Non Fungible Guide to Non Fungible Tokens
ADDENDUM TO THE NFT GUIDE TO BUY NFTs: so it turns out that being out of the loop is sometimes dangerous for the enviorement. While we are going through a mass extinction, I by no means endorse the mindless destruction of the world for the sake of waifus. ALSO REMEMBER THAT THIS ALL DEPENDS ON PASSWORDS AND PASSPHRASES AND IF YOU LOSE OR FORGET THAT YOU LOSE EVERYTHING YOU ARE FOREVER. It's here somewhere, I just need to find it. It's not really descentralized, with OpenSea saying that OH NOW IT DOESN'T WORK, YOU HAVE TO UPDATE IT, because they pwn all the waifus of the cryptoworld.
So, before we begin, yes, I made a NFT out of this post a screenshot of this post, making it meta to the edge of things.
Since I was too busy listening to “The Idea of You” by Nine Inch Nails during 2021, I didn’t notice the existence of NFT except for that one time my brother told me about the New York Times post that sold for a thousand or so about NFT, and when Spotify’s wrapped told me that everyone was trying to figure out what NFT are. At last, you will be able to buy a post that is about how to buy a post!
Let’s begin with What is a NFT. I am writing this as I am opening each new website, discovering it with you as we go, so to speak:
It’s crypto based, that means, blockchain based, so you need a crypto currency wallet. I got MetaMask because it has a plug-in for Firefox and has a nice polygonal red fox as an icon that welcomes you to “Ethereum and the decentralized web”, a big claim for a polygonal fox, but alright. I will stick with Ethereum then, because by default it seems the easiest way to get a wallet that runs on anything (that is, Firefox, another nice company because it suspiciously also uses foxes as logos. Reminder to self: Furries somehow run the shadownet, or the furry web, or whatever they call it. There’s a lot of crypto-furries out there, whatever that means).
And to set it up is fairly simple, it uses a password and then gives you a “pass phrase”, that is, a password made out of a list of words, which is also the best way to have passwords anyways, but it reminds you that if you lose this, you lost all of your riches forever and you are doomed. So you write the thing down like it’s 1985 and you’re in a hacker movie, making the whole “decentralized web” promise seem very real and cryptologic.
Then you’ll need a debit card anyways, because otherwise you’d have an atom bomb worth of processing power in your basement capable of mining, so yea, you buy Ethereum by a middleman, so, I’ll buy some ETH with Wyre cuz this is the Clinacally-Insane 20s. Wyre is the middleman between the bank and the wallet, I guess. Or between the bank and the Ethereum blockchain of power command something? That’s where cryptocurrencies get cryptical for most. And… I was wrong.
So, you just go to Wyre to put some Etherium into your MetaMask future wallet. Wyre makes the transaction between you and the good old miners, you know, the ones who run the world buying almost all GPUs in existence, the invisible hand of the market, you name it. Wyre charges a “transaction fee”, which you pay to the middleman, and a “network fee”, which you pay to the owners of processing power - energy. Well, isn’t it exciting? You will be paying so much in fees that it already makes you feel dirty for wasting so much money. Some rich guy once said, you get what you pay, so alas, you pay fees, buy crypto in this very specific way and then you have it in your wallet. Are you happy now? Are you happy that you just gave the weekly pay of the average worker of the world in an instant to a polygonal fox?
I am not, so I’ll try to get my money back. I will make a Non Fungible Token and sell it to you.
If you weren’t sure about buying crypto, your bank will probably make sure that you think twice by sending you a billion alerts, and the website asking you for information that you don’t even know where to find or what does it means or if you’re breaking the law in some way. You are not. Once your transaction is ready, after you tried to trick the middleman by using your credit card instead of a bank account because you don’t really know this Wyre guy, do you? or is it that the same guy from the Wyres that a proper bank sends? Are you really not breaking the law?
So, once you’ve gone through the whole thing, you feel like a Wall Street investor and go downstairs to have your first cigarette as a future-bourgeois. After all, you didn’t even bother to buy a well-sourced cryptocurrency, you just got Ethereum because you think Ether is a nice name for the second wife of the character in your next book, and also because besides Bitcoin, which sounds funny in some languages, Ethereum sounds out of that 1985 future that you were promised for and never came. According to better sources than me, Solarcoin and Greencoin or what not, are more sustainable, as it turns out that the I am destroying the whole entire world by putting numbers into a Polygonal Fox.
