TALES FROM THE BLOCKCHAIN
IAN SIMMONS delves into the oddities of cryptocurrency
Since the arrival of Bitcoin in 2008, the blockchain, a distributed digital database that maintains secure records of transactions, has produced a boom in cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Dogecoin that have made and lost fortunes for investors. They have also led to the creation of Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs), a form of digital receipt or certificate of ownership kept on a blockchain, that are currently fueling their own investment bubble for NFTs linked to simple digital images, but both blockchains and NFTs have the potential to do much more.
BITCOIN TIME TRAVELLER?
Bitcoin and the blockchain debuted in 2008 when a white paper entitled Bitcoin: A Peerto-Peer Electronic Cash System was published by someone calling themselves “Satoshi Nakamoto”, who also went on to devise the first blockchain database on which Bitcoin was run. “Nakamoto” remained active in the Bitcoin world until 2010, by which time it was clear that “Satoshi Nakamoto” was a pseudonym for a person or a collective; then he, she, or they vanished. Since then, there has been much speculation as to Nakamoto’s identity, with several people being named as, or claiming to be, either the man himself, or one of the collective operating under that name, but none of the claims have been wholly convincing, so speculation continues to be rife. One of the key factors that seems to exclude all the claimants so far is that none of them have accessed Nakamoto’s own bitcoin wallet, which would now be worth upwards of $50 billion. As all transactions and holdings on the blockchain are publicly verifiable, it is possible to monitor this holding and see if it is ever accessed by someone holding its private key. While his disappearance and failure to tap this fortune might be easily accounted for by him dying in 2010, wilder theories about Nakamoto’s identity have proliferated, ranging from the Bitcoin being a CIA front to enable them to make untraceable transactions to the idea that Satoshi Nakamoto was a time traveller.
Part of the reasoning for this is that the blockchain concept was so revolutionary and disruptive it seemed to have no real predecessors and seems to have appeared out of nowhere (although there are reasons to dispute this), but artist and philosopher Nick Hinton has put forward a theory that Nakamoto is in fact a rogue artificial intelligence from the future. He sees evidence for this in a specific block that was added to the blockchain with a
Nakamoto’s bitcoin wallet could now be worth $50 billion
block hash that features zeros “oddly similar” to the Genesis Block, or the first Bitcoin block ever added to the blockchain. Following the zeros are a series of numbers that Hinton says “represent the ‘Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything’”, which actually, is not all that simple. He maintains the random string of numbers is “meaningful” and “super rare,” and would supposedly take 3.3 decillion years to come up with using current computing power. As a result, he suggests that it was generated sometime in the future by a high-powered quantum computer using many parallel universes to do the calculation and that the funds building up in “Nakamura’s” account are part of a scheme by a time travelling rogue AI to take over the world in the future. newsbtc.com.
BLOCKCHAIN RELIGION
Matt Liston, former CEO of Augur, a blockchain prediction company, has started what he describes as the first blockchain religion, which
Should we consider Yves Klein’s imaginary artwork, currently on sale at Sotheby’s, a proto-NFT? FACING PAGE: A statue in Budapest dedicated to the mysterious ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’.
he calls 0xΩ (Zero ex Omega or Zero times Omega) based on a document known as the “flame paper”, only available on the Ethereum blockchain. Liston, described by some as the Cryptsiah or Cryptophet, terms he rejects, believes putting his religion on the blockchain could eliminate the need for it to have a leader, or even any governing authority, and give all its followers an equal influence on its beliefs and activities. This is because they can all record their ideas on the blockchain and then use it to come to a consensus, or, if not, “hard fork” the blockchain into two separate religions. “In this religion, the people participating and involved could essentially vote and continuously change the structure and nature of it,” said Avery Singer, an artist and supporter of 0xΩ. At the launch, Liston invited audience members to join 0xΩ by giving out highly inflated Zimbabwe dollar notes and Weimar Republic Reichsmarks inscribed with private and public keys people could use to generate a “wallet” on the blockchain and enter into the religion, saying that the combination of a blockchain and religion has captured “some kind of meme magic”. The religion is basically a consensus protocol for the Ethereum blockchain and has a wider application as it could be used by other religions or collectives to manage donations more democratically, reach agreements, and better identify honest leaders. futurism.com, 2 Jun 2018; Wired, 28 Jun 2018.
BITCOIN MOUSE
A blockchain-based collective, calling itself BitMouse DAO, has announced a project to insert a Bitcoin into a mouse.
Bitcoins are accessed using a digital “Private Key” and the collective intend to work with a “biological company” to inset the code for a Bitcoin into the DNA sequence of a mouse egg, so that when it is born, the mouse would have this code hidden in every cell. “Ideally the offspring of the BitMouse would also carry the private key,” BitMouse DAO said, adding, “We would make specimens of them to sell at auction after they die of natural causes,” with each still containing the private key in its preserved cells. “At that point, a single Bitcoin would split into multiple specimens, but as soon as someone breaks the specimen to extract the genetic information and thus remove the BitMouse, the other specimens would lose their value,” they write, as the person who did this would be able to claim ownership of the actual Bitcoin on the blockchain. Inevitably, they are also offering NFTs for images of the mouse and its offspring to raise funds to make the project a reality. iflscience.com, 1 Feb 2022.
