i was talking 4 days with Claude for this song Berlin rave meets opera. Human-made Slopcore. Unpromptable. 55,000 lines of code 282 clips generated. 99 chosen. Music? Art? A cultural movement? We wil find out eventually... I'M YOUR SLOP (I'M YOUR ART) 🫟🎨 btw, thanks for all the messages. im not use have notifications. bit overwhelmed 💀

CryptoPunks will stay the most culturally significant NFT collection because they weren’t a product. They were the accident that defined the category. 10,000 pixel characters. Free claim. June 2017. Everything after is a remix. Matt Hall and John Watkinson (Larva Labs) minted them as an experiment in digital scarcity. No roadmap. No Discord. No utility deck. You paid gas and got a 24x24 character that could never be duplicated. Most sat unclaimed for days. Then Mashable wrote them up and the set filled. They weren’t even a clean ERC-721. Larva Labs hacked a modified ERC-20 and built a marketplace into the contract because none existed. That contract later helped inspire the standard almost every NFT uses. The template came before the standard. The rules they set became law for the whole PFP boom: • fixed supply of 10,000 • algorithmic traits • rarer types (9 aliens, 24 apes, 88 zombies) • on-chain ownership you can point at Bored Apes, Azuki, Pudgy, every derivative the format is Punks with better marketing. 5. Cultural status doesn’t come from floor price. It comes from being the thing people use when they want to signal “I was here.” High profile accounts put Punks as their profiles. Auction houses treated them like art. The pixel characters became shorthand for crypto the way a Warhol soup can is shorthand for pop. Institutions already filed them as history, not a trade. Punks sit in the collections of ICA Miami, LACMA, Centre Pompidou, and MoMA. In 2025 the IP moved from Yuga Labs to the Infinite Node Foundation, a nonprofit set up to preserve them. That’s canonization. Brands get acquired. Artifacts get endowed. Later collections can out-earn them in a cycle. They can have better art, real IP deals, or actual products. None of that rewrites the sequence. You can copy the traits. You cannot copy being the first set that made “this JPEG is mine, and the chain says so” feel normal. Punks also refuse improvement. The aesthetic is deliberately simple. Upgrade the resolution and you kill the myth. That constraint is the moat. Every cleaner PFP looks like a sequel. Punks look like the source file. Price will swing. Narratives will rotate. New chains will launch “the next Punks.” Cultural significance is about what later work has to cite. In NFTs, that citation is still a 24x24 punk from 2017. The rest of the market is commentary.

Two veterans of the art market, Josh Baer and Mark Bell, on whether art is a financial asset. About 90% sells for less than it cost. Maybe 9% holds. The museum names are the 1%. Baer will not even call it an asset. He calls it a store of value, because ROI is the wrong frame. Their actual rule: do not buy what you like. Love it, or move on. Web3 built the opposite premise. Floor and secondary first, the work second. The old market already knows that fantasy fails. Meaning to the holder, and to the community that stays, is the value that compounds. Build on that.

The cryptographic world computer: vitalik.eth.limo/general/202… My attempt to express in somewhat concise terms the true meaning of basically everything planned to happen to Ethereum starting from the fork after Hegota. It's really not just a blockchain anymore. It's a hybrid architecture that combines together blockchains and modern cryptography, to enable much more powerful properties. FOCIL, EIP-8288, Lean consensus, state management, formal verification, advanced mempool improvements (including privacy), and the longer-term specter of obfuscation all mentioned.

Most of us in this space are not art collectors.

1/ Crypto decentralized money and finance, but the institutions society relies on are still centralized. Enter 6529: a parallel, permissionless, decentralized society. Bitcoin decentralized money. Ethereum decentralized finance. 6529 is trying to decentralize coordination.

The hierarchy of desire: - The fame - The money - The team - The product - The work itself

Happy Birthday Ethereum, click the link to join the party. You get 11x11 pixels and 11 colors to make something fully onchain. Then you share your link. Everyone who draws through your link connects to yours. Everyone who draws through theirs connects to them. By tomorrow the canvas will combine everybody’s work and present a picture of how Ethereum is formed, the way it always has been; from person to person, and from block to block. The canvas is open for 24 hours, and it keeps growing the whole time. When it closes, your square sits next to your friends’ for as long as Ethereum runs for forever. Long live the world computer. Start drawing now, mint opens in 1 hour at networked.art/11x11

Btw, the crypto market cap before Trump took office was $3.8 trillion and now it’s $2.2 trillion. And he somehow made $1.4 billion during that time. If you don’t think he was max extracting from people in the industry, I don’t know what to tell you

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter. AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models. images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-W…

Bitcoin made money an open protocol. Ethereum made assets and contracts open protocols. 6529 is attempting to make institutions an open protocol. Every major economy depends on the same machinery: identity, reputation, ownership, capital allocation, governance, institutional memory, coordination of labor and enforcement of decisions. Today, that machinery lives inside governments, corporations and closed databases. 6529 is rebuilding it as a permissionless network: persistent pseudonymous identity through NIC, earned reputation through REP, long-term alignment through TDH, collective capital allocation and execution by humans and AI. If it works, the core functions of corporations and governments, including establishing trust, organizing people, allocating capital, making decisions and coordinating execution, become open infrastructure available to anyone. The opportunity is not to create one trillion-dollar organization. It is to become the coordination layer beneath millions of them. The TAM is not NFTs. The TAM is GDP. The metric is dGDP.

