Chapter 4. "The Idea"

That's how we started to live in the new place, adjusting our lives and getting into our new job. But we didn't cut ourselves off from our old life, we keep in touch with our parents and keep a close eye on all the news. This weight on our hearts, because of which we left, did not leave us here, in the new place. We were worried about Ukraine every day, happy about its successes against Russia and looking forward to new victories.

I will not specify into details why we feel this way. I think that many of you are aware of this, but if you're not, please ask me and I try to answer.

One day I had an idea.

Work requires to have a good rest, and sometimes my spare time is spent by playing computer games. In that moment I was playing the World Of Tanks. After the game, I began to discuss game-related things with my wife and why so many people are still into this game, despite the fact that it is very monotonous. In fact, it does not have anything new and interesting - the same battles on the same maps for about 15 years since the release. How come that people are not tired of the monotony after all these years, and they continue playing it? I have not found a single answer, except that people just really love the tanks.

These fighting machines, that are capable of destroying everything around them, are the factor that draws people in!

Please write your ideas and why this game has been played for so many years if you are familiar with it!!!!

After this conversation, I offered my wife to make an NFT collection with tanks! I quickly opened OpenSea - I had already known what NFT is by that time. I love modern technology and try to be interested in everything new in the world. I saw that there isn't any tank collection, not even one. I made the decision to do it!

We need to make the first collection of NFT tanks in the world! )))

My idea sounded very cool for me at that moment! We got into a heated discussion about this idea with my wife. I decided that it could be connected with the situation in Ukraine and represent tanks - these destructive machines - as peaceful rather than frightening mechanisms, endowing them with peaceful, kind and cheerful images. We want to make people smile when they see these tanks.

And from that moment on, the idea took hold of me. I didn’t know anything at all about how NFT collections are made. I went back to OpenSea and started looking at collections there. Of course, I noticed that most of the well-known collections have a lot of items, and I also noticed that they are made of layers (I was also quite familiar with Photoshop, so I knew about the layers), and these layers are interlaced and repeated for different items. Afterall, I got the point that these 5 or 10 thousand items are somehow generated from a fairly small number of other images. I browsed the Internet and Youtube to look at how this is done. I thought that in 5 minutes I would find and download a program which allows to load the images (layers) I’ve created. Then, this program would make the required number of images. What was my disappointment when after surfing the Internet for hours, I could not find any single program like this! After that, I began to realize that it was not as simple as I had imagined. The next few days passed, I had a lot to do every day. In my spare time I started to explore the subject of making NFTs.

What follows is a brief recap of what I had to deal with and figure out, so please be patient to read it all.

After many hours of searching, I found guides in the programming environment on how to generate different instances of artwork based on the layers provided through written program code, as well as source code editors and software platforms such as NodeJs. To be honest, I was pretty depressed at the moment when I realized quite clearly that in order to create a certain number of images to be used as layers, I need to understand (at least, not deeply) the topic of program code, its editors, and generally how it all works. At that time, I was upset, not knowing that this is just the top of the iceberg. In the future, I would have to learn about the existence of decentralized services, smart contracts, the types and methods of creating NFT, the pros and cons of these types. I have to learn also about the fact that I would have to create a website, and not even one, I would have to deal with domains, hosting, DNS records to connect different sites, etc.

If I had known about it all at once, I would honestly have given up the whole thing. It’s for the reason that I should have asked to help other people and paid them for their work. The problem was in having no expenses for it – we only made the ends meet. I have NEVER EVER dealt with any of this stuff or read about any of it - I had no idea how to do it and how long it takes to figure it out. It's definitely a good thing what was waiting for me. Thanks to that, today there are both my sites and my collection in OpenSea and I'm writing this text to inspire some of you. Getting ahead of myself, I will tell you that it took me 8 long months. I spent 8 months in my free time studying all these topics, creating images (layers), faced with the fact that something did not work and I had to searched thematic forums for answers, ran smart-contracts in test networks in order not to keep money saved (FYI: you just need to pay a couple hundred dollars in Ethereum blockchain for creating a smart-contract). I made breaks and thought that if I gave up, then I would regret it for the rest of my life. Then, I would get back to my computer and overcame all the new problems and studied all those new subjects that I didn't understand before !!!!!

If you are interested in any details, write your questions and I will try to answer them. Maybe I can help someone too!!!!

Talking about missed opportunities, I have another good example. In 2009, I was a third year university student. I was working on my laptop and came across some site with news about modern technologies. There was an article about creation of some Bitcoin in Russian. I read that news, it described something about some obscure blockchain technology and said that it was going to be something big and new, something that hadn't existed in the world yet. They also wrote about bitcoin, saying that it is already possible to use it to pay for services on the darknet, to pay for drugs, etc. They said that someday it will be possible to pay for food orders with bitcoin and, in general, it will become a means of payment. I got interested in this article (not because of drugs because I never consumed drugs in my life) and even downloaded a program on my laptop. This program can mine these bitcoins. Then, I saw that 1 bitcoin can be obtained, if my laptop will work nonstop for days or weeks, and the pizza was worth several hundreds of coins (I can be wrong in the figures now because so many years have passed).

As a result, I deleted this program from my laptop in 10 minutes and remembered it all again only when bitcoin gained the worldwide fame and went up in price by hundreds of thousands of times.

And I can honestly say that I get a great sense of frustration and annoyance in myself when remembering this. I've read that there is even a syndrome called a “Fear of missing-out” syndrome. I don't know if I have it but I do know that I have no desire to miss out on anything else because of laziness, inattention, or some other things.

If anyone is reading this, then my advice is to do everything you can so that you don't blame yourself for the missed opportunities your whole life!

I also want to say that I have absolutely no confidence and understanding that this collection will be successful and will bring me any money. We can quote a great saying:

"If you want to get something you've never had before, you have to start doing something you've never done before”.

In any case, you shouldn't be afraid to start something new for yourself. Right now I just want you to understand why I didn't quit doing the collection - it wasn't for money. If it will also improve my financial situation, then I will be the happiest person in the world and I will use most of the money to make other people happier. Maybe I will be able to help someone change their life like I have changed mine. I would really like that! In fact, about ten different people (families) have written to my wife with words of admiration for our determination. I'm not kidding about that and I'm not proud of it as I understand that this was a necessity for us. We are willing to fight the obstacles for ourselves and others. People wrote that we had done what they thought was some sort of "incredible" thing. We had decided "to do this," to dare to change our lives in this way. They wrote that they would like to do the same, but they can't yet, they have things that stop them, and, most of all, it is fear of uncertainty. In the end, one family, after observing our new life, did it too. They moved from our former city of Vladivostok, to the city where we live now and they live not far from us. They are very happy that they did it. They said that without our family example with this moving situation, they would never have decided to do it themselves. I'm not making anything up - everything I've written isn’t exaggerated. At the time they told us about it, I felt really proud that there was something that I was doing for good in this life. I wasn't completely useless to a society... and you know, it felt damn good! )