It's pretty easy to dunk on NFTs now. I'm keenly aware of the well groomed and self assured snarky take downs of NFTs from the twitterati, the technorati, the wine drenched art world, the uninformed and the semi-informed and all of them make me yawn.
Most of them focus on how artists are getting ripped off. It's a Ponzi scheme and only those who got in 1st are making any money at all. It's a 'crypto-bro grift, mannnn' and NFTs should be outlawed and while we're at we should outlaw crypto itself.
As I've noted elsewhere on this site for a while I've been interested in Identity management and I first focused on Blockcerts which was a lot of fun but not as well accepted as I liked. That is, the community wasn't as big as I needed to learn so it was difficult to learn from others. Blockcerts is still humming but I'm focusing elsewhere for identity management stuff. In particular kilt.io is a promising technology that allows for social KYC and I think has tremendous potential.
When I first heard of NFTs they captured my imagination for the same reason as BTC. I understood Bitcoin-I had bought BTC at 140$-not enough, of course, but I understood the technology. NFTs were different, though, the idea of unique, one off code, married to the blockchain married to digital content fired my imagination as it appeared to do with many other people. But....Boohoo there are problems with the new technology. So let's all throw ourselves on the ground and say we'll never use the bad, bad thing ever again.
What continues to interest me about NFTs is the fact that we have unique code that is immutable, secure, reliable, and decentralized that currently is only being used for the most trivial of things--bored apes, crypto kitties and punks yet-all the well groomed, self assured types are all ready to trash it before they've had a chance to see if it can replace how we currently take care of house and car titles, medical records, verified credentials etc. Surely we should give it a whirl on something more substantial than virtual land in a game before we pass judgment on it in perpetuity...right?
It always surprises me a little how many people have never read Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore-it's one of the few things I remember from business school and pretty easy to conceive of once one has been exposed to it.
Most of them focus on how artists are getting ripped off. It's a Ponzi scheme and only those who got in 1st are making any money at all. It's a 'crypto-bro grift, mannnn' and NFTs should be outlawed and while we're at we should outlaw crypto itself.
As I've noted elsewhere on this site for a while I've been interested in Identity management and I first focused on Blockcerts which was a lot of fun but not as well accepted as I liked. That is, the community wasn't as big as I needed to learn so it was difficult to learn from others. Blockcerts is still humming but I'm focusing elsewhere for identity management stuff. In particular kilt.io is a promising technology that allows for social KYC and I think has tremendous potential.
When I first heard of NFTs they captured my imagination for the same reason as BTC. I understood Bitcoin-I had bought BTC at 140$-not enough, of course, but I understood the technology. NFTs were different, though, the idea of unique, one off code, married to the blockchain married to digital content fired my imagination as it appeared to do with many other people. But....Boohoo there are problems with the new technology. So let's all throw ourselves on the ground and say we'll never use the bad, bad thing ever again.
What continues to interest me about NFTs is the fact that we have unique code that is immutable, secure, reliable, and decentralized that currently is only being used for the most trivial of things--bored apes, crypto kitties and punks yet-all the well groomed, self assured types are all ready to trash it before they've had a chance to see if it can replace how we currently take care of house and car titles, medical records, verified credentials etc. Surely we should give it a whirl on something more substantial than virtual land in a game before we pass judgment on it in perpetuity...right?
It always surprises me a little how many people have never read Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore-it's one of the few things I remember from business school and pretty easy to conceive of once one has been exposed to it.
The idea is that new ideas are accepted by innovators and early adopters pretty quickly but there's a chasm that has to be crossed if these new ideas are to be accepted by everyone else. New ideas aren't simply going to roll on through the population like Roman Centurions. Ideas have to prove their worth, individual markets have to be identified, fear of change, and risk of letting go of the status quo have to be addressed. I would argue that we're here with NFTs. In addition Gartner in 2021 had NFTs at the top of their 'Hype Curve'
And now we're on our way down the 'Trough of Disillusionment'--I love that BTW-it sounds like a Valley in some Star Wars world. Regardless, any way you slice it NFTs are not in vogue. They are 'No where, Mon frere' as Carlin would say. And that, in technology, is not a bad place to be, frankly. Now, the heat's off. We don't have to make anyone's garage door open when they bark twice, or make their bank account swell because they double clicked on an avatar. Now we can actually explore the real deal value of a technology. So, in that vein with the generous help of all kinds of internet resources I built an NFT marketplace to better understand the technologies involved.
