. But like gold, practically all the water on this planet is finite (it’s easier to mine gold than cocktail it in a lab). And humans are heavily reliant on it — from homeostasis, to thinking, to agriculture, to industrial processes, water is integrated into practically all parts of our lives.
And this got me thinking: What if like an NFT, you attach a music-like royalty to water, such that every time it is played, your crypto wallet grows? Every time someone buys a Poland Spring from the 2nd street Deli, ching ching. Every time an energy company profits from a toilet flush or sink tap release, you garner a portion. Every time a cruise ship traverses the Atlantic Ocean, a charge is applied for every oceanic normal force. (ok maybe that’s a little extreme)
Basically, you own a royalty on all of Earth’s water. Like a bank, but with every molecule of H2O instead of $USD, you sap up those transaction fees.
Obviously, there is no real world application for this idea; no one entity can buy nor own the water. It’s not a currency, commodity, asset, good, or service. So unless you’re supervillain Gru who wants to end life by draining all the world’s war (an interesting application for space terraforming if pumped into orbit), water NFTs may have to wait until a fully functioning metaverse.
If water is integrated as part of one’s property (where NFTs come in to certify ownership) on the Ethereum blockchain (hydrating, showering, swimming in pools, etc. become daily processes) then antsy investors will be able to score some sweet royalties on this gigantic NFT.
Let me know in the comments what you thought of this idea.
P.S.
Greater applications? Well if gold (Au, a.#79) is a commodity, why can’t other periodic elements be? Maybe if all the world’s carbon were minted as an NFT, climate change would be solved via the already proposed carbon tax. Yet the premise of the idea is ironic because blockchain’s enormous use of energy is carbon positive.
