An enterprising young man has set off on his journey to catch up with the collective wealth of Elon Musk. Redditor Numerous-Dentist-882’s big idea was to create an “infinite money machine” with limited resources, and has conjured up “a physical NFT minting device” as the first step on the ladder to becoming the world’s second trillionaire. He demoed the portable machine with ‘strangers’ in New York, and has actually made his first NFT sale for $9.92.

In the humorous video above, you can see the who, what, why, and how of the unnamed NFT minting device. The video details don’t quite match up with those more recently penned on Reddit, so let’s take the latter as the newest, most up-to-date info on the project (the Reddit post was published more recently).

Numerous-Dentist-882’s likely real name is David Kramer, as we noticed in a link to his parody magnet fishing book on Amazon (reviews: 3.9 out of five stars). Kramer explains that the NFT minting machine was trained on an Apple Macbook M3 for just four hours in total. The dataset for the DCGAN hallucinatory image software was a collection of 2,480 face photos featuring a mix of 11 diverse personalities. Moreover, the dominant anchor class of 2,000 images ensured that the hallucinated face hybrids frequently have a certain president-with-a-penchant-for-gold theme to them.

Once training had been completed and Kramer was happy with the hallucinated face hybrids, the model was exported from PyTorch to ONNX (float32, 53MB). This made the NFT generator model portable enough for carrying around on a Raspberry Pi 4. Kramer says that even the puny Pi could run inference and generate a face NFT in 3s, but they’re hardly hi-res digital goods at 128-pixel square.

With the press of a button, the Pi fires a freshly generated face to an ESP microcontroller with a tiny screen, as demonstrated in the video. To complete the NFT creation with a meme-able slogan, whoever you snag on the street is asked to pair their image with a machine-generated phrase of the form “This is a (adjective) NFT and I want to (verb) it."

After confirming the perfect image-plus-slogan pairing, the NFT is then minted with another button push. You can look through several NFTs already made this way available on the OpenSea marketplace. We note only one was sold for what seems to convert to $9.92. The enterprise, which is clearly a parody, does actually have some impressive technical underpinnings.

Kramer has also made a website where you can try out the DCGAN from the comfort of your PC. A test image I clicked a button to generate is shown above.

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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.