HACKER Q&A
📣 mwrg

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 Accepted Answer ✓
you 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?