Before we begin today's money-grubbing screed from the future, I want to thank the 115 followers of Block To The Future here on PUBLISH0X (use my Publish0x ambassador link to start your own blog here). I also want to celebrate the little rally on BURST & FIL since my recent post about decentralized cloud storage providers on March 29. I think my 115 followers are all whales because it seems like I post and prices move. It's the DeLorean, guys. Get in my DeLorean. But seriously though, I have made some good calls recently and I'm glad because I had to waste a lot of time and money to acquire the information that I'm using to make my buys. Tron (TRX) price has nearly doubled since I posted about the budding Tron DeFi ecosystem on March 20.
Okay, today we will be talking about the 5 stages of NFT Acceptance. Some of my subscribers already know that I am very bullish on Bitcoin (BTC) and, based on the global fiat market cap, I think Bitcoin will certainly reach $1 Million per coin by 2050. But it could happen much sooner (especially if the world governments keep rapidly inflating fiat currencies with jumbo size stimulus payments). However, alt coins with utility, scarcity, and relatively low market cap also have enormous upside potential when they leverage market-disrupting blockchain technologies. Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are already showing potential to disrupt conventional markets and cryptocurrency markets. Coming to accept this fact has taken some time for me. It's been a process... not of grief, but of learning, understanding, and eventually NFT acceptance.
The biggest error I've made over the past few months was to deny myself the basic understanding of the word, "fungible", which I admittedly only just began to understand very recently. I didn't understand that the uniqueness of a digital asset is what makes it "non-fungible". Just think "one of a kind". Something that is non-fungible is unique. NFTs can be very similar to each other, but there can be no two the same. From a legal perspective, this opens up a lot of options which are not available when dealing with cryptocurrency tokens. All cryptocurrencies and tokens are (mistakenly) designated as "securities" by the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). There are enforceable regulations on token trading and minting in the United States that apparently don't apply to minting and trading NFTs.
When I began to consider the linguistic semantics at play, I was confused, and I still am. The one NFT I have says that it is 1 of 16. So how different are these 16? They can't all be identical, right? Then they would be fungible. How different MUST they be? I think there is an argument that as long as there is some minuscule difference between two similar NFT assets, then they are exempt from securities regulation in the USA.
I have a friend who builds video games and educational applications and now we're talking about all the cool things we could do with NFTs inside of Decentraland to grow his brand. I'm not a software developer, but I studied Technological Entrepreneurship and Management at Arizona State University, Fulton School of Engineering. I am always looking for growth hacking opportunities, entrepreneurial endeavors, and disruptive innovations. I'm a theory guy, a consultant, a project manager, and a generalist. I can barely code a little jquery, css, and html. But I can recognize value in the market. And we can see now, with NFTs, all that creative energy from the ICO boom is back. Now there's an apparently legal way for anyone to start minting and selling digital assets again. This means that we can build dApps which leverage possession of NFTs for in app permissions. This means that dApp builders don't have to launch a token in order to create something of value.
At this moment, I only possess a single NFT. It's on Wax.Wallet and it is an image that many would find offensive so I won't share it here. I guess I was issued this NFT as a sort of punishment for not being as degenerate as the degens running Clover Protocol. This is just one example of a niche community that is leveraging NFTs to generate... something. But NFTs have a great deal more utility than novelty or lulz. NFTs act as the deed of ownership of digital land in the blockchain virtual world, Decentraland. Since a plot of digital real estate is a unique digital asset, it is a perfect use case for a Non-Fungible Token. Live virtual events are being held inside of Decentraland now. The virtual world is still in early development stages, but the value of the in-game real estate is skyrocketing and all of that real estate is apparently bought and sold as NFTs. Check-out this video from Coin Bureau on the topic. I found it very informative.
I'm pretty sure I earned another NFT over on Gitcoin's Quests, but I'm not sure if I used an incorrect withdrawal wallet or if I need to claim it still or how to view it... so I'm a total NFT noob. But at least I'm moving on to the next phase. I'm no longer in denial. Now I'm actually trying to get my hands on some NFTs and experience this new market. It's actually been really interesting to consider my own experience coming to accept NFTs. The conventional cycle of grief consists of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I suppose today might be the first full day of NFT acceptance for me. I'm ready now to buy some NFT-related project tokens, but the ETH gas fees are way too high... 0.035 ETH transaction fee on Uniswap. I'll have to wait a little more, because I'm not a high roller who can afford these $65 dollar transaction fees.