So, why not have a cigarette anyways? You fucked the world in two ways already, you dirty cryptocapitalist.
And after the cigarette, you feel calm again, thinking about that co-worker/fellow Lyft driver in that one lonely Austin Texas night that told you that doing Lyft and investing in cryptocurrencies was the way of the future and how he most probably owns a Victorian house by now and you should have followed his advice and your own gut feelings that the market was a made up game anyways so why not play it with digital wallets and what not. You also remember that extremely confusing time with no signal in Vancouver when you bought some bitcoin out of an ATM only to find that you didn’t get any paper money but just a made up number in a made up app that you forgot about and now is lost in time like tears in the rain.
So lets make sure I’ve got the basics of my immensely risky but potentially high yielding investment right:
- I have Firefox, which has a fox.
- I got an extension with a fox in it, which is a shortcut to the future-wallet (cryptocurrency wallet, e-wallet, nerd wallet, wallet wallet)
- The fox wallet is called MetaMask, which promises me to get me into the decentralized web
- To add moneys into the wallet, you have to go through a middleman if you’re dumb like me, or have not sold anything into the crypto market yet so I have no other money than the one in my bank.
- They need a bank account to make the transfer. The fees are for both the middleman Wyre guy and the bitcoin miners, which goes directly to them.
- I got Ethereum because it was the easiest, coolest sounding one.
- Can I call myself a dilettante now? What is a dilettante? The bar man in Neuromancer calls Case an “artiste”, so, I guess edgeMute is an artiste now.
I still feel bad about my investment, but I can see how Non Fungible Tokens came to be out of this incredible shame that I am buying made up moneys for a game I am not even going to play. I can now, finally, use my money to buy a Non Fungible Token in a website like OpenSea, where I just had to refresh the window several times to get the MetaMask foxwallet extension running and connected to the site so I can use my crypto wallet with the NFT marketplace of OpenSea.
It seems like the guys at OpenSea also played Quake, since the message for my successful first NFT began with the joyus WOOT of the Quake Ranger/ Quake II Space Marine jump. “Woot. You created your first Non Fungible Token”. How cute!
Now it gets tricky! Aha! So, in order to sell your NFT, you have to OWN it with moneys, so you have to have enough money to buy your own NFT to sell it. To have to be rich in order to be rich, makes complete sense, like the rest of the market.
And here is where I can see a lot of tricky tricks to be made by the NFT OpenSea marketplace. You can sell it as a bid, however there is a “reserve price” which has to be above a certain amount of moneys, and in order to be in the market place at all, you have to make a ONE TIME GAS FEE, gas meaning, I don’t know, the amount of gasoline it took me to go from here to Vancouver. So, I don’t have enough ETH for the Gas Fee of OpenSea, so I’ll have to find another way to trick you to help me end this post.
The idea behind a Non Fungible Token, it seems, is to create a unique mark with cryptography and blockchain tech to ensure transparency and security, crypto for the latter, blockchain for the former, so crypto = security and blockchain = transparency, or so the logic seems to go.
In order to even create a NFT in a big marketplace like OpenSea, you need to pay them moneys, gas fee, inside your crypto wallet, linking your OpenSea account, with your Non Fungible Tokens to your crypto thing, and since OpenSea run on some type of gas, or processing power (servers, would be my humble dumb way to understand it)... and that’s not what it is. It is still the old “transfer fee” from our good old guy Wyre, which gives it to the miners, and promises not to keep to himself, or so he says, you kind of intuitively know that there’s millions being made out of the confusion of the whole system, just like in the real world, except that way crazier.
But wait! There’s something called Lazy Minting, which is just for people like you and me, you know, artistes.
Which is basically making a post in the website with the picture that I am selling to you, except that I can’t sell it yet until you tell me you want to buy, sort of like an artiste would sell to an art collector in the future but in cyberspace and during a pandemic.
The NFT is created with some crypto standards and once it’s sold on the cryptocurrency ledger/market (in this case, I want Ethereums if possible, just for this one time please? Just one?), it will be forever forged into the blockchain, making it an unique piece of art.
It is made!
So, long story short, I created a crypto wallet, bought too much Ethereum, wasn’t enough to pay the gas fee to make the Non Fungible Token, felt like a failure, found out that making a Polygon one is gas free (no moneys to the miners) so made that one and here it is, for the modicum price of 1 Ethereum, I will give you this beautiful photograph of the only thing I see every day if I get the chance, because I can’t look at anyone’s eyes or do much else.
