Thanks, Mr Right-Click & Save
How to turn bros explaining you the world into an NFT
I love working in crypto. It's been three years, but man, I do get annoyed quite a bit with a certain type of guy I meet on dating apps. It can go two ways. Either it's the: "Hey, I'm holding a ton of SHIB, what do you think of it." "Are you also yield farming on (enter protocol with degen yield)?" way. In that case, alright, I will try to establish that I'm neither a YOLO trader nor a fan of memecoins because they do more harm than good — immediately establishing myself as responsible, classed boring. On that note, I sold my memecoin at a 2x; I could've made a 5x. Oh well, having been down 80% on it for most of the time, I figured that's the best I could get out of it. Not much Yolo Power in me on that one.
The other way it often goes is what also happened again recently. The conversation usually goes along the lines of:
Them: So what do you do?
Me: I work in Marketing for a Blockchain company.
Them: Oh, so you're dealing with cryptocurrencies and things like NFTs.
Me: Well, it's part of the industry, yes. I'm not really in the business of dealing, though.
Them: Something more or less eloquent about how this entire thing is just a giant bubble, a scam, a hotbed for criminal activity, and whatnot.
Usually, there is no use in trying to argue that position. All my "But isn't HSBC the bank of the cartels?" And how come Goldman Sachs had to pay a 5.4 billion fine for helping corrupt government officials last year — type arguments are lost on them.
Are centralized entities not having our best in mind? Unthinkable.
But this wasn't supposed to turn into a rant. This is an educational post — somewhat. And for me to give instructions to all the ladies (and guys of course) who maybe also get messages about NFTs explaining them, how they don't understand them — when in fact — they understand them a lot better than the Mr Right-Click Save on the other side.
When I got yet another such message, of course, I did the most obvious thing: Turn it into an NFT. Here's how I did it.
Ingredients:
- A screenshot of a Mr Right-Click Save conversation (also just generally someone explaining you how you don't understand crypto works too)
- Please re-name them, so there's no personal information in it. I did look up what counts as "Personal Identifiable Information." Calling them "Guy from [Dating App]" doesn't qualify as that. No GDPR violation today. 😉
- A Meta Mask Wallet
- IPFS — bear with me; I'll explain that in a second.
- A little Matic — because no screenshot of my conversations with guys is worth the current Ethereum gas fees. 🔥
Let's talk about IPFS.
One quick note ahead, this is nerd territory. I mean, I've always been a nerd; it just took me a few years to embrace that. Once you've got IPFS, if someone comes and tells you that they just store their files on their Google Drive, you can nicely drop that "That's so Web 2.0 of you". — and leave them confused.
Btw, I have not tried that yet, but this is how I'd imagine it going. If you do try, let me know how it goes.
Back to topic, IPFS. So we all know that sometimes websites go down due to the failure of a centralized service. At times the issue is on the side of the hosting server or because the DNS couldn't correctly resolve the address. In some countries, it can also be Internet censorship (Try setting your VPN to China or Belarus and see for yourself).
Shutting down a centralized service? Easy.
How to prevent it? Decentralization.
IPFS is short for Interplanetary File System and was built to ensure a reliable, distributed network to host content. Instead of relying on just one central hosting provider, IPFS connects thousands of computers worldwide that host content. Unlike links on the WWW, IPFS links point users directly to the content stored on various computers worldwide.
You might think that some files are indeed way too big to be stored on your computer. And, of course, you're right. Files, when uploaded, are split into chunks, distributed across peers, and assigned a hash so they can easily be located.
While it sounds awfully similar to blockchain, IPFS isn't based on it. It's a distributed network of computers that serves content in a peer-to-peer fashion to the end-user. Before adding anything to IPFS, you better be sure. Like blockchain, you can't change contents because that would mean changing the hash itself. However, you can add a new version of a file and connect it to the previous one. So you might think twice before uploading embarrassing photos.
Now that you know what IPFS does, let's move to the fun part: running IPFS.
Setting up IPFS
Don’t worry. It really is easy. I managed to do it in just under 15 minutes. Note, I’m a Windows user, so that’s all I can cover. But you can find the instructions on how to run it on Mac and Linux here.
- Head to IPFS' Github Desktop Download page.
- Find the file that ends in .exe and download it. There is only one.
- Run the .exe file and pick if it should be only available to yourself or also other users on the computer.
- After picking the install location, hit install.
- Voila, once finished, you're all good to go.
