INTO THE ETHER
Bitchcoin proposed three ideas that are only now being seriously considered: using blockchain to track ownership of artwork, public fractional ownership of artwork, and blockchain itself as a medium.
The prescient audacity of the project garnered considerable attention and was featured in Vice and Wired, among other publications. According to critic Tim Schneider, “blockchain-based work probably first surfaced in art-world consciousness in the form of Sarah Meyohas’s Bitchcoin.” Meyohas’s creation of cryptocurrency as art, minted on her own proof-of-work blockchain, engaged with the ownership and utility of art in the digital future, but the intrinsic connection between each Bitchcoin and its constituent artwork necessitated non-fungibility, creating the "proto-NFT" as early as 2015.