The oldest emoticons in the world 🙂 and 🙁 raised 237,500 dollars at an auction on Thursday, reports auction house Heritage Auctions. They were sold by creator Scott Fahlman in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT), a non-exchangeable feature that guarantees ownership.
NFTs are tokens that are linked to a digital ‘something’, such as a picture or a meme. The token serves as proof of ownership of the object. They are stored all over the world, similar to the bitcoin.
The emoticons were delivered with a signed certificate and two essays by Fahlman, who is a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. In one of the essays, the creator writes that the emoticons represent “the first steps towards a new kind of universal language”. Or step back from the modern civilization, to be honest.
The emoticons were first used by Fahlman on September 19, 1982. The emoticon : -) initially had to indicate a joke and 🙁 stood for ‘I mean it’. Nowadays, the user mainly shows that he is happy or not.
