I Spent $1000 Making an NFT Project and Unfortunately Learned Some Things | Hacker News Reader

I Spent $1000 Making an NFT Project and Unfortunately Learned Some Things

hatingonoats.com

26 points0uobatchy20 comments

For somebody so full of technical vitriol (note: I've yet to form a serious opinion on Web3 so I'm no apologist) this person seems pretty green:

> Unbeknownst to me, modern filesystems write data in "blocks" of a predetermined size.

>Unfortunately, I had to rerun the generator script since I did not include a way to pick up where I left off if I ever stopped part-way through, but with the revolutionary optimization of removing the logging which somehow reduced the runtime from several days to several hours

> With my suspicions confirmed I turned to other cloud services to host the files. [...] And by "cloud services" I mean an AWS (Amazon Web Services) EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Instance. If you aren't aware it's just another computer managed by Amazon that I'm able to remote into.

> Then I had a realization: IPFS is a piece of shit. Retrieving a single file using IPFS takes minutes to do if it isn't cached by several nodes, which mine weren't since I had just added them to the network.

...then I read:

> Despite having a degree in Computer Science, this was my first time actually launching a website.

We can tell.

What's the issue with someone who's "pretty green" writing a post-mortem like this? If anything, I thought your comment held more vitriol than the article.

My comment has no value judgments, only an observation. They refer to a service as a "piece of shit" and sarcastically deride EC2.

Fair enough. For what it's worth, I interpreted that choice of words as an element of the casual writing style and the EC2 comment as a fairly accurate, albeit non-technical, description of the service. To each their own I guess.

> We can tell.

This is pure vitriol.

I couldn't tell. And I'm a frontend dev with over a decade of experience.

I know it wasn't really the point of the post, but this isn't the first time I've heard negative reports about IPFS. Which is a real shame, I've been following it for a few years now, it was one of the few crypto/blockchain products that actually seemed useful.

IPFS is not a crypto/blockchain product.

It's a distributed filesystem. It's good for what it is.

Everything can be criticized. You could say muscle cars are crap because at this price they should at least fly.

The author, thinking NFTs were stupid to begin with, spent a significant amount of time and money creating a reductio ad absurdum project of selling colors as NFTs, but nobody took the bait. A cynic gets his well-deserved comeuppance.

I would disagree.

He did everything reasonable. Spend a good amount of time and resources on this project.

He clearly acted on the thought I have had plenty of times: I should just start my own nft token and become rich.

I might have struggled way less from a pure technical standpoint but I would have tried it very similar.

This gives my mind a good feeling and I appreciate his effort.

It also explained to me how you create nfts.

Selling a color is not reasonable.

Admit it or not, most successful NFTs have artistic merit, and are capturing something authentic.

Although the NFT community has been shown to reward irony (especially post-irony), it has not been shown to reward cynicism.

People aren't going to line up to pay for spit in the face. They're not as dumb as the author assumed they would be.

> most successful NFTs have artistic merit, and are capturing something authentic.

you lost me here.

Phrased another way. They were created in good faith, not “people who buy NFTs are idiots so I can do whatever and they’ll still buy it.”

The top ten most traded collections last week are all knockoff cryptopunks (ranked 17), which itself is bulk-generated crap from a combination of templates.

It's hard to imagine a more cynical industry.

I mean... I feel like that's almost what good faith is right now in NFTs, but people can still tell when they're being condescended to.

In fact, I'd say the less substance something has the easier it is to tell the attitude of the people making it. As in all things the details matter. Those are the things that set apart genuine attempts from everything else.

Sooooo Cryptopunks are apparently quite expensive.

Have you seen them?

I do like the beeple stuff as he is a genuine curios interesting person.

But then again in the top nft list is a clock?

Tell me pls how the color idea is stupid while the punks are not? Or the clock?

Or those apes?

I dunno about the actual use or future of NFTs, but all this talk is now tempting me to mint some of my proko sketches. They look nice from a non-artist perspective, and I've done stupider things with a thousand bucks before

> …there is a very real possibility that when you start pushing to the network that a gas war you have nothing to do with will coincidentally start over some underpriced NFT or something even dumber and your transaction prices will spike up by 3000% and drain your wallet.

Such a practical currency.

He could have just skipped the IPFS part and used data URLs to render his colors. He would have probably saved on storage as well. The URLs could be generated dynamically.

The minting site doesn’t really sound all that satirical or in jest. This was the project that got absolutely shit on in the twitter quote tweets if I recall correctly

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