I’ve had some strange experiences in my career as a journalist. But nothing even remotely prepared me for the experience of watching total strangers competing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a picture of my words.

A few weeks ago, I decided to write a column about the rise of nonfungible tokens, the hottest craze in the cryptocurrency world, with a meta twist: I would turn the column itself into a NFT and put it up for auction, with the proceeds going to The New York Times’s Neediest Cases Fund.

When I pitched the idea to my bosses, I thought the stunt might attract a handful of bids from curious Times readers who had spare Ethereum, the cryptocurrency being used for the auction, burning a hole in their digital wallets. Maybe we’d raise a few hundred dollars for charity and explain the complicated process of creating and selling NFTs along the way. I set the auction’s minimum price low — 0.5 Ether, or about $800 — and was nervous I might not get even that much.

Instead, the auction became a circus. I listed it on Wednesday morning, and before I went to bed that night, the top bid had risen to more than $30,000. When I woke up the next morning, it was $43,000. In the final hour of the auction, I watched, slack-jawed, as a last-minute bidding war broke out.

$98,000.

$143,000.

$277,000.

After more than 30 bids, the auction ended at 12:32 p.m. Eastern time, with a winning bid of 350 Ether, or about $560,000. A few minutes later, after the auction platform had taken its cut, nearly $500,000 in cryptocurrency landed in my digital wallet. I was stunned. Congratulatory texts and media requests started pouring in. My colleagues joked about stiffing the charity and slipping off to the Cayman Islands. My editor said I shouldn’t expect a raise.

The whole ordeal was surreal, and it raised the question: Why would anyone spend the price of a high-end Lamborghini on a picture of my words? After all, the NFT was just a cryptographic signature linked to an image of a column that anyone could read on The Times’s website, albeit with a few bonus perks. (I also stipulated that I would feature the winner’s name and photo in a follow-up column, and Michael Barbaro, the host of “The Daily,” gamely agreed to throw in a voice message for the winner.)