Bear in mind that this second one is for sale, for only 1 Ethereum, which is a fortune, but hey, how many times will you be able to say “I bought a NFT out of some dumb’s guy how to page of how to make a NFT before it was cool?”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯Problem loading asset.
Also, it is a very meaningful photograph. I have been taking this same picture for over a year, sending it to a friend’s mother, not this exact one, which is the NFT, but different days and different weeks. If you feel like that’s something you’d buy, I can make up a collection and we can set a reasonable price.
Recap:
- Crypto is slang for security.
- Blockchain is slang for transparency
- NFT is a crypto-blockchain-item, like this picture
- NFT is a secure, transparent one item, like the picture I am selling
- To sell NFTs you need to have a Crypto Wallet
- MetaMask has Polygonal fox as it’s icon and it follows you when you install the extension for Firefox. It also is a cryptocurrency wallet. It requires that you save a spy-like-message or otherwise other people will have access to your money or you will lose your money forever.
- To sell NFTs, you need to plug in your picture into a blockchain crypto ledger/market.
- OpenSea.io allows you to create NFTs by following my stumbling steps
- It also post it into the public so everyone can admire your DeviantArt of the “decentralized web”
- You cross your fingers until someone thinks you’re worthy of their Ether, or vanish into the ether. Get it?
- To buy my first NFT click here
- To buy Ether, the waifu, click here
- To buy this post click here
So yea, I’m feeling generous right now, so I’ll buy something out of the NFT market and put it right here in the blogpost, just to see how it works. Let’s see.
I also finished watching The End of Evangelion again for the nth time the other day and I feel like I need a waifu. There’s no peers anyways. Looking for them was as easy as a google search, and this one is kawaii to the extreme, and it’ll be mine forever and ever until the end of Ethereum. So I’ll get my own waifu, I’ll buy it, yes, you heard me, I am going to buy a waifu right now, that’s how society works, you pig, you buy people, but since that’s called slavery we rather buy pixels of pretty girl-dolls and call them waifus and make a whole background story about her. So, without further ado, I present you, Ether, my waifu:
I have successfully descended to the realm of creepy hikikomorism. I’ll have to post some day my idea that most ideas are equal to a waifu, not really that complex or important, say, a flag is pretty much a waifu, with a background and a story maybe even a sound. Anyways.
Ether is my waifu, I bought it out of OpenSea.io with my dirty Ethereums that I got earlier and I feel like a pig.
Let’s build a story about Ether, this Waifu. If you buy it, you can add other stats. So far, she will be:
Ether (25/F)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯Problem loading asset.
Athletic/Scholar
Likes: bicycles, sunsets, cakes
Dislikes: Dirty old men.
I’d much rather have bought something for breakfast, but hey, if I am selling my art for such prices it’s because it comes at huge costs. I’m not kidding here. This blog post took me a week of depression, at times non-stop bombardment from the DogWolf people, which I have a story about them in the writing, sometimes interrupted by the Crow friends, but anyways, in the words of Nieva’s from Do Gauchoids Dream of Electric Nandues?:
“I’d rather not have done it”.
This whole blog post edition screenshot will be up for sale by the way, I just have to compress it into one solid image and you can have it, without edits, right here in the same place where I got my waifu.
However, if you want to own Ether, the first waifu ever sold over the Internet in a Non Fungible Post about Non Fungible tokens, you can buy it here:
Overall, I feel as if I had just bought a blow-up doll for real, and I want to get rid of it as soon as possible. I think that this market drives out of that cringiness of it all, trying really hard to impress everyone to make, well, what all markets do, sell stuff you don’t need for people you don’t like or whatever it was that the line was.
Can I really need to add that the only way you could delete something out of the platform would be via their website, making a report or owning the item, but it would still be "minted", marked, as a string, somewhere in the past of the Internet? Kind of future archeologic proof, creepy as well.
I think it’s an obvious choice for gamers, it has been around since DeviantArt, the OpenSea design is suspiciously similar to Google’s Picasa where you could access private collections of photographies for moneys as well, but the difference is that this is all crypto and memefied.
The crypto market runs on vaporwave and lives enterily on the Internet. Waifus have actual monetary value. This post proves it.
-edgeMute
Unless the market grows, which it will, I’m not interested in it.
Thank you for joining me in my non sensical day of writing one solid blog post about NFT.
If you buy anything, I will be forever grateful. I wonder if I’ll get an email? I think I would.
And as usual, I hope your woes are soon over.