Thread by @Devotedwear

Alright degens, time to kick off 2022 with a discovery in the historical NFTs land.
Ps, this one starts from 2011! 👀

1/15 🧵

#HistoricalNFTs #NFT

To those who don't know, namecoin is the 1st altcoin that was created back in 2011, a fork of bitcoin.
It's basically a decentralised name service.

Some of you may be familiar of nmc(namecoin) assets like Twitter Eggs & Blockheads that are being traded via @EmblemVault

2/15

Before we go further, some of you may be wondering whether nmc assets/domains are NFTs or not.

I'll let ser Vitalik answer that question for you.

3/15

Now, back to the discovery, almost all of the Namecoin assets that had an media file like an image attached in their metadata, have already been registered, like Eggs.

However there's still a lot of unregistered assets out there, some historically significant, some not.

4/15

Assets like TEST & UMBRELLA from xcp have shown us that an asset necessarily doesn't need to have a media file in to to be valuable, there are many ways via which significance of an asset can be portrayed.

5/15

So, today at about 5:30pm UTC, I got a dm from ser @n11stic saying that he has been digging the nmc chain and has found something quite interesting.

Now, there have been many assets created on the NMC chain, starting from the 1st one ever, d/bitcoin, April, 2011.

6/15

Off these assets, many meaningful ones have already been renewed, and some others were left, for example: d/xn--8vh1d9ftiaa
Now, this seemed gibberish to me, until today.

As I chatted with @n11stic, he reminded me of the concept of Punycodes

7/15

Those who don't know, Punycode is a type of encoding language, usually used for internet hostnames.
Now, when I ran the above example xn--8vh1d9ftiaa (which I thought to be gibberish) in a punycode converter, it gave me this -

┣▇▇▇═─

8/15

My mind was blown into pieces! The fact that people back in 2011 were using an encoding language to turn symbols, emojis etc into the blockchain just made me go 🤯

And, there are many of these available right now! (No, me & ser @n11stic haven't registered most on purpose)

9/15

Now, let's get down to how you can register these.

1. Open namecoin.org/download/betas/
2. Download the Electrum wallet
The easiest version to run is -
Electrum-NMC v4.0.0b0 for Windows (Installer)
It's best to use a windows system here.

10/15

3. List of all of these assets - namebrow.se/search/xn--/
4. Find the ones that are still "expired"
5. Decode them - punycoder.com
6. Open Electrum, go to View - Show Address
7. Click on Address tab, copy the address, load some nmc from an exchange like CoinEx

11/15

Or dm your namecoin addy, I may send some.
7. Now, with nmc loaded on the wallet, click on Buy names tab on Electrum, enter the name that's expired that you wanna renew - check name availability - Register name - ok - enter password.

And voilla, you own an NMC asset.

12/15

Now, you can use EV to trade these assets on eth.
Do note, it takes about 30 mins or so for a name to renew.

Hats off to @n11stic for having the foresight to finding these assets. We on purpose have only renewed a small amount and left others for everyone else.

13/15

Now, will these have value?
The answer is, I don't know, only the market will tell us over time however the fact that NMC is super cheap (1$) & by definition these are NFTs, so why not get some 2011-15 assets?
Just for the history of it.

Note, this is not financial advice
14/15

DYOR.

Consider this as an opportunity to attain some super interesting cryptographic relics for super cheap prices, and nothing else.
A small gesture of sending love back to the historical NFT community 🤍

Also, nmc is a chain of suprises, who knows what else is there 👀

15/15