In December 2021, a digital record linked to a computer-generated picture of a robot samurai sold at auction for an amount of cryptocurrency then worth over $1.8 million.
These were the heady final months of the worldwide craze for "non-fungible tokens" — or NFTs to you and me. NFTs, on its most basic level, is the ownership of a digital piece of work, such as art or music. They could include memes or even actual pieces of art. Advocates promised that they would revolutionize art patronage while making millions of ordinary people filthy rich in a matter of months.
