Buy This NFT Column on the Blockchain! - The New York Times

NYT's Kevin Roose writes "a column about NFTs that is, itself, being turned into an NFT and put up for auction".

Good definition of an NFT: "digital collectible item stamped with a unique bit of code that serves as a permanent record of its authenticity and is stored on a blockchain... can be bought and sold ... can’t be deleted or counterfeited. That makes it useful for artists... to create limited edition digital goods".

Essentially brings the world of art and collecting to the digital realm, where copies were the bane of artists everywhere. "Scarcity — the quality that gives offline art its value — was hard to replicate online... Creators can even attach a royalty agreement to their NFTs, entitling them to a cut of the profits every time their assets are resold".

Roose's process:

• set up a digital wallet to hold his token & any cryptocurrency made from selling it, using "browser extension called MetaMask and set up an empty wallet for Ethereum"
• chose Foundation to be the NFT marketplace, where the auction is held
• created an account on Foundation and linked it to his wallet
• "upload an image of my column to ... IPFS"
• "mint a token mapped to that file... generating a unique cryptographic signature ... on the Ethereum blockchain, marking the file I uploaded as the real one". While minting was eay, "adding it to the Ethereum blockchain ... requires paying a “gas fee” — a kind of congestion tax ... — and listing my token required two transactions: one to mint the token and another to generate the code that runs the auction... gas fees to create a single NFT can exceed $100, although many are closer to $50"
• listed the NFT for sale, setting a min. acceptable price in Ether. "The auction will run for 24 hours after the reserve price is met, though more time gets added if people bid in the last 15 minutes"
• the token is automatically transferred to the winner's Ethereum wallet
• many NFT sellers add perks, so he did.

It sold for 350.00 ETH ($1,456,945.00).

"Some of the NFT buzz is shallow hype, no doubt ... full of scammers and get-rich-quick hustlers ... but NFT fans think the technology could be used to keep track of all kinds of goods in the future — titles to houses and cars, business contracts and wills."

For media, "Digital subscriptions are one way for creators to take back control of their own destinies. NFTs could be another.... erode the economic dominance of social media middlemen and give more power back to the people who are producing creative and interesting things "