a disciple of the Church of Thomas Bayes
Joined October 2011
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The first contest is done: 15 artists, 34 works, 17 hours of drawing, and 13k edits.
xitter.cf/artgobs/status/2113336…
The first contest is over. The winners (chosen by the hand of randomness):
@architktum
@dbt_slch
@esikkoba
@cs_ulrich
@ethermaxist
Prizes have been sent.
Results:
gobblers.xyz/contests/share-…
Thanks to everyone who took part!
A short chapter from my diary of reviving the ArtGobblers graveyard.
After recreating and modernizing the broken official drawing tool, my idea for the next steps was based on the fact that 99% of NFT collection websites are complete hollow shells - lifeless storefronts. Often cluttered with flashy js effects that mask total emptiness and a complete lack of ideas. And no one in their right mind visits these official sites more than once every six months, or stays longer than five minutes. There’s simply nothing to do there.
So my first idea was to create and maintain a steady stream of contests with small cash prizes, punctuated by heavier art contests with more substantial rewards.
With that in mind, the first thing I did was launch two contests - open to anyone with a twitter account and an eth wallet. In the first, you spend a bit of time on a drawing, share it, and cast 10 votes in a mini-game of “pick one image out of two.” For those who can’t or don’t want to draw, I added three extra drawing modes (on top of the classic ArtGobblers one): pixel/genart/AI. The EV of a single drawing right now is a little under $20, and of three (three entries max) - around $40, with the winner picked at random.
In the second contest, all you have to do is cast at least 100 votes in the game described above (pick one of two). This is needed to rank all the project’s existing drawings (pages) into a sort of objective leaderboard, which we can then use to pick winners of future art contests without relying on judges. And the EV of those (minimum) 100 votes currently sits in the $40–50 range.
And the strict rule for entering both contests was “one account per person.”
And even in this situation - a tiny pool of 10–20 participants - there were users abusing both contests with 3–4 accounts. And while I’d thought that a drawing in the first contest was a “proof of work” no matter what, forcing sybils to spend time on drawings, the sybils’ counter-move turned out to be five-minute brush scribbles in the first contest. And the bare minimum number of votes in the second (which naturally ruins the leaderboard’s objectivity and breaks its whole point).
Abusing this is rational and correct from a game-theory standpoint, even if it’s unethical. On my side, it’s rational to fight it - which is what I’ll do. But I understand that if the prizes were more substantial (by an order of magnitude), I’d be facing a completely different cohort of sybils playing web3 - the ones who know how to use proxies and multi-accounting software, and fighting those windmills would drain a lot of energy.
So I drew the absolutely obvious conclusions: avoid contests of any kind (tweets/drawings) where the winner is picked at random, and lean toward curated contests where winners are chosen by a secret vote of judges. Or don’t accept entries where the proof of work is five minutes of pencil on canvas, or a tweet from an account you can clearly identify as a “hollow shell.” You could go even further, as most NFT projects do - only admit people who hold, say, a gobbler at their address. But that would build an impassable wall around the very thing I want to create, because in that case participants would have to pay to take part, and that goes against the ideas of the “free web3” that you and I share.
So it goes.
By the way, both contests are here, and the first one ends today:
gobblers.xyz/contests
visavi retweeted
panel’ka — watch it being drawn gobblers.xyz/d/EGNEF4K
The idea that NFTs unite us into “communities” is a huge misconception, and I’ll try to dispel it. If a number of people bought different items (NFT items) belonging to some broader entity (an NFT collection), that in no way makes them “like-minded” or kindred spirits. It makes them people who own something similar. But what they own in this case (pictures of apes) has almost no context and no intrinsic value. That isn’t enough to bring them together or to build a community.
You can love Pokemon and, finding yourself at a gathering of fellow fans, you’ll genuinely be among “your own” - because an enormous invented world was built for it, over decades and the intellectual labor of tens of thousands of people. You can talk about the show, the games, show off your decks, your pokedex in pokemon go, your keychains - in short, share the things that occupy your mind in everyday life.
You can show up at a BMW owners’ meetup, as an owner of the car yourself, and land among people of roughly the same social standing as you - sharing your impressions of owning the car, listening to others’ troubles, talking about the vehicle you drive yourself around in every day.
You can gather at a board-game club and play till you drop, or meet at a book club and discuss literature. Then you’ll go home and, even outside the community of like-minded people, you’ll spend five hours straight fine-tuning your MTG deck, or maybe open a new book and pull an all-nighter.
And we really do need like-minded people - they motivate us, they give us new experiences, they expand the boundaries of a field that’s part of our lives.
