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NFT Spiritual History: 15 minute heroic dreams of Cans, Frogs and Mortals

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In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

NFT Spiritual History: 15-minute Heroic Dreams of Cans, Frogs and Mortals

原文作者：史中，浅黑科技

(0) 9527 and 7523

In the world of Tang Pak Fu Lighting Chou-heung, 9527 is just a house slave.

But in a certain cyber world, 9,527 is $340,000.

The next avatar, smoking a cigarette in a melon hat, is no. 9527 out of more than 10,000 avatars in Cryptopunks, the world's most popular NFT project.

# 9527

Its owner, 0x949... B786, just updated its listing price on January 23, 2022, at 124ETH, or $34W.

If you're willing to pay that much money, the next thing you know, it's yours. How about that? Good deal?

What, you think it's bullshit?

That's because you don't understand the rarity attribute behind the avatar.

Did you see that cigarette in his mouth? Only 961 out of 10,000 people have this attribute. Did you see his little hat? Only 419 people have this attribute. Did you see that sexy moustache? If you look closely, it's the gray one above the mouth. Only 288 people have this property

Oh, even that doesn't work for you...

It's okay. You're not interested. Someone else is.

On June 10, 2021, the world-renowned Sotheby's auction house auctioned its "brother", Cryptopunks No. 7523.

# 7523

Look at this melon skin hat, it's the same formula, but the head below has become the so-called "alien", cigarettes are gone, replaced by pinduoduo one yuan seven mask.

Cut the crap, but let's start with the price: it sold for $11.75 million, a small target for renminbi conversion.

There are only nine out of 10,000 faces with alien faces, and he happens to be one of 175 people wearing masks.

One interesting detail: while masks are a great metaphor for the world today, six years ago, when the Cryptopunks were born, there was no Novel Coronavirus outbreak.

So the original owner of 7523 was sold to Sillytuna, a seller at this auction, in 2017 for a bargain price (about $1,646).

In four years, 7523 has become a "COVID-19 alien avatar," with a price increase of more than 7,000 times, which seems like a better idea than buying a house.

That's Sillytuna's tweet, and two days after the auction, he's still complaining that he doesn't have new shoes... The tweet itself was pretty punk.

There may already be some impatient friends. What a mess, with your time to talk, I have enough to download the picture down, to both wearing masks and smoking avatar P, and then replaced my wechat avatar...

Why would I pay $1,000 for this bullshit picture?

The question "why is NFT valuable?" has been explained by countless people.

But I want to tell you an interesting story from the point of view of spiritual origin.

(1) Andy Warhol & NBSP;

In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

In 1968, the line appeared on a promotional page for the Stockholm Museum of Modern Art.

That year, there was no Internet, no iphones, no Tiktok, no Bitcoin, no Telegram.

But the central script that shaped today's world has all but emerged.

The man who said it was The Pope of Pop art, Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol

In 1961, Rato, a portly erotic writer and gallery owner, said to Andy Warhol, who was struggling with what to paint: 'Is there any way you could paint the tin you eat for lunch every day?

Mr Rato

Andy Warhol thought the idea was so bad that he gave Rato a $50 "creative fee."

From this beginning, he spiralled out of control, painting soup cans painting coke bottles, painting Ma Lianliang Monroe painting some head of state. (The $50 creative fee was well worth it, since one of his later paintings sold for $100 million.)

Campbell "s Soup Cans 1962

Flavor Marilyns 1962

Andy Warhol had a mathematical logic behind almost everything he drew: repeated subjects + random variables.

Attention! Although human artistic creation originally contains the factor of "repetition", most of them are "theme repetition". For example, many painters in the middle Ages drew Jesus and The Virgin Mary, and primary school students drew "house tree people" respectively in school, but Andy Warhol's repetition was a very straightforward "image repetition".

Image repetition requires very little aesthetic ability. When I first saw the Marilyn Monroe in second grade, I could see through it and feel the rhythm.

This is the kind of repetition that only a machine can produce. (In fact, his method of painting was also industrial "screen printing.")

I think one of the reasons why an Andy Warhol painting can sell for as much as a Van Gogh is that it captures precisely the most common state of mind of the industrial age.

What was the state of the industrial age masses?

I'll give you a quote from Andy Warhol, so you can feel it:

You know the president drinks Coca-Cola, Elizabeth Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and you think about it, you can drink Coca-Cola too.