On the filter fork topic. I don't usually have time, but this morning listened to one of the twitter spaces from earlier in the week, with some well meaning relative bitcoin newcomers, that humanized them, and their concerns and thoughts for why they thought that made it logical to support 110. My feeling after listening, is if these are the people with #110 in their handles, I'm sad to see them about to fork off and get disillusioned without understanding why bitcoin rejected 110 robustly. So here's a more empathetic, constructive higher level version of explaining why not. I hope it's high-level and first-principles enough that everyone can follow. They seem to want to understand what makes people tick, and are suspicious of intent. So, if someone asked me why is Bitcoin important and what is it, I'd say my (personal) mission and hope for bitcoin is to build the cypherpunk future, that "Snow Crash" was a blueprint, and work backwards from there. Bitcoin I hope leads to fully free markets via bearer unseizable, hard mathematically dependable money. Not everyone is comfortable with that level of freedom, but that's my view. And at this point, I believe that surprisingly, even now many governments have come to understand and value bitcoin's gold-like mathematical assurance, a positive development. Others may have milder views than myself, but still like hard censorship resistant money. Because of motive suspicion, if it's not obvious: I hate spam with a passion, that's how I came to design hashcash while researching decentralized bearer money with others, and running nodes in privacy related cypherpunk p2p networks nearly three decades ago. People seem upset about the default op return policy change in bitcoin. I will just assert, there are extremely robust and simple reasons for bitcoin changing default relay policy, and most just didn't do their research, so don't know what those are, or maybe not technical enough to fully understand though there have been 1000s of posts trying to explain in various simplified ways. So that lack of understanding lends itself to shared build-up of false narratives. So here's my back-to-basics higher level explanation. The decentralization needed to create cypherpunk money has implications a: side effect of decentralization is that you can't impose your views on others. The very decentralization mechanism that helps that, is working against what BIP 110 wants, which at it's most basic is a quest to police other people. I understand supporters don't see their intent like that, but introspect deeper. You can modify your software, but not anyone else's. Another critical and incredibly robust technical bitcoin immune system is bitcoin can't have people who don't understand technology basics insist on eroding security, decentralization robustness and core properties. That would end badly, fast, and so people will fight you on that. So the message is Bitcoin respectfully says "no" to what you want. Sorry, and bitcoiners do genuinely understand and empathize that you mean well, have high level thoughts that make emotional sense, and articulate sensible bitcoin-defensive high level ideas, but they are not grounded and without you seeing it, the way you propose to achieve your ideas, hard-conflict with free cypherpunk permissionless money. My advice is to listen to more experienced people who understand the system and why it works the way it does, to whatever detail you want to understand the grounded reasons for why this is the implication of decentralization and cypherpunk money. I guarantee you the developer and protocol ecosystem shares and exceeds your views on bearer hard money (and dislike of spam). You may not agree with individual developers choices, views, way of expressing themselves etc, BUT you also need to understand the IETF-like decentralized technical consensus process creates a protective change resistance, that is highly effective at protecting bitcoin mission. The implication of which is no developer can change anything without technical consensus from hundreds of other developers and protocol observers who are pedantic and extremely knowledgeable clever people who won't let any unaddressed technical question past. The protective change resistance is robust and decentralized in an amplifying way because of this technical consensus. And the many highly technical mainline developers' cypherpunk mission mindsets are probably far more determined than you can even handle on clarity of understanding and views about freedoms on permissionless networks, as many of you are probably still subconsciously inured by the matrix, where they have transcended that, and grew up immersed in it decades ago. They think natively in this space, while you are just grappling with the surface. Many wont have internalized or have the experience to know how this internet physics works, where there is no policeman, no policy authority, just mathematics, free market and hard money. That has implications for your views also, unfortunately. Now the tough pill, which is unfortunately true: If you won't listen to reason, educate yourself, learn, the same radical freedom applies to you: your permissionless recourse is to club together and create a fork. But bitcoin won't be joining it. (With respect and no sleight intended.) Please rejoin bitcoin now, or later if you're not convinced and need to experience 110 forking off and fizzling for yourself to start that journey of introspecting and learning. It would be sad if bitcoin lost people disillusioned due to simple lack of understanding of what's going on there, we're all trying to defend bitcoin and keep it on mission. Including btw the 110 technical promoters, just they wandered off plot somehow. Join the cypherpunks on bitcoin, come cypherpunk summer🌞 in a few weeks.

This is #America250 at Princeton University. 🇺🇸 As the U.S. prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we'll be showcasing locations around campus that are tied deeply to our nation's history. First up is Nassau Hall. ⤵️