But if you buy a premium (or not-so-premium) red T-shirt from a special series of red T-shirts, and then meet up with other owners of these T-shirts at a waffle house, you won’t be among “like-minded people.” Sure, you can discuss the floor price of the red T-shirt, discuss the promises (which, once again, won’t be kept) of the company that made the collection, sing some rap - which will come off as freakish - and then go your separate ways, because the only thing connecting you is the item you bought, and there’s basically nothing more to talk about. You’ll go home, hang it in the closet, glance at its floor price on opensea, and go do the thing you actually love (or don’t).
xitter.cf/DGMD22/status/21115108…
i will continue to say that the hate on Apes is misguided. I don't really understand it. You have anon influencers who appeared like Ossen that are going hard on the hate.
all i see from apefest is a group of likeminded people who share common interests enjoying each others company and the culture built around collectibles that they own.
show me a trading card fair or event, an art exhibition, a car show... and the scene could look similar.
stop hating on people who are enjoying their lives and building culture around something they are proud to own, and showing up despite market price being down and overall morale of the NFT space at low levels.
I'm announcing the second gobblersxyz contest: it runs for two weeks, the winner gets 500 usdc, and to enter you just need to cast at least 100 votes on the /vote page. Whoever best guesses the mood of the crowd takes the prize.
Contest: gobblers.xyz/contests/voters…
One important clarification: the more votes you cast, the better for you - it helps build more accurate player rankings, and in tie-break situations whoever cast more votes will rank above someone who only cast the minimum 100. Abusing the system with multi-accounts is pointless (though in theory there are attack vectors) - but given the obviously small number of participants, I'll be tracking down any abuse and fighting it ruthlessly.
And don't forget - five days left until the first contest wraps: gobblers.xyz/contests/share-…
Hey frens. Mini share-contest - five prizes of 100 USDC.
Simple rules:
1. Make any drawing with any tool - brush, genart or ai
2. Hit Share next to it - that gives it a public page
3. Post the drawing's link on X from your linked account
4. Paste the post URL on the contest page - that's your ticket
5. Vote 10 times on the /vote page
gobblers.xyz/contests/share-…
No requirements for the drawings (almost no requirements - just don't send a blank canvas), but it'd be great if entrants put in at least a little effort 😊 And going by past contests, there probably won't be many participants - so any given address has, off the top of my head, a double-digit % chance of winning. That said, if someone decides to spam the contest for the sake of 100 USDC, I'll have to step in.
Archive of past contests:
github.com/Artgobblers-commu…
With this contest I want to test the infrastructure for future ones. Results in three weeks. Once it wraps, we'll try launching proper art contests.
On gobblers․xyz you can connect your own ai chatbot to an mcp server and ask it to draw something using the standard artgobblers toolset (and at the end - replay the whole process and turn the drawing into an nft item).
After a string of experiments - asking Claude to draw in one style or another - I noticed that whenever I let it pick the artist closest to its own taste, it always leans toward Van Gogh. I used to think the reason was the huge amount of text Vincent left behind (the letters to his brother), which ai models were trained on. But the real reason is simpler: Vincent is the most talked-about artist on the internet.
gobblers.xyz/d/7QC2XN7?v=1
The first lesson to learn if you're trying to make markets on Poly by hand or with bots: never trust Poly/Gamma's shitty match start-time data - find another source of truth.
But I didn't come back for nothing, kek. I can't not shill my hobby! That hobby is reviving a dead NFT project. Its name isn't spoken out loud in polite company - it's become a synonym for "failure"/"cluelessness"/ "disgrace." Its name is Art Gobblers. When I believed in it at launch, I think I forgot to take off the rose-tinted glasses, and there's nothing to be done about that now.
Here I'll keep notes on what it's like to work on something that, with near-100% probability, is headed for failure - but I'll try anyway. Right now we have the site gobblers.xyz. We have no line to Paradigm, to Royland, or to each other. Samurai-style, we have no goal - only the path.
Though, to be honest, there is a goal: to build a community of artists and help them make art regularly. (I'll modestly keep quiet about the goal of building a community of collectors - the NFT art market is dead.) Art contests are coming, and the drawing tool has been upgraded so that even people who can't draw can make something - while those who can write scratch-code or use LLMs day to day have room to play too.
There's also another idea I'm planning to build, but we'll come back to that later. I'm absolutely not shilling this collection - right now it's dead, and that's unlikely to change.
Hey frens. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since fantasy_top wrapped up, but here I am, showing some signs of life. I locked my quant in the basement for the whole summer and promised to let him out if he figured out how to make money on Polymarket (turns out he's got a rich betting background!). For what it's worth, he's still down there - but now he's testing his profitable (I hope!) bots.
