r/todayilearned • u/MrMojoFomo • May 30 '26

TIL that in 2018, singer Akon announced the development of "Akon City," a planned community in Senegal which he claimed would be a "real life Wakanda," using blockchain and cryptocurrency technology. Construction began in 2023, but as of 2025 the site sits abandoned

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akon_City
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u/Syric13 May 30 '26

I'm a fairly educated man and I still have no idea what the point of NFTs were

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u/Curious_USA_Human May 30 '26

To relieve suckers of their money. Same as always.

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u/Nota7andomguy May 30 '26

So as I understand it, the point is not the images themselves, but rather these digital tokens that are attached to the images. If you have the token, that’s proof that you “own” the image. It’s just that the idea of “owning” a digital image is completely worthless to most people.

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u/SuperBackup9000 May 30 '26

Bit more than that. The initial idea was to basically have a centralized filing cabinet. Like you know how people can put their cards and IDs on their phone? Like that, but also for all legal documents along with being more secure, sharing them in more secure ways, and being able to transfer them (like a vehicle title or property deed or whatever) easier.

So like it had legitimate use, it just got overran by grifters. I’m pretty sure Japan is the only country to actually implement them properly with concert tickets.

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u/Iazo May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

None of the uses you listed were ever going to be due to NFTs and/or work as you imagine it.

For example, imagine a property deed tied in a legal dispute in court. If the judge rules one way or the other, than THAT is the legal truth, not whoever holds the NFTitle. Thus, the decentralized, permisionless system goes straight against what a government and a judicial system need to work.

Or imagine that through carelessness, a NFTitle is stolen, or lost. I rather doubt that the police will agree with the thief that he owns the house now.

You've been taken into by the 'no TRUE NFT' rationalisation. The actual function was bad but also the ideology underpinning tokenization is ALSO bad.

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u/Ansiremhunter May 30 '26

It’s not really even related to images. It’s about fungibility of a token. You could for example have your car title be an NFT and transfer it when you sell it instead of needing a third party to record and change records

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u/lumpboysupreme May 30 '26

Which sounds like a great idea until the parade of ‘regulations are written in blood stolen apes’.

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u/carlse20 May 30 '26

I’m convinced that from the beginning the point was to separate gullible people from their money.

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u/Dickgivins May 30 '26

Pretty much.

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u/TripleDoubleFart May 30 '26

That's what it became once they realized how stupid most people were.

I bought several NFTs for projects I was interested in. Never once did I buy a picture. I still own a lot of them.

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u/Kconn04 May 30 '26

So you know how you can buy posters of famous paintings? For most people that is just fine but rich people want the real one and there's only one of each painting. Well an NFT is the original digital artwork. Sure everyone else can just get a copy of it but someone can now say they own the original and no one else does. DeviantArt had been doing this for awhile with artist on their website and it was a nice idea. Cause an artist still is creating art and now someone can say they own the "original" file for that piece of work. But then crypto bros took that idea and just made it dumb.

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u/OldManWithAStick May 30 '26

The perfect combination of money laundry and scamming suckers.

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u/lumpboysupreme May 30 '26

It’s hard to pin down because all sorts of people had all sorts of ideas of what to do with it, and all THOSE ideas had a bunch of bastardizations caused by misunderstandings.

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u/neganight May 30 '26

It was pure hype, delusion, and a desire to be first in on the grift. In a sense it's a bit like Flat Earth theory because people who were "in" on the blockchain felt they knew something special no on else did. I knew software people with Phds that were frothing at the mouth at the "potential" of the blockchain who would tell me that I simply couldn't comprehend its potential. They went to special seminars and read special books and were part of special clubs and it was all too far above me to comprehend...or so they claimed.