NFT Art, Blockchain, Sustainability, a Field Report.
What I just learned about NFT art, blockchain, and pollution.
How do you deal with new challenges and technologies as a designer who wants to stay on the cutting edge? You can’t always just watch nice YouTube explainer videos; you have to do it. So, I decided to enter the field of NFT art, because there are a lot of things in it that seem very fascinating and yet so complex and difficult to understand. If you don’t know yet what NFT art is, you’ll become aware when you hear that a jpeg by the artist Beeple was sold for more than 69 million dollars at Christie’s auction house. Now awake?
I made it my business to create an NFT artwork and offer it on an NFT art platform. Not with the goal to become financially rich, but with the goal to become rich in experience. I had no idea until then and just started and it turned out to be not as easy as one might expect nowadays. This is not supposed to be a manual because I just went by trial and error. So, all professionals please close two eyes 😉 and all others should certainly not understand this as a tutorial.
This is just my experience and not a tutorial you can rely on
The first surprise came when I realized that you first must spend money to earn money. You need some Bitcoins (in this case Etherum) to pay the fees for an NFT auction. OK, so I did a little research and then signed up with Coinbase. This is a platform where you can buy and sell Bitcoin. This is quite complex because it works like a bank, is secure and you have to go through all the verification steps.
Now I was looking for a platform on which I can offer my super artwork. Then I came across Rarible and wanted to throw it on the world market as an auction. Hm, then I noticed that I need a wallet to store my bitcoins — crap so again a short research and I installed a wallet. In my case I it’s the Coinbase wallet and again I had to verify, link the accounts and then move the bitcoins from Coinbase to the wallet. It wasn’t easy and didn’t really work because it always transferred smaller amounts, then again it didn’t. For me as UX designer it was a horror but after many small transactions I had a few dollars in my Coinbase wallet. No idea how this finally works.
Back to Rarible and I created an auction. It worked quite well until I wanted to finally release it final. A few days and weeks I tried it again and again, but I had constant problems with the wallet and I just didn’t made it. I was really disappointed that I cannot do it. Later I had the idea not to try it with Firefox but with another browser and boom — my auction was online. Normally I’m quicker to change the browser but I was so busy with all the back and forth that I had simply forgotten to check.
Now I thought that I write down my experiences times and if someone thinks he is too stupid for it — No, I blamed my monitor (which can do nothing for it) with some swear words really and I fought really hard. I assume that this will be easier in the future but currently I find it less intuitive and not so easy.
If you want to have a look at my auction, here’s the link. But please don’t take it too serious 😉 .
NFT Art and sustainability
Finally, a few words about Bitcoin, NFT Art and sustainability. It is frightening how much energy the whole system around Bitcoin consumes and we definitely shouldn’t support it. I have now also contributed my small part but how should I learn if I do not do it?
As always, there are alternatives that are unfortunately still in their infancy but have great approaches to ensure sustainability. That’s why I decided to mine a new cryptocurrency on my cell phone that doesn’t rely on huge computer farms but on the dynamics of your personal network. I think it’s a great idea, it costs absolutely nothing, and your cell phone doesn’t drain due to any background activities. The new currency is called PI and is a project of Stanford University and could revolutionize the crypto market. Clearly, you can’t buy anything from this currency now, but now in the early beta phase you are currently mining huge amounts of coins that can become valuable if the currency is successful.
PI is the first project in the world which can mine bitcoin on a smartphone without any computing or battery power. In the current phase, you can only join by invitation, then you build your network and thereby you mine more. You mine for free from the first second and you can increase your mining factor by inviting others to your network and they mine too — that’s it. The earlier you join the more you mine and the more people worldwide join PI the lower your mining factor will be, That’s the whole trick to increase your value — without the need for computer farms but with a clever concept.
If you want to try this too, just go here via my invitation link, download app (No battery consumption!) and sign up with my invitation code:
BeeDee66
Invitation link:
Now you can decide wehther you are curious enough to take this journey.