IPFS Desktop
When you open it, it should look something like the above. With the desktop version, you can check your status, manage files, check out your peers (which is oddly satisfying ngl), and visit the "Merkle Forest" — even though I am yet to understand what precisely that means 🌲.
If you got some essential files that you never want to lose, feel free to use IPFS to store them. Just click on files -> import -> select file
Within just a few seconds, it should've been imported to IPFS. Congrats, you've stored a file the Web 3.0 way. 🙌
But anyway, I kind of strayed off the path here. Because most NFT marketplaces will store your file for you in IPFS. But we'll get back to IPFS in the end, so it wasn't entirely pointless ;)
Mint the NFT
I used opensea for this, and I didn't bother creating a collection (yet) — but I might well consider if enough people send me screenshots.
Oh, and you will need a little MATIC in your Meta Mask. It's trading on a lot of exchanges, so I have faith that you can get your hands on it. If not, for just a 10% commission, I'm more than happy to help you — also, I will question your financial judgment if you do accept this offer.
Equipped with Matic in your Wallet and logged into Meta Mask (note, connect to the Polygon Network using the drop-down next to the colourful circle on the top right of your Meta Mask), head to Opensea and click on create. Then you get a view like the below.
Oh, and the D in there that's my password manager going wild. Upload the file, give it a name, go wild on the description, ignore all the traits unless you want to add any (I don't know, maybe if this becomes a collection, one could start adding traits), pick the supply, and you're nearly there.
Don't forget to pick the right blockchain. In this case, we want to use Polygon (Matic) — ain't nobody got $200 ETH gas for such an experiment.
Once you've made sure all looks good, click create. Your Meta Mask will pop up and ask you to confirm.
A few moments later, you've minted an NFT. 🎉 It now shows up in your Wallet in collected.
But we're not yet done. As a legit NFT Queen, we also want to freeze the metadata. Because if people can change the metadata, they can technically change the entire NFT, which isn't the point. And we're too legit for such business anyway.
Go to your item, click on "edit," and then scroll down all the way to where it says "Freeze Metadata."
Move the bar to the right, and then below, a "Freeze" button appears. You only get to do this once so, enjoy the freeze ❄️
But Opensea also wants to cover their bases, so you get another popup to confirm that you truly understand what this means.
Confirm, and then sign the transaction that'll pop up in your Meta Mask with long af string of numbers and characters.
When you check your item a few moments later, it will say that its metadata is frozen.
Okay, now let's close the loop by hosting the entire NFT on our own IPFS instance — because we can.
Adding your NFT to your IPFS
To get the data we need, click on the "Frozen" next to metadata. This will open up a new tab.
In this tab, you find all the metadata of your NFT as hosted in IPFS. You can add that entire set to your IPFS desktop.
Just copy the part behind ipfs.io, so it starts with /ipfs/charactersalad…Open your IPFS Desktop, go to files, click on Import and choose from IPFS.
Copy in the path, and now you're one of the hundreds of computers ensuring that your NFT's metadata will be available. Quite cool, isn't it?
And if you want to add the image file, that's a bit more tricky but also doable (I mean, I figured it out somehow).
Copy the string of letters from behind ipfs:// in the image URL and leave out the /image. Then you type into the browse field on IPFS desktop /ipfs/the string of letters you've just copied and browse.
So it looks something like: /ipfs/bafybeiavtnfr3fynnocby27ygwghoc7hmqj5bppctrxf5k3qgqon5jdlem/
If you did it right, you'll be shown the image file that is your NFT. To complete this whole exercise, click on the three dots next to the image and pick "Copy CID". This copies the path to the image.
Head back to the files page, click on Import, choose "From IPFS", and then paste the CID you just copied. Import, and now you also host the image file. You might need to use your local gateway to look at it, which will open it up in a browser window for you.
Btw, if you buy any other NFTs, you can also import them to your IPFS so you'll never lose access to them. Isn't that awesome?
I just realized that turned out quite long, but we covered a lot of ground here. If you now also run IPFS, hit me up, and we can peer-connect.
If you have some annoying guys (or people — we wanna be inclusive here) in your DMs explaining you how you know nothing about crypto, and NFTs, even though you have minted some and probably know more about the Future of France than they ever will, you're not alone.
Oh, and of course, if you want to see my NFT, it's here. ⭐️
And apparently, it’s thanksgiving, so, in this instance, I want to express gratitude to Mr Right-Click and Save because, at least now, I know how to use IPFS and how to mint an NFT on Opensea using Polygon.
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