When I heard that a very stupid looking digital image of what looked like a blue finger wearing a hat sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, I thought I wanted my own dumb looking finger with a hat picture! Lucky for me, there are many fans on PublishOx who have written extensively about NFTs and so I was able to educate myself. I no longer wanted a picture of a finger, I wanted a Non-Fungible Token of a finger.
The difference between digital picture and NFT (Non-Fungible Token) is worth a lot. NFTs are unchangeable and can't be divided once they are minted. So, if I have #45 of 100 total NFTs of badly drawn fingers or toes wearing hats or scarves or smoking weed, then no one else can have #45. The NFT technology creates the same kind of scarcity and ownership that exists for physical collectibles (or not-so-collectibles). We all know that scarcity drives value.
NFTs have a lot, lot, lot of other features, though. They can hold information, they can transit cryptocurrency, they can show video files or play music, they can be created and sold pretty cheaply by artists and musicians, and they can be used to play games.
Playing games is probably my favorite thing to do with NFTs. It led to my ambiguous but profitable relationship with the AlienWorlds "game" (which so far mainly involves clicking the words "Mine" and "Claim" at rather long intervals). Every once in awhile you would get a surprise NFT in your Wax Cloud Wallet. There would be a brand new Rock Cudgel, or the chance to be a white lady or a white dude or even a green alien for the avatar that no one ever sees (you know, because the game is just you clicking words and you don't interact with...anything). And then you could try to sell your white dude or shovel and make, well, not very much. Even the shovels show some of the potential for NFTs. They imbed stats about how well the shovel tool will do at giving you stuff when you mine. Other categories of cards include warriors and weapons, all with stats that imply a big battle - let's call it Thunder Dome - is coming. Exciting!
Other NFT games are much further along. SPLINTERLANDS seems so multifaceted that I am going to wait until I have a free 3 day weekend to start playing that one. In the "game" Upland, you can float around helplessly viewing various American cities (so far) and buying and selling properties. I hated this game at first, but I have finally gotten some traction flipping a few properties and look forward to whether I can keep buying my way up the net worth ladder. Where Upland gets interesting is that you can buy and sell your NFTs - which are yours and yours alone because of the way NFT smart contracts function - for either the Upland token or directly for crypto. My amazing real estate empire (sarcasm) is worth $40 or so in fiat now, and people really do buy these properties for fiat if that is an appealing exit strategy for you. In fact, another option for you is to pay $20,000 for landmark properties like New York's Chrysler Building in auctions. You know, just to get started.
OK, so maybe you are wondering if I forgot what the title of this article is. I did not. But there is a lot going on in the NFT space and I really do want you to start building your own collection of ridiculous NFTs, hence the highlighting of some of their cool features.
The NFT that is closest to my heart has literally none of the useful features I just highlighted. It probably is worthless, or maybe even costs my brain and eyes money somehow when I look at it. I mean, I have made profits of a 300 Wax on NFTs and even those memories can't make me smile like the sheer awfulness of my beloved favorite NFT. Ideally I would pull back a curtain, but you probably can see it right there below these words. Yes. Leonard Having a Ball on His Birthday.
This card is wrong wrong wrong in almost every way. It is so wrong that it goes all the way down the throat of wrong and comes out wrong's rectum a gloriously gleaming winner!
This NFT was the promo card that was supposed to rev up excitement for the whole Leonard Nimoy collection! I mean. Spock! This is the best picture you could find of Spock! Nimoy himself dedicated years of work to developing his artistic vision as a photographer. I mean, it is true that he mostly took photos of naked ladies, and we know that the internet is totally uninterested in naked ladies so that might not have been appealing. But, still. This? Oh man. So stupidawesome.
Let's do a quick checklist: Pleated khakis? Yep. Legs crossed while reclining? Yep. Grown ass man well I don't know what he's doing touching or perhaps lightly pinching or maybe trying to insert his left thumb in the hole of a giant beach ball? Yep. Mustard yellow as a birthday party color? Yep. Ping pong table? Yep. Oddly shiny green towels on almost everything even stacked up a bit? Yep.
I mean it has it all. It is probably the best photo they had of Leonard Nimoy crossing his legs in pleated khakis while thumbing the hole of a ball. At least I *hope* it's the best one they had.
Anyway, I paid real human crypto for this (0.85 WAX if I recall) and while it will never ever be worth that again in WAX. It is worth so much more in the pure joy it gives me.
I want you to have this kind of cross-legged beachballhole joy, too.
Your place to play is wax.AtomicHub.io. There are many, many, many NFT trading sites, but this is the platform that I think best balances financial scalability, affordable entry items, plentiful variety, and earnestly terrible monstrosities like Leonard Having a Ball. If you try to use the site, you will be prompted to log in with a Wax friendly EOS wallet. The easiest to use is Wax Cloud Wallet. You can use that to sign into almost anything in the Wax world, from Dapps to Games to trading sites. It works very well with Atomic Hub although it has pretty weak security. You may want to just start with Anchor Wallet if you plan on having any serious value moving into NFTs this way.
Once all that is worked out, you need to get used to the kooky way that EOS runs. That is beyond the scope of this article to explain, but if you are planning to make a lot of transactions at some point you'll need a Wax or two to stake to CPU and NET (which are kind of like bandwidth meters, in my mind) and to buy some RAM (which pays for the storage of your transaction data, I think, maybe).
However, you don't even need to have any money at all to get your NFT party started. There are lots of them for free! Mostly very boring, ugly, wordy, or painful to look at, but some are sweet, pretty, funny, or even kind of cool. If you are willing to spend .10 Wax (I think 1 Wax is less than .2 USD right now) then a crazier universe opens up.
At the risk of creating new competitors to my little hobby, here is what you do at Atomic Hub. You go to Market. You sort the whole mess of NFTs by Price (Lowest). You sit back and marvel! When you are dead tired of scrolling, then you look over to the left and see that you can narrow things down by Collections and all sorts of other features. You randomly click on one of the Collections listed that sounds too weird to exist and then you see that people pay lots of real human crypto for... that. Yeah. But keep clicking around and maybe you find a collection or a maker that you really like!
OK, this is all well and good, but my insider super secret way to find the most puzzling, weird, awkward, endearing NFTs is to go to the lower left and put a number like 100 or 50 in the Max Mint box. That will get rid of any NFT that had hundreds or thousands of versions. It probably gets rid of the freebies, too, but what you get are the lovingly handcrafted diaper fires straight from the well-meaning artistic hearts, or cannabis-blurred eyes, or greedy little minds of people who put out limited run NFTs. They might be trying to create scarcity to drive up the price (in which case the NFT might be incredibly cool) or they might not be able to afford enough RAM to make more (in which case the NFT might be a bad hand drawing or awkward photo). Either way, you are the winner!
I hope you enjoy playing around in the charity store Free Bin with me. I will have to quit doing this soon. My account is overflowing with weird looking fish, corn cobs with fangs, and the occasional awkward photo. And of course Leonard Having A Ball.
You may be wondering if I would sell my dear favorite NFT. Never! It is simply too fantastic. And, err, there are more than 5,000 of them out there, each unique!, but also identical, so putting it on the market means losing both my chuckles and my money. Unless you think there is something really great about owning the only Leonard Nimoy Thumbholery NFT to ever inspire a blog post? (that has GOT to be true, right?) In which case, this specific unique NFT is worth more than all the other ones. It is #2019.
Make me an offer!
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