There are still accessibility issues with many tokens and some of the tokens of projects innovating the NFT market are challenging to acquire. The difficulty in accessing these tokens is certainly holding their market price back. I want in, but I'm holding back because of ETH fees. I think there's a lot of people like me and I think that's why it might make sense to bite the bullet and pay the network fee. But we're going to have to buy a bare minimum of $500 worth of any token to have it make any sort of sense right now. Probably more like $1,000-$2,000. I'm interested in scooping up some Rarible (RARI) and some NFT Protocol (NFT) right now, but I'm not ready to commit that much to make it happen, so I'm looking for a centralized exchange. I'm still surprised at how difficult it can be to find even a centralized exchange that has what I'm looking for (and that I already have an account with). Look at the RARI markets:
The decentralized exchange options (Uniswap, Sushiswap, Balancer, & 1inch) are my preferred method. However, the prohibitively expensive Ethereum Network gas fees have me looking for a centralized exchange that I might use. My Gate.io account has been frozen until I can KYC as a non-US resident.... and VPN doesn't help. Poloniex old account has been frozen as well. But I thought it got hacked because I couldn't seem to recover it and I did download and use that fake Poloniex mobile app back in 2018. I emailed their support to try to get to the bottom of it and they directed me to try to collect the 50 Pascal Coin (PASC) I had remaining in the account which I must have dual-mined to Poloniex years ago. I recently had a terrible experience on Hotbit trying to withdraw Essentia (ESS) and they took a 17,000 ESS withdrawal fee. At the time it was a $100 fee, now it's considerably more. I contacted their support and they refused to help so I'm done using Hotbit. I don't have an account on any of those others and I don't even recognize a few of them. That's saying a lot from me, because I literally have a list of over 50 exchanges that I've either used or attempted to use. My strategy back in 2017 was to have an account on as many exchanges as possible so that I could scoop up tokens before they got on the bigger exchanges. However, as I've recounted here, that didn't work out too well for me. There were some very small victories, but mostly... just frustrating learning experiences.
The markets list for NFT Protocol is way smaller, with only 3 options:
I'm basically forced to use the decentralized exchanges and pay huge Ethereum gas fees if I want these tokens. So that means I will need to buy a lot of these tokens to justify the high gas fee and lower its percentage impact on the token purchase. I share all of this history and context to give you an idea of just how many barriers exist just to buy some tokens, even for a relatively experienced crypto user with an abnormally high number of exchange accounts. I'm relaying all of my past experiences with those various centralized exchanges to emphasize how much centralized exchanges have failed me over the years. Even some centralized exchanges that I really liked using have gone under or terminated my US account. Here's a list of exchange accounts I previously held, which have now either locked my account or gone out of business:
Cobinhood
COSS
CoinExchange.io
cfinex
C-CEX
CryptoBridge
CryptoHub
Cryptopia
Gate.io
HitBTC
Huobi
Nanex
Naraex
Poloniex
So, when people tell you not to keep your crypto on the exchange... that's why. Not your keys, not your coins. I don't even trust Coinbase or BlockFi too much after what I've experienced. It seems like any custodial account is a risk of one kind AND another. But at least there is some degree of confidence that the larger exchanges will remain solvent. Now I generally always pull my tokens off the exchange as soon as possible. I mostly did do that with these failed exchange accounts, but I was also unable to do this with a lot of my micro holdings because they weren't worth enough then to pay the exchange withdrawal fee. That's another way smaller balances can become stuck on the exchange.
When I got started in crypto there were very few decentralized exchange options, just IDEX and EtherDelta... maybe a few others. And the liquidity was a joke. The SEC charged the founder of EtherDelta and it seemed like the dream was dead. That's why all this liquidity pouring into DeFi liquidity pair pools is really revolutionary because we now have the ability to transact in all these obscure tokens without having to create an account on some shifty exchange. We don't have to do KYC, pause deposits or withdrawals due to "wallet maintenance", or pay inflated withdrawal fees. The current DeFi revolution empowered by decentralized exchanges is a truly remarkably achievement. However, the Ethereum Network scalability issues are blocking us from fully capitalizing on these opportunities. This is holding the lower end of the NFT market back as well. This means that these projects building critical NFT infrastructure for minting and trading NFTs are undervalued right now because the small dollar buyers haven't even shown up yet.
Before we go on, I realized that I forgot to acknowledge the 1,161 people I have followed on Publish0x. You guys are amazing. I'll definitely be spam following a lot more people on here for a while. I'll be sure to keep my readers updated on how many people I have spam-followed on Publish0x. I'm still creating Block To The Future social media accounts and nobody is following there yet. Please follow me on Twitter, Telegram, Flote, & Odysee.
All of this stuff is highly risky. Cryptocurrency investments are subject to extreme volatility, regulatory risk, and account security risk. It's very difficult to participate in this already risk-filled environment when the already massive fees are further magnified. You have large fees on Coinbase to convert the USD in your bank account to ETH (probably about $50 fee for $1,000 USD buy). Then fees to send your ETH to your METAMASK wallet or exchange account. Then a huge network fee to swap ETH for your desired ERC-20 token on a decentralized exchange. The large fees make it impractical to participate in values less than a few thousand dollars. So it is becoming very difficult for enthusiastic community members to get involved as early as we want to without having to take a really concentrated position.
Yeah, NFTs are a wild market right now. It's so wild, there is no way I'm buying any random digital art assets that I don't personally really love and want to own. Until recently, I couldn't even imagine wanting to own any sort of NFT. But that has changed now, because I've seen some pretty epic NFTs and I'm starting to understand how and why they can have very real value. However, since I'm not interested in speculating on buying NFTs at this time, I am limiting my exposure to the NFT market to RARI and NFT Protocol for starters. Now I am a believer in the NFT market sector and I have come to accept that NFTs aren't just here to stay, but they are the focal point of disruptive blockchain technology.
please let me know your thoughts on NFTs and NFT-related tokens in the comments. I’m scrolling through these NFT sites trying to comprehend what is happening here. So any guidance is mich appreciated. What are your favorite NFT exchanges? Has anyone here purchased land in Decentraland? Can you share what your land deed looks like? Thank you for reading and please thumbs up and subscribe before you go.
-NOVAX
Join the Block To The Future Telegram announcement channel
Follow Block To The Future on Twitter
Follow Block To The Future on Flote
Follow Block To The Future on LBRY / Odysee