There are a ton of choices to be made when it comes to NFTs/Web3/Blockchain stuff and the answers that you come up with are largely personal: what do you already know, what do you have access to regarding training, what can you get up and running the quickest, do you want something durable or do you want something ephemeral as a stepping stone to something else. I used Node.js as it's very widely used; it's also used on the front end and backend so I was (in theory) killing two birds with one stone. I used hardhat as it had a solid community in discord and was recommended in the course I took and followed on youtube. I used OpenZeppelin even though I initially thought I would go straight to the Solidity files-it made more sense once I got started to use OpenZeppelin b/c they had already done the heavy lifting of dealing with things like reentrancy hacks which I knew nothing about-but, hey, that's why I was doing this, to learn. I used tailwind for the CSS and React for the front end (very challenging I still have a hard time even making limited changes here) and a number of node modules for testing, install, and IPFS integration. I'll list all the files here as well as the YouTuber that can walk you through the process of developing the marketplace.
Essentially what you're doing is creating your own unique coin! How cool is that! If you want to you can follow the process all the way through to minting something to whatever blockchain you choose. The real benefit here, though, is that once you're done you'll no longer be a latte sipping, wine drenched, know nothing. And when someone starts to drone on about how NFTs are crappy and need to be outlawed you can knock their Chiclets out...metaphorically of course.
There are a ton of choices to be made when it comes to NFTs/Web3/Blockchain stuff and the answers that you come up with are largely personal: what do you already know, what do you have access to regarding training, what can you get up and running the quickest, do you want something durable or do you want something ephemeral as a stepping stone to something else. I used Node.js as it's very widely used; it's also used on the front end and backend so I was (in theory) killing two birds with one stone. I used hardhat as it had a solid community in discord and was recommended in the course I took and followed on youtube. I used OpenZeppelin even though I initially thought I would go straight to the Solidity files-it made more sense once I got started to use OpenZeppelin b/c they had already done the heavy lifting of dealing with things like reentrancy hacks which I knew nothing about-but, hey, that's why I was doing this, to learn. I used tailwind for the CSS and React for the front end (very challenging I still have a hard time even making limited changes here) and a number of node modules for testing, install, and IPFS integration. I'll list all the files here as well as the YouTuber that can walk you through the process of developing the marketplace.
Essentially what you're doing is creating your own unique coin! How cool is that! If you want to you can follow the process all the way through to minting something to whatever blockchain you choose. The real benefit here, though, is that once you're done you'll no longer be a latte sipping, wine drenched, know nothing. And when someone starts to drone on about how NFTs are crappy and need to be outlawed you can knock their Chiclets out...metaphorically of course.
eI was going to put all my files for the marketplace here on the site but there are Weebly size limitations that make that not doable. So, I've put the marketplace files on Github and linked them here. (I've uploaded everything EXCEPT the Node.js modules there're simply too many of them and it's really just a matter of building your environment. If you want them ping me via the contact page and I'll zip them up for you.)
They are plug and play for the most part-there's a caveat that comes with that though-it took me quite a while to get to the point where I could mint a .jpg on a test net on my local machine and that was simply following a recipe from Nader who, as far as I can tell, is easily the most knowledgeable Web3 guy out there. I also took a Udemy course that took Nader's course and dumbed it down thus the 'Kryptobirdz' name but I don't recommend the course as it didn't reference Nader sufficiently and as a result had very few people commenting/asking questions and built a very limited following. It was a little stale but it was what I ran into 1st. When I realized it was cribbed off of Nader's course I learned a lot more. My files are at the final stage of the process so if you want to start from the beginning do just that-if you want to see what it looks like near the end just copy paste my files once you build your environment. I did delete my private key-it was a burner but I didn't think it was wise to have it floating around. Everything else is as is and if you have issues feel free to reach out I'd love to chat about it as I think it's one of the coolest projects I've done in a while. If I get ambitious I may try to install it on the web vs. just locally-that'd be cool.
They are plug and play for the most part-there's a caveat that comes with that though-it took me quite a while to get to the point where I could mint a .jpg on a test net on my local machine and that was simply following a recipe from Nader who, as far as I can tell, is easily the most knowledgeable Web3 guy out there. I also took a Udemy course that took Nader's course and dumbed it down thus the 'Kryptobirdz' name but I don't recommend the course as it didn't reference Nader sufficiently and as a result had very few people commenting/asking questions and built a very limited following. It was a little stale but it was what I ran into 1st. When I realized it was cribbed off of Nader's course I learned a lot more. My files are at the final stage of the process so if you want to start from the beginning do just that-if you want to see what it looks like near the end just copy paste my files once you build your environment. I did delete my private key-it was a burner but I didn't think it was wise to have it floating around. Everything else is as is and if you have issues feel free to reach out I'd love to chat about it as I think it's one of the coolest projects I've done in a while. If I get ambitious I may try to install it on the web vs. just locally-that'd be cool.