Thread by @punk6529

1/ Some Things I Am Learning Minting NFTs (an ongoing thread)

You cannot learn how to do things simply by watching others doing them.

You can only learn the reality, both technically and how you feel about it, by doing it yourself

2/ I have always "forced" myself to try new things - blogging, tweeting, VR goggles, BTC wallets, BTC nodes, NFTs.

I am always shocked when people write opinion columns like "I have proudly never used BTC but here are all the reasons I am sure it is bad"

3/ So in this spirit, I have minted progressively more complex NFT collections since last August:

✅6529 Intern
✅6529 Gradients
✅6529 Raw
✅The Meme Cards

I am finally feeling like I have learned enough to start having some initial opinions so here we go

4/ The single most surprising thing to me is how anxious I am when I mint.

I drop a 6529 Raw photograph and 30 seconds later I am refreshing the site to see if anyone bid.

Then the long wait until the end of the auction period ("will there be other bids this time???")

5/ It is impossible for me to overstate how irrational this is on multiple levels.

First of all, there is basically no chance that a 6529 NFT will fail to sell.

There are 385K of us here, mints are always priced low, someone will always mint it and I know this rationally.

6/ 2nd, as politely as possible, the revenue from the minting is a small fraction of the amount of money I have spent & will continue to spend on buying NFTs.

And my NFT / crypto life is further firewalled from my physical world spending.

So it is not financial stress.

7/ Third, it is not even my career on the line.

I think most people are here for the tweetstorms, for the open metaverse, not to judge me as, say, a photographer.

So a 6529 mint won't bomb and even if it does, it won't impact me financially or career-wise.

AND YET....

8/ ...I still get anxious.

The process of minting an NFT and saying "does anyone want to buy it?" is a form of vulnerability.

You somehow may feel "rejected" (by whom? by everyone?) if it does not sell.

It is not wholly rational, but it is a real thing.

9/ In which case, my mega-learning here is "have sympathy for the artists" because most have all this stress but magnified 100x.

They may not have a large audience, the minting revenue may pay their rent, and their career may be tied to how much people respond to their art.

10/ 2nd learning is that tooling to do a medium-complex mint, to manage allowlists, airdrops, communities, ongoing mints, is still fairly immature.

There are some good tools, but you need good people helping or you have to invest real time yourself to learn.

This will improve.

11/ Third learning (and this is an important one to me), I think I have proven something with The Memes drops.

*** It is possible to do a high demand drop at a low price without gas wars ***

Most teams say either "gas wars " or "dutch auctions/high price"

12/ Well I think it is clear that there is a third choice: "grind to build an allowlist"

Now this boils down to "do a lot of extra work in order to make a lot less money" so I understand why people aren't into it.

But know that it is a choice they are making.

13/ 4th: Fighting Sybil attacks (ensuring users are unique) is really hard.

For the first few cards we just built an allowlist manually.

Then we leaned on that allowlist for future drops.

But that leads to concentration, so we need new ideas. It is really tricky!

14/ 5th: We are still dependent on centralized services for identity and anti-sybil attacks.

Twitter accounts are a long way away from being perfect proxies for "real humans" but they are currently the best proxy we have.

This needs serious work.

15/ 6th: We still need work on better decentralized oracles.

Many programmable / dynamic / interactive ideas work easily with an API.

But APIs are centralized single points of failures, won't last long-term.

We need more work here too.

16/ Now that this thread is here and in place, I will add additional "learnings" and maybe also some more practical ideas that might be useful to others.

Also, everyone should mint and try to sell their mint at least once.

It will be a very enlightening experience 🙏🙏🙏