Over the summer I’ve been reading about the “Blockchain” and Crypto-currencies, mostly due to developments with the day job, but it soon brought me to the attention of the bizarre phenomenon of NFTs, or “Non Fungible Tokens”. This is again thanks to my inquisitive son who just loves to stick his nose in all these technical things.
What is an NFT?
Each NFT is a unique digital asset stored on a blockchain. NFTs can exist in a variety of formats, but most often are images, audio, or video files. What makes them different from any other digital file is that each NFT has specific code that verifies where exactly it is on a blockchain, or who has ownership.
You can think of an NFT as a one-of-a-kind trading card. If you create an NFT, you have ownership over it. People can make digital copies of it, just as prints are made of famous paintings. But only you will have the original, unless you decide to eventually sell it.
NFT Unlikely Guns
I am a pre-internet, pre-personal computer kid. So my childhood consisted of drawing (amongst other things) and one pastime was doodling soldier battles across various landscapes. Guns were prominent in the movies I watched, and it seemed the fashion for the protagonist to have a very special one; Dirty Harry had his 44 Magnum that could “blow your head clean off”, Rick Deckard had his Pflager-Katsumata Series D 5223 Blaster and Ellen Ripley had her M-41A Pulse Rifle. So naturally one of my favourite things to doodle are guns and it’s led to my Unlikely Weapons Series.
It’s possibly not a time for lauding the gun. I have no idea how guns work and although I’m not necessarily anti-gun, I really hope these guns are fucking useless and very unlikely to exist. I created these individually in Procreate on my iPad after an initial sketch in my sketchbook.
The NFT Gun will be accompanied with a unique name for the gun and a semi-realistic manufacturer or brand name, along with some sort of outrageous but believable description about the gun that would suggest its unlikelihood of being a real weapon. I used OpenAI to generate this information which somehow seemed fitting with this Crypto project.
You can setup additional goodies and prizes for each NFT. So each customer will have the opportunity to receive an actual pencil sketch of their unique weapon. Pencil on A5 Bristol Board.
NFT Unlikely Knives
The other subject I picked was knives, and with rising knife crime rising in the UK I have struggled a little with using this weapon as the subject matter. But with the doodles being so basic and cartoonish I’m hoping they’re allure is not for lauding them as weapons (I have picked a lot of cooking implements in the collection) and simply love of the graphic itself.
I’ve been posting my knives on my Instagram channel. One each day since October (unless the day job got in the way). I thought I’d post the doodle along with some clever ditty about the knife, so I dug out a list of “Murphy’s Laws and Colloraries” that I’ve found on the internet decades ago and kept them in my back pocket. Suffice to say I quickly ran out of entries that had any connection to knives and just continued picking them out. It seemed fitting to say something along with the basic doodle. If this turns out to be a book that’s attributed to an actual human that wrote or collated them, then I will give credit it where it’s due.
The NFT Marketplace
So, looking at the various NFTs that are available on OpenSea.io, there is a myriad of different styles. All very rich in detail and some more basic than others. I just don’t understand how they command the fees of thousands of dollars. It’s truly bonkers. I can only imagine that the asset is merely a vehicle to making money, like the old Baseball Trading Cards.
A lot of the artists make “collections” which seem to be a riff on one idea. A monkey with different clothing and accessories, a cute penguin, pixelated punks, etc and they must use some sort of computer program to make the variations which can reach into the thousands, maybe even employing AI? So my initial strategy is to create a set of 100. Manually. In order to do that they have to be very basic and quick.
Buying Crypto
I’ve had such an infuriating time buying crypto. Researching the right soft wallet to store it in. I wanted to make darn sure I could re-instate the thing if I lost my phone or something horrible happened. If you lose access to your wallet, you lose your crypto. So I’ve landed on Trust Wallet being the easiest to understand – it’s a world that belongs to the geeks.
The next hurdle is spending the crypto to create the NFT Collection, then spending on each NFT upload. Each process involves something called a “gas fee” and it seems to fluctuate wildly for “Ethereum” the particular currency that NFTs seem to flourish on. Depending on the time of day, it can be quite expensive. When I first tried, uploading one NFT could have cost $2-$8 and for 100 this is not money I have. Some artists must be spending upwards of six figure sums just minting the NFT before they are even sold.
My next cheaper option is using another currency called “Polygon”. There is a smaller NFT market here and it’s free to mint (the in-word for creating an NFT on the blockchain) NFTs here, you just have to pay a percentage of the sale price when someone buys one. So this looks to be the best place to dip my toe in.
Buying crypto on Opensea seems so difficult though. I keep getting errors and glitches and then turned down for the transaction. So I will keep trying until I’m successful….