Coke is coke, and no amount of money can buy you a better coke than that bum on the corner has. All cokes are the same. Elizabeth Taylor knows it, presidents know it, hobos know it, you know it.

You replace Coca-Cola with iPhone, Tiktok, Elizabeth Taylor with Dilieba, and the statement still holds.

Gone are the days when rich girls wore velvets and poor girls wore patches. Even sanhe can buy a pair of clean pants for $10.

Andy Warhol once faced the camera and ate a hamburger for more than four minutes. It became a great metaphor for the industrial age.

But that may not be a good thing for the inequality-obsessed human race.

Look, here we go! So far, I've quoted two Andy Warhol quotes that seem to contradict each other:

If everyone in this era, rich and poor, rich and poor, is drinking Coke, eating McDonald's, using iphones and tapping Tiktok, just like the cans standing side by side in the painting, then what makes you different and let you enjoy the spotlight, even for 15 minutes?

The trick, I'm afraid, lies in that tiny "variable".

In the environment of industrial production, the most simple and crude way to artificially control variables is "limited production".

My classmates all wear AJ's shoes, but yours are ordinary style, mine is limited to 500 pairs worldwide. Then, when we meet in class, your attention will inevitably be trampled under my feet. So I had my 15 minutes of fame.

Even though we're legally equal, there's a variable in me that's scarcer than yours, and I create an artificial inequality.

It's always worked, and half a century after Andy Warhol pointed it out, people are still enjoying it.

And it's getting worse.

Andy Warhol made his first appearance in TIME magazine, May 11, 1962.

2. Matt and Pepe & NBSP;

It all started one day in 2005.

You turn around, put your ass on me, bend down, yeah, don't move.

Matt said to his girlfriend ayana.

Matt Furie

Don't get me wrong, Matt is a cartoonist.

He was painting a scene in which a man tries to pee with his underwear down to his ankles. This movement is difficult to draw, so let girlfriend guest model...

He drew a comic called "Boy's Club," in which the main characters were four lazy young men with nothing to do.

One of them had a frog's head and a wise face. His name was Pepe.

Pepe was inspired by Matt's cousin David.

That's what David did when he took his pants off and peed.

Young Matt stood outside the toilet door and watched in horror. He felt a sudden "Oh my God, why is it so good"...

In the comic book, he inspired Pepe to say the words, "Feels Good Man!

Soon, the Boys' Club story became an Internet sensation.

But then the story began to surprise Matt.

Feels Good Man some people post pictures of themselves punching in at the gym with the caption "Feels Good Man," and then others make memes and write "Feels Good Man."

There's even a sand sculptor who has made up a song called "Feels Good."

Gradually people found that pepe, the frog, the look of diaosi, the temperament of passers-by, nothing but the character of the game world, just like the screen dark down that moment, inside the reflection of himself.

In the blink of an eye, pepe was being dressed in all kinds of clothes, all kinds of professions, all kinds of broken expressions, extreme emotions.

Of course, we now know that this is a standard meme meme.

Ask Mr. Andy Warhol, the "consultant" sitting on one side, and he will raise an eyebrow - nothing new, still superimposing variables on repeated subjects.

So, you can understand it this way:

Although Andy Warhol died in 1987, the Internet has created a "distributed Andy Warhol" with countless anonymous creators.

This Andy Warhol is more resilient, even immortal.

(3) Christopher Poole & NBSP;

Christopher Poole was 14 when he started 4chan, an anonymous texturing community, in his basement in 2003.

Christopher Poole

At first, 4chan had only one section, where middle school and junior high students posted Japanese comics.

But soon there was a "whiff of freedom". Due to anonymity and lack of archiving, people can express their opinions freely here, which attracts expert photo artists and sand sculptors. It is like the boiling water of a bay.

The timing of 4chan's breakout coincided with Pepe's lap, making him a natural fodder for 4chan's fans.

When people come across interesting memes, they save them and find the right opportunities to use them themselves.

It's easier than going to McDonald's and ordering a burger or going online to buy a pair of socks.

Here's the truth: In the Internet age, the cost of copying something is lower than it was in the industrial age, down to almost nothing.

This leads to a serious problem: if you use the same picture, I use it. The more people use it, the more it rots on the street and depreciates rapidly.

