Ask HN: Where is NFTs as a technology or investment?
As I’m working through reports, I realized that with AI-everything taking all the air in the room, I hadn’t heard about tokens of the non-fungible kind for a hot second.
As an artist, I was excited about the implications of getting paid for your work each time it sold, but have not seen that facet explored in the tech news I follow here and elsewhere.
Of those still in the space, what does the landscape look like? Did it pan out better or worse than you expected? Has the technology led to any unforeseen problems or solutions that came from time spent on the tech?
Truly curious, seeing as we are in what I would call a similar cultural moment with what I’ve been seeing made and written about “agentic” AI. I thought that whole space basically collapsed once people finally realized they were just buying URLs that pointed to a jpg, and those hyping it got out and left the bag holders with "ownership" of a bunch of worthless pictures on the internet. I remember a the Bored Ape Yacht Club being sued a few years ago, but it looks like all the celebrities were let off the hook for promoting it. This. The idea of having some kind of cryptographic proof of ownership to a JPG copy of an original piece of artwork was just about the silliest thing I’d ever heard when it first started going viral. I (and most others) support artists by donating through platforms like Patreon, without needing some kind of arbitrary artificial commodity. Dead with no funeral, no burial plot, not even a mention in the newspaper. But, you can own the original NFT eulogy as an NFT! There are many copies floating around but this one is the original. Bidding starts at $100,000. Too many found out it was a ponzi scheme [1a][1b] and it fizzled out. [1a] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_o3nZHzCwA [video][4 mins] [1b] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpqreZlmHGU [video][7 mins]