I find that I only really understand something when I do it myself. This applies to all new things in life but at the moment I’m still trying to get my head around the constant development of crypto.

I have been trading cryptocurrencies, trying to get the feel of buying low and selling on the way up. Everything is converted to equivalent values in US $, making it easy to see when the value has risen. However, this ignores the problem of fluctuating value of the $, so it would be best to find something else to use as a baseline.

There is nothing that doesn’t fluctuate in value, so I just stick to the $, this is best until bitcoin stabilises, probably sometime in 2023.

My newest experiment is in looking at NFTs. Non Fungible Token. As I see it, the difference between an NFT and a Bitcoin is that each NFT is numbered and unique while bitcoin is seen as more generic. You can own (control) a bitcoin, but no one really cares which one it is.

To try to get my head around NFTs I decided to create a work of art and put it up for sale as an NFT. NFTs are built on the etherium blockchain so I had to work from an etherium wallet. I used Metamask.

I had to save the artwork (a sketch of a new type of car) onto the blockchain and put it up for sale on an online market place. It sounds easy and is fairly straightforward. However, nothing on the public blocckchain is free, so you have to pay (in gas, the payment system in etherium) for it. It is worth choosing the time of day as the price in gas depends on how busy the blockchain is at any moment.

Thats’s my first experience of NFTs, I will now experiment with making more and maybe selling some,