APE FAIL
The highest profile NFT linked images are “Bored Apes”, which have been bought and hyped by celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Justin Bieber. There have been 10,000 of these produced by the Bored Ape Yacht Club, each a computergenerated variation on an image of a bored-looking ape, and they can sell for over $300,000 each. The owner of Bored Ape 3,547, named only as maxnaut, failed to realise the full value of his NFT due to a “lapse of concentration”. While listing his Ape for sale online, he accidentally typed “0.75 ethereum (ETH)” (£2,405) instead of 75 ETH (£240,500); ethereum is the cryptocurrency used in many NFT transactions.
“I instantly saw the error as my finger clicked the mouse but… it was instantly sniped before I could click ‘Cancel’ – and just like that, $250,000 was gone,” he said. His Bored Ape had been instantly snapped up by a bot that monitors the market for sales below a certain price and buys them at superhuman speed, and as there is no central authority governing the blockchain it is almost impossible to get accidental transactions reversed. Having paid 8ETH (£2,418) in “gas fees” to speed the transaction through, the automated account then put maxnaut’s NFT back on sale almost instantly for $250,000. bbc.co.uk/news 13 Dec 2021.
PUTTING THE CRYPTO IN CRYPTOZOOLOGY
Taking a rather more grounded approach is Mattereum, a startup that connects NFTs with physical objects and supports them with enforceable, legally binding, contracts, with the aim, in the longer term, of using their NFTs to enable the circular economy to function. Having already tested their concept with NFTs linked to real gold, wine, art and high value collectibles, they have just launched an NFT connected to an alleged footprint cast of a Chupacabra, taken in Florida and which, in 1995, appeared in the Fortean Times exhibition Of Monsters and Miracles at Croydon Clocktower. For sale on the NFT marketplace OpenSea, the NFT will give the purchaser ownership of the cast, which is kept in a secure art storage vault. They can then either leave it there and trade the NFT or use it as a collection receipt and take possession of the actual object. mattereum. com.
EARLIEST NFT?
Something that could be said to be a proto-NFT has been put up for sale at Sotheby’s: a receipt for a piece of invisible art by Yves Klein, best known for creating his signature vivid blue colour and using it in many of his works. In the late 1950s, Klein sold several pieces of imaginary art under the title Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, which he would sell to buyers for a weight of pure gold, then issue a receipt to the buyer. He then got buyers to take part in a ritual involving burning the receipt and throwing half the gold into the river Seine to make the buyer the “definitive owner” of the artwork. Unburned receipts could be sold on, and Klein kept a register of who owned these. Klein’s receipts acted like NFTs, with his register forming a kind of blockchain, and the burning ritual also prefigures the way that once someone claims a physical item that is connected to an NFT, the NFT no longer exists and is “burned”. The estimate on
Klein’s receipt is $551,000. Only time will tell if Bored Apes retain their value quite as well. upi.com, 23 Mar 2022.
TRUMP COIN
While a cryptocurrency called Trumpcoin exists and is currently being sued by the Trump family for using their name without permission, another form of Trump coin is finding favour among his fanbase. This coin is an actual token that features Trump’s face embossed in gold on a silver background with his slogan, “Keep America Great”, written in an arc above his head. It has not been made clear where these coins originate, with no company taking credit, but they are being sold through a multiplicity of online affiliate sales outlets connected with right-wingers for just $0 (plus $9.99 shipping and handling), with some marketers claiming this physical Trump coin was actually a cryptocurrency too. This was considerably boosted by a fake account on the messaging app Telegram that claimed to belong to the actor Denzel Washington, saying that “Democrats are only causing panic and insecurity, and the American people are not safe with them on the wheel,” and claiming that Trump coins would soon replace “real money” as a safe form of currency. Many other fake accounts then pushed it and claimed that the coin’s value was about to surge, just as the price of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have rocketed. It got to the point where a fake account for Trump-aligned Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene shared a fake story on a fake Fox News website about a fake tweet by a fake Elon Musk, falsely claiming that Tesla’s chief executive would soon accept Trump coins as payment. As a result, many Trump followers have been buying the coin in quantity, confident that Trump will either soon make it legal tender or allow it to be exchanged for his own cryptocurrency, with one purchaser saying: “Seems somewhat risky to me, but $500 against a potentially large upside seemed like a reasonable risk.” A New York Times investigation showed that not only were claims about the coins’ potential value completely baseless but discovered they had been created by a company in Romania and were manufactured in bulk in China before being sold through right wing online outlets in the US, who took a cut of the profits. Their surface lustre turned out to be simply paint and they lacked any value as metals. nytimes.com, 22 Jan 2022.