I Bought Another Alberg 30
I paid too much for this one.
I purchased ‘Sabrina’, the 1966 Alberg 30 #158 over twenty years ago and spent the next four years refitting her while racing and sailing all over the Chesapeake Bay. Just about the moment that I thought I was done with the upgrades, I took a new job and moved to a landlocked city ‘down south’ and sold Sabrina before I left. She was a great boat.
Last month I flew out of Reagan National Airport and on the way to the airport I popped into the marina where she is kept just south of Alexandria on the Potomac River. Sabrina was in the second slip by the parking lot. She still is a pretty boat.
I haven’t told anyone before this blog post but… I bought another Alberg 30!
My second Alberg 30 is an NFT and she’s anchored on a blockchain.
Blockchain?
Very briefly, blockchain is a technology that has been around for decades and it allows people to very securely store digital records while at the same time allowing the public to access those records. Any edits and changes to the records by someone with the “secret keys” to make changes create a new link in the chain and those are also recorded in the same secure and public way. Many blockchain applications are internal to an organization and are not visible to the public.
Insurance policies, real estate transactions, financial transactions, health records, voting records and many, many other types of digital records are stores on blockchains. It’s a great way to store data safely and track any changes over time.
NFT stands for a Non-Fungible Token and they are a type of record that can live on a blockchain.
A property record is a good example of a use case for non-fungible tokens. Non-fungible simply means that the record is unique. Think about a property deed for a house. Hopefully, there is only one deed per house! Every time someone sells or buys a house, someone researches the history of the house by viewing the deeds and property records at a courthouse and if the house is owned by the person who is selling it after the research checks the deed, then the buyer purchases the house and a new deed is created. You can look at the current deed and see the owner and go back in time to find the previous deed and the one before that and the one before that, etc.
With a deed on the blockchain, the data can be stored in the non-fungible token format and if you wanted to search the history, you’d just look at the previous link in the chain and work your way backwards. Any edits to the real estate NFT deed would be shown in the data, online and there would be no need to go research the property records at the courthouse anymore because the data is stored on a blockchain that could be accessed by anyone with a computer if they have permission to do so.
My company, PlantsMap.com is working on a project minting NFTs that store all of the information about an individual tree. Specifically we store all of the ecologically beneficial information about how much water the tree filters, how that tree contributes to savings on in cooling costs to nearby buildings in the summertime, how much CO2 it removes from the atmosphere and how much carbon it stores. We can tell you with reasonable accuracy how valuable in real US Dollars a single tree planted on a street in a city or in your front yard is to that community or your neighborhood. We can calculate how a single tree, or a forest of trees, sequesters carbon and equate that information to a Carbon Credit.
All digital records of importance that need security, change tracking and public visibility will be stored using blockchain technology in the future.
Art can be turned into an NFT and stored on a blockchain. Today, at least at the moment, digital art is the most visible use of NFTs. Sites like Voice.com allow artists to create digital artwork and turn them into NFTs and sell them to their fans. Many people collect digital artwork. Digital artwork is heavily used in the online gaming industry where players can accumulate a score, or points to be used to upgrade their clothing, weapons, virtual houses or methods of transportation. These items are regularly created and bought and sold in the form of digital NFTs on a blockchain and very often purchased using cryptocurrency which is another type of use case for blockchains.
Back to sailing…
My Alberg 30 is a piece of pixel art that has been minted (ie: created) as an NFT and stored on a blockchain. Since it is an NFT, there is only one official copy of my Alberg 30 artwork. Someone may screenshot my Alberg 30 artwork but only I own the NFT original art and the fact that I own it and all of the details of the transaction are stored inside of the data held inside the NFT. Anyone can view it and see that I’m the owner. It’s a unique, one of a kind piece of artwork with a crude representation of an Alberg 30.
I’ve created NFTs of a few of my photographs and you can see them at Voice.com/billblevins.
You can view other NFTs of sailboat art for sale at Opensea.io/collection/crypto-sails and buy them with various forms of cryptocurrency.
To wrap up and get back on the sailing theme, you can see some of the other NFTs I’ve collected including my CryptoKitties ‘Sailor’ on my OpenSea profile.