This makes the meme's writers uncomfortable because it's popular but they don't know it.

It was boring for the people who first used it, because he had struck gold, but they weren't famous either.

Well, in that case... Is it possible to make a stalk graph scarce? Like AJ shoes, artificial scarcity is good.

The wise men decided to give it a try.

Soon, the author of the Pepe meme put a large watermark on the picture: "Rare Pepe, do not save", in order to prevent "stealing" the picture.

This "rare Pepe" was posted in/R9K /.

By the way, / R9k/is the original section of 4chan, and the rules are like this: you have to post original stuff here. If anyone posts a word here, you repeat it, and you're banned for a period of time as punishment.

How does the system know if what you're saying is original?

You see the name of this section, R9K, is actually the abbreviation of "robot to re-script" Robot9000.

Writing down the rules for r9k

The script was written by comic book writer and programmer Randall Munro.

Fed up with people copying, watering and gluing over words that weren't their own online, Munro wanted to create a "utopia" -- a world where once someone said a word, no one else could say it again.

Hence the Robot9000 script.

Randall Munro and his famous Matchstick Man comics

Back to rare Pepe.

/r9k/ plate hu fu netizens immediately think, yes, intellectual property protection ah! Therefore, everyone supports the author of rare pepe to stop Posting the original picture, if you want to use rare pepe to install force, you have to pay for it.

I should warn you: At this point, Pepe is completely unrelated to its creator, Matt. Matt may or may not like pepe, but since Matt doesn't mix with 4chan, no one cares about his opinion.

4chan is a closed universe -- no one outside the universe can influence the history of the universe inside.

Soon, authors were selling their own pepe, rare and unwatermarked, on the second-hand website ebay.

And they do, because if they do, they're the prettiest ones on 4chan...

At that time, there was a sensation.

Someone packed up 1,200 rare pepes and put them up for auction on ebay, eventually driving the price up to $50, 000.

Bullshit pictures. That's how it relates to money.

And they all believe it, at least on 4chan.

(4) Joe Rooney & NBSP;

Joe Rooney, a coder, was developing a digital wallet for Counterparty, a P2P website, in 2016.

That day, in the Telegram group of Counterparty, suddenly someone threw in a card like toys, above the painting of a satoshi nakamoto appearance of rare pei Pei.

The guy says, "I made a whole deck of cards. They're rare Pepe. I'm selling them online.

Hu Bi netizens have echoed: this is too awesome, I want to buy.

Then people started bidding for $1, $5, $10. And then everyone just rolls off and orders...

Rooney held up his mobile phone for a long time.

"At that moment, I wanted to paint rare Pepe myself..." He recalled.

However, he soon came up with a better idea than painting Pepe -- creating a platform for trading rare pepe and using his traditional art to create a "wallet system" for storing rare pepe.

Joe Wayne rooney

But pepe, no matter how much they look like cards, are only pictures, and pictures can be copied.

So how do you get everyone to agree that someone owns an image?

He immediately came up with a clever way to use Bitcoin's billing system.

Bitcoin's billing system features a distributed ledger, where the same account is recorded by thousands of nodes around the world. That is to say, as long as you have the password of your wallet, the coins in it, no matter how many, are definitely yours, and everyone has to recognize them.

This makes "cooking the books" impossible.

I gave it a try and as soon as I entered the site, it set up a wallet for me

This feature was used by Rooney to make a "rare Pepe wallet".

In a nutshell, it works like this:

A rare Pepeka is tied to a Bitcoin wallet, and only its owner has the password (or private key) to the wallet. If you want to transfer Pepe to someone else, all you have to do is give him the code.

This trading model, it actually works.

What's more, Rooney has made an interesting feature: in order for a creator to submit a Pepeka to the site, he has to send a certain amount of Bitcoin to an empty address, in other words, to burn the coins -- rooney can't get them, and no one else can.

Why waste money?

It's like when you join a gang, you have to take a head as a proxy. It doesn't matter if the murdered man is lying innocent, it's a "barrier to entry" that prevents someone from opening a drawing app, drawing a cheap Pepe in five seconds and selling it.

This setting is significant.

Soon, there were so many pepe with good ideas and fine paintings hanging on the platform, apparently from someone with a certain level of artistic education -- the creators began to take it seriously.

This is the Rare Pepe Directory, an artwork site that comes with the wallet.

