Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Non-fungible tokens or NFTs still seem to be all the rage. It probably comes as no surprise that Meta wants to be a part of it, so from now on you can buy and sell NFTs on Instagram.
The new feature has been released as a test for some users in the U.S. As Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced, NFTs will become available on Facebook soon, too. This way, creators can offer their work, collectors can buy it, and Instagram gets yet another purpose that’s not photography.
From a photo-sharing platform, Instagram has almost become everything but one. So maybe this doesn’t come as a surprise – non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are soon to come to Instagram and join a bunch of non-photographic options that are already there.
This information is not merely a rumor. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently confirmed it, saying that NFTs are coming to Instagram over the next several months.
A 22-year-old Indonesian student has become a millionaire virtually overnight by selling five years’ worth of selfies as NFTs. Sultan Gustaf Al Ghozali from Semarang, Indonesia, uploaded over a thousand images to the NFT platform OpenSea. The images were originally priced at just $3 each.
The emergence of NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) brings a new type of technology for establishing digital copyright of original content. This can help creatives, like photographers and artists, to create authentic claims that can be verified on a decentralized database called a blockchain. A blockchain permanently records the information which cannot be modified or deleted, since it is stored on many different computers. The computers are located throughout the world and operated by users who are incentivized to maintain the blockchain network to verify transactions. For NFT, it verifies a claim to ownership which records the data and issues a token that is given to a rightful owner.
I analysed 50 Top Landscape Photographers with accounts on the NFT auction platform, Foundation, between the dates of the 5th to 9th July (2021), to answer the following question:
How much do landscape photographers earn from selling NFTs?
Specifically, I used public data to compile:
Back in January, during CES in Las Vegas, a strange object appeared on the Kodak stand. The Kodak KashMiner, the “Powerful Bitcoin Miner”. The idea was that people would be able to rent this machine for around $3,400, and then customers would be able to keep a portion of any Bitcoins it generated.
Spotlite, who ran the scam scheme said that users would pull in $9,000 over the first two years, providing a $5,600 profit after taking their initial investment into account. Now, the whole programme has been scrapped, and Kodak says that they never officially licensed the name to Spotlite.
While some of us still struggle to embrace the concept of cryptocurrencies, the others are taking a step forward and merging it with art. Artist Kevin Abosch brought blockchain technology and photography together and created a piece of digital art titled Forever Rose. The artwork was based on Abosch’s photo and sold for $1 million worth of cryptocurrencies, which makes it the world’s most valuable virtual artwork ever sold.
KODAKCoin is here, the new cryptocurrency for photographers from Kodak. Yes, that’s right, the company whose resistance in adopting the digital revolution drove them to the point of bankruptcy has created a new digital currency.
The KODAKOne blockchain platform is a service through which photographers can register images before licensing them. KODAKCoin is the currency on this site, which users will receive upon the sale of their images.
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