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NFT: I put my art up for sale on the block chain

Heres my story: I heard about nft's like most people with the awesome and unexpected story of Beeple (Mike Winkelmann). And our of curiosity, bragging rights and ( * cough * a little greed ), I wanted to try sell a my own nft.

Oran C

Apr 17, 2021 • 5 min read

NOTE: spelling/grammar is bad in this article, so heads up...

Heres my story: I heard about N.F.T's (Non-fungible tokens) Basically Non interchangeable units of value a single dollar bill is exchangeable for every other dollar bill, but works of art are not interchangeable)like most people with the awesome and unexpected story of Beeple (Mike Winkelmann).
For what the hell is a nft look

Non technical: HERE,

Technical: Here, SUPER technical raw spec HERE

And our of curiosity, bragging rights and ( * cough * a little greed ), I wanted to try sell a my own nft.

I've never owned any bitcoin or any crypto before, so going into this I didn't know what to expect.

I started where all good internet stories start:
Google.com

"how to buy NFTs"

Which brought up a few websites that I have heard of opensea.io, rarible.com and went with rarible.com.

I went to there website, and the first unusally think i encountered was.

There is no user accounts! Unlike most normal websites, you have to authiticate using a 'crypto wallet'. With no wallet, I was like okay lets get me a wallet.

Aftere some googleing. Downloading some apps paying some fees, and getting authenticated I was setup!

First major roadblock!

1) I had to buy ether, which ment the transaction costs were frickin' crazy! like $6-$10 bucks to buy $100 worth of stuff. Which totaled around $16 bucks just to move some money around.

This begs the question: why the hell are Ether transaction prices so dam high?

This is a something ill leave up to the reader...

Link:

Why are ETH transaction fees so high? Reasons and solutions - CoinGate

Second major road block.

2) Rarible Transaction fees:

To setup my nft, I had to pay transcation fees, which amounted to $70 dollars! , which made the prospect of making any money on my nft, totally moot. (sad face emoji)

the resulting page:

As of 20210417 I have zero bids, and one like.

Which is to be expected because of all the noise in the market. And the fact that inorder to be noticed you need a following or do a large social blast that hey im doing a nft please come buy it!

Take aways

When all told the cost for setting up my nft was $108.03! (0.04725898 Ether) which is was like 10 times what I had expected.

The statement from Beeple that this market is a bubble I true. Its going to pop really soon. And I'm excited to see what cool things rises from the ashes.

My token:

Link

by oran collins
github.com/wisehackermonkey
oranbusiness🚫 gmail.com
20210417

Bonus Shit:

Question: `Are nft's just hashes of your image stored on the blockchain?`

Short answer: NO

Long answer: No, the block chain does not store a hash of your image or data, it only has a link to the actual photo or data you want,

To quote the spec for nft's

A mechanism is provided to associate NFTs with URIs. We expect that many implementations will take advantage of this to provide metadata for each NFT. The image size recommendation is taken from Instagram, they probably know much about image usability. The URI MAY be mutable (i.e. it changes from time to time). We considered an NFT representing ownership of a house, in this case metadata about the house (image, occupants, etc.) can naturally change.

Metadata is returned as a string value. Currently this is only usable as calling from web3, not from other contracts. This is acceptable because we have not considered a use case where an on-blockchain application would query such information.

Source: EIP-721: ERC-721 Non-Fungible Token Standard

Take note of : `The URI MAY be mutable`

This is important, that means the block chain is not actually verifying unique photos/data, its just verifying that the token is valid and unique...

This is the format for the data for a nft it has a json field of data for the nft. which here would be a image url that can change.

Here's why the image is not a hash stored in the block chain, the reason is its too expensive to do so.

Alternatives considered: put all metadata for each asset on the blockchain (too expensive), use URL templates to query metadata parts (URL templates do not work with all URL schemes, especially P2P URLs), multiaddr network address (not mature enough)

This is say basically we thought about putting the hash in the nft and we tried, but its not worth it...

Hope that helps anyone in the future who has this exact question!