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Ask HN: Why aren't there memecoins for software?
Crypto is filled with empty scams and grifts but an insane amount of money flows into these investments. Why don't we see more of these meme coins or NFTs backed by actual valuable software constructs like model weights, training data, or even just useful language expressions or abstractions?
If I could invest in, say, my favorite UI component in an open source project and that investment pumped up the dev(s) or other early investors wouldn't that create a strong economic base for developing software?
Or maybe I could invest in a particular iteration of a machine learning model. Or a particular dataset. Or a function. I'd love to hear from experts. Thanks.
- gus_massa 2y agoyou buy the "cancel" button of your favorite framework. Everyone can still use it, because otherwise it would be a disaster and probably the OSS licence allows using it anyway. One year later another person buys you the button for $2. I guess the maintainer gets a cut, hopefully nobody forked the project because the maintainer decided to retire. Isn't it better if the second person just donate the $2 to the maintainer?
- mwrg 2y agoThe thought is that the maintainer would own a share of the asset and if they retire, they would be free to sell or hold that share. Maybe for something as trivial as a button it isn't obvious where the value is but for entire libraries, etc. it could provide economic incentive to recognize valuable projects and invest in them while they are still young. You could "own a little piece" of your favorite framework along with the maintainer(s). The concept of a fork even maps pretty well to how forks work in the blockchain. You would own a share of each fork if you owned a piece of the original project.