How to Buy NFTs of Virtual Art Made by AI Artists Created by AI With ETH

... is a title to a post I never guessed I'd write even 12 months ago. But here we are. As to what the F it all actually means:

• NFT, for non-fungible tokens, are virtual items of perceived value (art, keepsakes, etc) bought and sold on a blockchain.
• Virtual art made by AI artists, in this case, refers to art made by "Taylor" and "Alejandro", two AI artists created by August Rosedale for his Mirage Gallery.
• ETH, for Ethereum, is a blockchain-based cryptocurrency that's theoretically more environmentally friendly than Bitcoin, but still only in theory.

They're being sold on Mintable, a community-run NFT marketplace. And if that's still somewhat intimidating but you're interested in the fairly delirious buzz around NFT, here are step-by-step instructions for buying the art of Taylor and Alejandro -- or for that matter, any other item on Mintable -- from August Rosedale himself. 

First, however, please caveat the hell out of your emptor purchasing decision beforehand. For instance, read this tweet thread highly critical of NFT's long-term fortunes.

That to one side, here's young Rosedale:

The first thing needed is to be using the Chrome browser. 

On Chrome, install the "Metamask" extension and open that up and make an account. (When you install Metamask it should automatically open a new tab to make an account.) 

Assuming you don't already have a wallet, click "Create a wallet", and make a password. 

Next it'll show you the 'secret backup phrase'. Write the phrase down somewhere safe in case you ever lose access to the account and need to get back in. 

Now your wallet is all set up and you'll see that you have 0 ETH in it. 

There are two easy ways to get some ETH (Ethereum) into your wallet:

The first option is to buy it with Wyre. In order to do that just click 'Buy' and then click "Continue to Wyre". 

The other way to buy ETH for your account is if you already have a Coinbase account, you can buy the ETH with Coinbase and then send it to your Metamask wallet. 

You do this by clicking "Buy/Sell" on Coinbase, then change it to ETH and buy however much you want. Then click "Send/Receive" on Coinbase, and then enter in how much ETH you want to send. Make sure you have at least $200 USD in your Metamask account. 

To copy your Metamask wallet, click the Metamask extension and click "Account 1" and it should copy your address. Paste that address in the "To" field on the Coinbase transfer. 

Once you do this, it'll take a few minutes for the ETH to show up in the Metamask account. Now you are all ready to buy your first NFT! 

If you want to get involved with Mirage Gallery and support one of the pieces from the AI generated artists, go to this link here. 

Once you are there, click one of the Early Works that you like. It should open a new page with that artwork. 

From that page, click "Buy Now" and Mintable will ask you to create an account if you don't have one already. 

Once you make your account, go back to the link and get to the page of the artwork you want. Click "Buy Now" and then "Connect a wallet" if you haven't connected Metamask yet. 

Once you click "Connect a Wallet", Metamask should open up and should say "Connect with MetaMask", click "Next" and then click "Connect". 

Now Metamask should close and you'll be on the checkout for the Early Work. Click "Proceed to Pay", which will open Metamask again. 

When Metamask pops up, it might have some outrageous gas fee like $3k or $4k, if this happens, don't worry, it is just a bug and means that you don't have enough funds in your Metamask account. So add more ETH to your Metamask wallet if this happens. 

If you have a few hundred dollars in there, you'll see a more believable gas fee. Right now the gas fees have been super high because of all of the transactions happening on the Ethereum blockchain. It is common for it to be somewhere between $50-$100 for the gas fee to purchase and NFT right now. This will hopefully change in the future when ETH2 is released. 

If you have enough funds in your Metamask, you can now click "Confirm". 

Congratulations, you bought your first NFT! It'll take some time to process but you can check by clicking the Metamask extension and seeing if the transaction says "pending” or not. Once the transaction goes through, the NFT is officially in your wallet and you now own it. 

There are numerous ways to look at the NFTs you own. The easiest is to go to opensea.io and paste your metamask wallet address into the search bar and you should be able to see the NFTs that you own. 

To see just the Mirage Gallery pieces that you own, you can go to miragegallery.ai and click "Collector's Login" and create an account and view your artworks (it'll connect to metamask). 

The last way is to go onto Mintable and go to your account and click "My NFTs". This will also allow you to download the full resolution image of the Early Work. You can also download the full resolution file through the Mirage Gallery site as well.

You can tell NFT is right about to go mainstream because it's so easy!

Above: Art by "Taylor" and "Alejandro", respectively.

Comments

[Aleena]

An investigation into the technical implementation of NFTs discovered that they are simple JSON documents that contain a uri to a server that hosts the resource. NFTs cannot be altered once created and there is no guarantee that the server hosting will always host the resource.

In fact, there are NFTs that have been sold whose server has dropped the resource already. For more information, check this twitter thread. https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372163423446917122

[sirhc desantis]

Best. NWNotes. Evah =^^=

[Wagner James Au]

Aleena: Yes, that's the thread that I linked to, very important to read before deciding whether or not to jump into this.

[Sean R. Lynch]

Energy consumption will always be limited by supply and demand, so the energy consumption of blockchains will always be a function of the value of mining vs the price of electricity. If the value of mining somehow gets high enough to cause significant disruptions to electricity supply, we'll have much bigger problems because it'll mean fiat currencies have collapsed.

While I'm pretty skeptical of the long-term value of NFTs in general, virtual worlds seem like a natural fit. NFTs could act like designer labels that cannot be forged.