Since there were no cameras in George Washington’s day, a person’s image was either sculpted or painted. Portraits of our nation’s first president often showed him standing behind a desk with one arm behind his back. This led to a commonly held, yet easily debunked, belief that the phrase “it’ll cost you an arm and a leg” came from artists charging a price for the painting not based on size or number of subjects, but by how many limbs were to be painted. Not true, but it makes for a good story.
Today, artwork is being turned into nonfungible tokens or NFTs and purchased with cryptocurrency. In layman’s terms, an NFT is a kind of digital collectible item that is stamped with a unique bit of code. These collectibles can be bought and sold. Society is becoming more virtual, especially after this past year. NFTs are incredibly alluring. An artist by the name Beeple, sold a tokenized collection of his art at an online auction at Christie’s for more than $69 million! So when I read that a journalist wrote a column about NFTs and turned the column itself into an NFT and sold it for $560,000, I decided I wanted in on the action!
The first step was to go online and type in “How To Create and Sell Your First NFT.”
So, I need to set up an Ethereum Wallet, purchase a small amount of Ethereum and connect my wallet to an NFT Marketplace. Sounds easy enough…
- Go to the app store.
- Search and download Coinomi.
- Open the app and write down your recovery sentence of 24 words.
- Set a strong password.
- Add ethereum to your wallet.
- Use your receiving address to receive ether.
Wait a minute! The process of "minting," as it’s known in crypto-speak, and then selling an NFT can cost more than $1,000! That sounds like an arm and a leg to me!