I plan to issue 2100 Friendship Cards as a small NFT experiment. The reason for choosing this number is also very simple. We know that Satoshi Nakamoto set an upper limit of 21 million in the Bitcoin Bitcoin experiment, so the number 2100 is a very delicate number in everyone's mind. The minting limit per wallet will be set to 14, does anyone know why I set it this way?
Some friends said that the 14th anniversary of the birth of Bitcoin, the end of Bitcoin block incentives in 2140, 14 in Chinese means a lifetime, and some said that Ethereum was born in 2014, etc. Some of them noticed the law of 2100 / 14 = 150 Dunbar's number Dunbar's number , refers to the upper limit of the number of people who can maintain a close interpersonal relationship with a certain person. I believe that 150 key nodes can leverage countless possibilities. As long as there is a dream, everything can come true.
General programmers like to use multiples of 2 such as 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 and so on. And I also consider myself an algorithmic generation artist, and I am quite sensitive to color spaces. You will see the expression of hexadecimal 00-FF in friendship cards. Regarding the upper limit of each casting, I chose the perfect number of 14 / 2 = 7, which allows a maximum of 7 castings at a time, which means that you have the opportunity to encounter 7 versions.
Crypto artist @fearless_zi has been creating the Crypto Portrait Gallery series since May 2021, and gave me a Crypto lxl in the new year of 2022, a very vivid pixel work. He also customized works for Liu Ren, Wu Sheng, Feng Tang and others. Many people mistakenly thought it was some kind of AIGC and wanted to generate an avatar, but in fact it was all the pixels he clicked out by himself. My friendship card will be based on this second creation.
The most difficult part of issuing NFT for many people is not the work itself, but the concept of Metadata. Those who don't know may think it has something to do with the Metaverse universe. I first noticed that Metadata is in the photos taken by digital cameras, such as camera model, exposure, resolution, shooting time and even latitude and longitude, etc. are all part of the metadata. The NFT specification also introduces the concept of metadata.
Many projects use the HashLips Art Engine open source project to synthesize images, generate metadata, and adjust scarcity, which saves a lot of time and labor costs for publishers. In addition, there are third-party tools such as https://d.tools, https://bueno.art, https://nft-generator.art, https://nft-inator.com, etc., which can handle NFT metadata. That's half done.
Get your files and metadata ready, and publish your assets online. How to anchor the relationship with an NFT on the blockchain? CryptoKitties, the first project based on the ERC-721 standard, actually points resources to the project's own web server. CryptoPunks, which appeared before the term NFT, extended a hash value based on the ERC-20 standard to verify asset relationships off-chain.
The verification method of cypherpunks is very primitive. At first, they just put the punks.png file containing 10,000 cypherpunk avatars through the sha256 operation and recorded the hash value on the chain. to confirm who an avatar belongs to. Later, someone assisted them to encode the elements and write them to Ethereum, and then construct them into SVG for output. In fact, these are two different contracts.
I have seriously considered the matter of uploading pixel paintings to the chain. By extracting image pixels and compressing them through RLE run-length encoding, common PFP works can be controlled at about 512 bytes. After that, restoring the SVG vector format can still be 3.5 times less than the PNG image format. Nouns DAO is a very good project on the chain, but it also has its limitations. After all, the information that can be expressed on the chain is really limited, and the complexity is relatively high and cannot be popularized.
Except for special cases such as CryptoPunks and Nouns, most NFT projects use off-chain storage solutions such as HTTP or IPFS to solve metadata and file resource access. The ERC-721 standard provides the TokenURL method to return the address corresponding to the Token ID. Traditional web services may be inaccessible, and the IPFS protocol has no incentive layer, so it can only use third-party Pin services like CDN.
The choice of the chain can be described as the benevolent see benevolence, and the wise see wisdom. My judgment is relatively simple: the developer wins the world. On Ethereum, there is the NFT prehistoric project Cypherpunk issued based on the ERC-20 standard, and the first NFT project Obsessed Cat issued based on the ERC-721 standard, with various revisions, as well as ERC-1155, Atomic standards, etc. There are many developers in the ecological environment, and other EVM compatible chains can also be selected from the perspective of cost.
As a member of the DMC (@datamallcoin) decentralized storage service ecosystem and a third-party application company of the CYFS (@CYFSTech) network protocol: Fog Works (@fogworksinc), the co-founder of Fog Works (@fogworksinc), naturally has different opinions on the issue of data storage. In the short-term, HTTP and IPFS protocols can be chosen for compatibility, while in the long-term, requirements such as stability and high availability must be met, and NFT holders should have the right to manage data.
NFT is essentially a Deed contract, just like a real estate certificate is a proof of equity in a house. As a Friendship Cards NFT holder, this friendship is recorded on the blockchain in the form of Code is Law. Friendship also has distances. According to the Six Degrees of Separation theory, the social relationship that is more helpful to work and career development is not a "strong connection" but a "weak connection".
Will the 2100 pieces be distributed to those friends in the end? According to the casting conditions, there will be at least 150-300 independent holders in the initial stage, no white list, no worries about scientists, and free casting is completely open. I will establish a telegram group and a WeChat group to benefit the holders, whether it is an airdrop or a whitelist, or a priority experience opportunity for a scarce product, just like the Clubhouse of the previous year or the current ChatGPT.