Paying just over $400,000 for a rock might sound reasonable if that rock was a particularly beautiful diamond, or a chunk of the moon perhaps. However, poker pro-turned-crypto investor Mike “Timex” McDonald has just paid that sum for a virtual, digitized picture of a rock.
This looked far too rare to pass on https://t.co/VgmPhoZxqR
— Mike McDonald (@MikeMcDonald89) August 20, 2021
Mike McDonald purchases a high-value NFT
The EtherRock is an NFT – a Non-Fungible Token – and cost McDonald a whopping 125 Ethereum to buy, one ETH of the cryptocurrency equivalent to almost $3300 at the time.
While to many it may only look like a child’s colourful drawing of a rock, to McDonald and others it is a savvy investment.
“I’m pretty sure I could sell this rock for 1000 eth within 24 hours if I wanted to (which I don’t). Let’s say someone had offered me 5000 eth for the rock -> am I still selling a large premium? How do you determine what a premium is?”
For those who still don’t understand what an NFT is or how it might prove to be worth the price of a very nice house, perhaps the ‘Phil Ivey Collection’ will make it easier to understand.
Titled “The Royal Flush”, these digital collectibles feature exclusive artwork depicting Ivey’s biggest career achievements.
Why are NFTS so sought after?
With only a limited number of each virtual card available, their worth becomes what a person is willing to pay for them – this is the basic premise of not only NFT’s, but also cryptocurrency exchange in general.
Ivey is well-known to the crypto-poker community as the face of Virtue poker, a decentralized poker platform based on the Ethereum blockchain and using peer-to-peer networking.
Back to the NFT world and the EtherRock website itself states, “These virtual rocks serve NO PURPOSE beyond being able to be bought and sold, and giving you a strong sense of pride in being an owner of 1 of the only 100 rocks in the game :)”
McDonald’s rock is one of only 9 non-grey rock jpegs released, McDonald explaining: “91/100 rocks are grey. I think this is the cheapest non-grey rock. (You can obviously look through all 100 and pick your favorites but it seems reasonably market will prefer the more unique ones).”
His blue rock isn’t the most expensive to be sold, another of the rock-art NFTs recently changing hands for $1.3million, and a “diamond-studded” version going for $500k…
Just spent half million dollars on a rock 😂 pic.twitter.com/4zDmDgzERz
— H.E. Justin Sun 🅣🌞🇬🇩 (@justinsuntron) August 22, 2021
Mike McDonald investing long term
The 100 rocks are among the earliest NFTs released, but there are thousands more of these “cryptopunks” available, including 10,000 characters that were initially designed to be part of a video game.
These “punks” now have a market value of over $1billion, and famous poker pro and cryptocoin acolyte, Doug Polk, explained their worth recently to PokerNews.
“They have a great culture of people who I don’t think are likely to sell them and have really managed to make it into to mainstream. Most of the people who own punks are just not going to need to ever sell them.”
McDonald was of a similar view: “I just don’t like pump and dumps and try to own things I can close my eyes and be happy I still own in 10 years.”
Meanwhile, if you need to bring yourself up-to-speed on such things, check out our handy guide to Ethereum, Bitcoin and all things crypto-related here.
Terms and conditions apply. New customer offer and 18+ only. Should you require help regarding your betting pattern, please visit www.begambleaware.org.