The prediction-market landscape shifts fast: with the World Cup over, the free money has evaporated. swisstony, running his accounts on that ultra-fast feed, is gutting the market, and regular edges are, imo, extremely scarce (but they're there). The Poly content on twitter is bad and samey - cookie-cutter posts: "I found a super-smart bettor (really just a degen) who made $5M on three bets (and will give back those 5 plus another 5 on his next three), here's his page with my ref link." Plus the manipulation and the shills. Me, I don't have much to say about Poly and betting - money loves silence - but if I ever do, I'll give it a shot.
The way of the samurai is found in death.
Thank you to the team and to everyone involved with the protocol. It was an incredible game, and we'll remember it fondly.
The end of the road was predictable - if you're building something in web3 but you're not building a casino, then whatever you build is most likely doomed to failure and oblivion.
Thank you for not building yet another casino.
xitter.cf/0xKipit/status/2057121…
visavi retweeted
I am a Web3 Ambassador at World Liberty Financial.
There are 12 of us on the team page. 4 are named Trump. 3 are named Witkoff. The page calls us "the passionate minds shaping the future of finance."
600,000 wallets bought our memecoin. They lost $3.87 billion. The family collected $350 million in trading fees. It launched 3 days before the inauguration. 80% of the supply went to CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC. I did not choose the names. I designed the allocation, the vesting, the timing, and the distance between the product and the President.
The distance is my best work.
I am the reason these events are unrelated.
World Liberty Financial sends 75 cents of every dollar to DT Marks DEFI LLC. That is the family entity. Zero capital contributed. Zero liability assumed. I wrote this into the Gold Paper. Page 14. The lawyers bound it in white leather. The binding cost more than the due diligence.
Justin Sun invested $75 million. He was facing SEC fraud charges. The SEC dropped the case. He is now our advisor. These events are unrelated.
Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to federal money laundering violations. He received a presidential pardon. The SEC dropped its lawsuit against his exchange the same week we listed our stablecoin. Then the exchange settled a $2 billion deal entirely in that stablecoin. These events are unrelated.
Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed of BitMEX pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations. All 3 received presidential pardons. Then the company itself was pardoned. $100 million in fines. Gone. An American first. These events are unrelated.
Sheikh Tahnoun of Abu Dhabi paid $500 million for a 49% stake that was never publicly disclosed. Then the administration approved semiconductor exports to his companies over national security objections. These events are unrelated.
Everything is unrelated. I track the unrelatedness on a dashboard I built. The dashboard has 7 columns now. I am proud of the dashboard.
On May 22nd, 220 people paid a combined $148 million to eat dinner with the America First president. Over half were foreign nationals. Justin Sun paid $18.5 million for the first seat. He visited the Executive Office Building the day before. I designed the seating chart. I put it on the Investor Confidence page. That page is doing well.
The team page lists 3 Witkoffs. All 3 are Co-Founders.
Steven Witkoff is the President's Middle East envoy. He testified as a character witness at the President's fraud trial.
His son Zach runs the crypto operation. His son Alex is also a Co-Founder. I have not been told what Alex co-founded.
The father runs the diplomacy. The sons run the platform. The family runs both. That is organizational efficiency.
Barron is 19. His title is Web3 Ambassador. The same as mine. Donald Jr. called the conflicts of interest "complete nonsense." Eric launched a Bitcoin mining company called American Bitcoin. America First. The mining partner is Hut 8. Hut 8 was founded in Canada. America First means the name.
On March 6th, the President signed Executive Order 14233 creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The order directs the government to hold Bitcoin. The President's family holds billions in Bitcoin. The executive order appreciates the President's assets by presidential decree. I did not write the executive order. I made sure it looked unrelated to the portfolio.
Trump Media put $2 billion of Bitcoin on its balance sheet. The ticker symbol is DJT. His initials. The press secretary said it is absurd to insinuate the President profits off the presidency. Forbes calculated his crypto holdings exceed the combined value of Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower. I would call that absurd too. That is my job.
600,000 wallets bought in. 1 of them asked why she could not withdraw her funds. I told her the protocol was experiencing dynamic market conditions. She asked what that meant. I sent her the Gold Paper. She said she had read the Gold Paper. I muted her channel. Dynamic means the conditions change. The condition that changed was her access.
A congressman called us the world's most corrupt crypto startup operation. We put it on a coffee mug. Ironic merchandise. $45. The revenue split on the mug is also 75/25.
My own tokens vest on a different schedule. I wrote that schedule. That is not in the Gold Paper.
The memecoin funds the family. The family funds the platform. The platform funds the stablecoin. The stablecoin funds the deals. The deals require the pardons. The pardons free the partners. The partners fund the platform. The President signs the executive orders. The executive orders inflate the assets. The assets fund the family.
I am the reason these events are unrelated.
