This was never anything aside from a scam designed to separate the tech illiterate from their money.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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What? You mean digital art that infinitely reproducible, can't actually be owned, WASN'T the next big thing? Oh jeez. I hope the metaverse succeeds and if not then AI surely will RIGHT?!?!
Hey but this cryptographic key says that I own it because I paid made up currency units for it or something
Hey but that made up currency I worked for by burning electricity, I mean MINING it.
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Who could have predicted this? Literally impossible without hindsight and that's the revisionist history I'm sticking to.
but for a brief period of time, some people made some money, while most participants lost
edit: do AI next
This describes our species’ entire existence 👌
we were the bored ape all along
Dramatic? I found this an entertaining example of dumbness 🍿🍿🍿
For sure. This is comedy, not drama.
I remember playing with Stable Diffusion in 2022, and thinking "Oh. That's the end of NFTs."
NFT art was stupid to begin with, of course, but SD was such a blatent, extreme inverse of the "artifical digital scarcity" angle. If I wanted a shitty, albeit "unique" and deterministically reproducible digital image, I could just make it in 30 seconds on a desktop. If I wanted a certain look, I could use img2img or eventually controlnet and all sorts of augmentations.
Yes, junky AI was junky AI, but ironically it was the antithesis of everything NFTs stood for. Instead of "digital information is worth commodifying at great expense," it was "digital information is basically free." And I still find it amusing that Tech Bros and con artists jumped from one ship to the other so quickly, or somehow have feet in both.
AI wasn't the NFT killer, right click > saveas killed it at the very moment of conception.
Digital scarcity is a complete joke.
Sure you can copy the image, but you can't have the same machine-readable hash indicating ownership in my private system!
I think most people don't understand cryptocurrencies. On one side it's all hyperbolic about being your own bank and financial freedom and new tech, on the other side it's hyperbolic about how there is no underlying value, it's all going to 0, scams, drugs, terrorism, money laundering,...
But the fact is that crypto does have an underlying value. It's gambling. Gambling is a huge industry.
Also drugs.
I always said as long as crypto can be used to buy drugs, it will have value.
When everything we know in the world is gone and we're using rocks to make spears again, people will still want drugs, the value is eternal.
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Whoever could have seen this coming
Everyone with eyes.
Anyone with the most basic common sense knew it was going to end up like this.