Update
I finally have an NFT up for auction! You can see it by going to opensea.io and searching for "Joining the Chain Gang" or for "Ideonautics", which will take you to my one-item "collection," whence you can select my Chain Gang GIF.
Here's the piece's complete URL:
https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c248420045cb7b5e/12473096270307474822386408590859581622395186292893904555627382909634093252609
BTW, while you're at opensea.io, you might take a look at the wide of variety of other stuff -- I mean art -- that's being offered.
Once there, of course, you can "bid" on my piece at your own risk. Actually, it's a Dutch auction: the item has a definite price, but that price will decline over the course of one month until either A) someone recognizes how wonderful the work is and snaps it up (at whatever the price is then) or B) it reaches my preset minimum price and still doesn't sell.
It all remains a rocky road up a confusing hill.
You may recall that I used a debit card via PayPal to buy $110 worth of eth (the Ethereum cryptocoin) at Coinbase on August 11th. Although the bank account involved was charged almost immediately, it took 4 1/2 business days before I could send any eth from my Coinbase account to my MetaMask wallet. But once that transfer was possible at all, it was easy to enter and cleared quickly -- under 10 minutes.
But then, when I tried to complete the listing... I was told again that the listing was free, but to complete my first one, I would have to "initialize" my wallet and pay some gas fees. The fees varied from moment to moment, and had gone up from $50-something quoted on Aug. 12 to $95-something on Aug. 19 -- amounting to more eth than I had brought over from Coinbase.
Last night I bit another bullet and bought another $110 worth of eth. Guessing that it will clear completely sometime next Thursday.
Today I moved the rest of my cleared eth from Coinbase to my MetaMask wallet (that was still easy), then tried to finish my listing. Gas fees were something over $100, and even if I could have made the payment, I just didn't want to. This was at about 1:20 pm.
Remembered something about timing affecting gas fees & did some research. Apparently, they tend to be lowest after the trading day is over, both in New York and in Europe.
Son of a gun! Logged back in to OpenSea at about 5:15 pm and finished the listing, paying gas fees that amounted to $55.65, a nice improvement.
In the meanwhile, I'm remaking my car-joke GIFs at a slightly smaller scale (33% of 1920x1080) to get them in under OpenSea's 40MB maximum upload size. However (!), I've just heard back from Motoclub.io, and might yet get something going with them with my automotive amusements.
To be continued....