Well, maybe I’m not thinking so much about converting one of my books into an NFT — that just seems too futile and heartbreaking an endeavor — but I am still thinking about and trying to understand this whole nutty NFT/cryptocurrency thing.
So, yeah, a while ago I posted an entry that basically said I wasn’t interested in the NFT thing so much because of the massive amount of power required just to mint one NFT because NFTs are minted/dependent on the Ethereum blockchain, which, in order to validate each block on the chain, requires a massively massive amount of power — not as massively massive as Bitcoin, mind you, but massively massive nonetheless… which is less than healthy for our less than healthy environment.
Yeah, I love runon sentences so what?
Anyway… long story short… or, in today’s parlance, tl;dr: This whole NFT/cryptocurrency thing is all kinds of confusing and a bit depressing.
But it wasn’t too long after I published that foresaid entry that I learned that, since December 2020, Ethereum has been in the process of transitioning to a much more energy efficient process to validate its blockchain, one that, once the transition is complete sometime in Q2 2022, should make the new validation process almost 100% more energy efficient than the old one…
Yeah… so since that last forementioned entry I’ve been doing a bit of research into the whole blockchain/cryptocurrency/metaverse thing and, while a very dark and thick cloud of confusion securely engulfs my head regarding it all, I am slowly beginning to find it all quite amazing.
And more than a little bit ridiculous.
Especially the amount of money folks are willing to pay for some — a very small percentage — of these NFTs.
I mean, this beeple dude is making a crypto killing with his art.
And, yes, I do think his multimillion dollars NFTs are pretty cool and worthy of the art label.
But the amount of money being shelled out for the CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club and other nutty “art” collections is just nutty.
IMHO.
But hey, who am I to judge what the nutty future has to shove down our throats, you know?
Anyway…
I have taken the plunge and jumped into the cryptocurrency mining game. It’s actually pretty easy to do.
I think the whole metaverse thing is just going to explode hugely and in a very short time so I decided to mine the coin of Decentraland, one of the sites vying for metaverse dominance.
For perspective, just to buy a plot of virtual land in Decentraland, you need to be able to shell out a cool $10K… but first you’d have to convert that legacy money known as dollars into MANA, Decentraland’s currency, in order to purchase the land (which is a process — money conversion that is — that is very confusing with the whole wallet thing but which I’m slowly beginning to grasp).
For further perspective, recently a virtual real estate company just purchased a $4.3M, that’s M as in million, plot of land in a competing metaverse site called The Sandbox, outdoing a not quite as recent $2M Decentraland purchase…
Yeah… nutty.
Ergo, I joined a mining pool and I am now mining me some MANA at unmineable.com. If you want to give it a go, use my referral code and it will decrease your payout costs and earn me a little extra coin.
Referral code: 04kp-cr5c
Send me an email through the contact page if you have any questions or need help getting started mining and we can schedule a video chat. The mining thing is quite easy, once you get the whole confusing wallet thing covered.
Anyway, I’ll keep you posted on my nutty NFT travels and travails.
And if you have any NFT/crypto skin in the game, let us know/share a link with us so we can check it out.
#staysafeoutthereandgetvaccinateddamnit