Later, the website also developed the O2O model -- you buy an electronic card, I will give a paper card.

But as any buyer knows: paper cards are worth nothing, it's the picture on the Internet that counts...

At this point in the story, it all seems silly, but everyone's motives are fun, money, free expression, and generally good.

But that's what liberalism is all about. When countless freedoms are added together, they overwhelm the horizon.

5. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump

Liberals are liberal in every way, and as you can see from the comments on 4chan, they mostly say what they want, misogynist, black, self-centered.

Some 4chan users like to refer to themselves as "NEET," or uneducated, unemployed and unskilled.

You know, they're the main team of keyboard warriors.

Life advice from "NEET".

There was a special section on 4chan called Politically Incorrect, full of white supremacy rants. In their eyes, black people rob without a father and Asian people are cheap and evil and want to build a wall to keep everyone out of the beautiful country.

It's an anonymous community, doesn't expose itself, and nobody gets in trouble for it.

Over time, this soggy soil spawned a worm of right-wing online thought known as the alt-right.

2016, just in time for the US election. The alt-right saw that Trump's campaign slogan was to build a wall on the border, and that's fine with his own people. Trump is probably a 4chan diver.

So the alt-right made Pepe look like Trump and encouraged people to vote for him.

Innocent Pepe suddenly went from a meme to a political symbol...

The climax of the story happened on August 25, 2016. Hillary was seriously criticizing the right-wing trend of thought in her campaign speech. However, a voice in the crowd shouted out: Pepe!

The voice, which most people didn't understand, was considered a battle hymn by the alt-right.

After that, the pepe memes, which appeared out of nowhere, just got scarier and scarier.

Someone turned Pepe into the Ku Klux Klan, someone stuck a Swastika on him, someone made pepe carry a crusader flag.

Some people even found a frog head human figure named "Keck" from an ancient Egyptian stone painting and said that this is the holy apocalypse given to us by the ancient Egyptians and our god is Keck.

Some people on 4chan started laughing seriously: "Our group should consider finding a good lawyer to help us build a" free "white country -- Keckstein...

They even painted a flag for Keckstein with the 4chan Logo on it...

Pepe's author, Matt, was the most freaked out.

Think about it. Pepe was the spirit kid who pulled his pants down to pee, and now he's being used as a monster of hate.

The victim was an offline leader of Alt-Right.

Fed up, he decided to Sue those who publicly associated Pepe with politics.

But it didn't help.

Later, he had to personally come out to write a sequel to Pepe's story - Pepe died because of racism, they held a funeral for him...

But it still doesn't help.

Because from the day Pepe landed on the Internet, it was in the hands of a distributed Andy Warhol, and no single person could even decide what pepe would do.

Some people think Pepe is a success, others think Pepe is a failure, his person is painted, become infinitely complicated.

But in the field of blockchain, Pepe has undoubtedly become a shining "pioneer", which has explored the "safe zone" and "minefield" of blockchain art.

In fact, there are many heartwarming creations about Pepe, too.

(6) Watkinson & Hall & NBSP;

In the spring of 2017, Rooney was working on his thriving website, Rare Pepe.

Unbeknownst to him, just across the line, there was another geek looking across from him.

This guy is Hall.

Hall and watkinson, his gay friend, both graduated from the University of Toronto with computer science degrees before moving to New York in 1999 to become Newwind. They both liked to do weird things with computers, so they formed a group called the Larva Lab.

Hall on the left, Watkinson on the right.

In recent years, they have been honing a strange art: using computer algorithms to create heads.

For example, back in 2011, they released an App that gave you an avatar that looked like an Android. It looks like this.

Hall on the right, Watkinson on the left.

In 2017, they got pretty good at creating avatars, taking a punk theme and creating an "avatar engine."

The gay friends were talking about Watkinson's niece's crazy doll collection, which reminded them of their own childhood collections of baseball cards and Magic: the Gathering. (It's the same as Chinese boys collecting water Margin cards)

It seems that collecting is the common trait of all mankind through time and space...

"So, is it possible that we could produce a limited number of heads, say 10,000, and let people collect them?" Hall says.

So he went online to collect information and came across the rare Pepe website.

But rare Pepe has a problem: it uses the Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin network was designed to be used only for bitcoin accounts and nothing else. So looney had to attach a "Pepe wallet" to the Bitcoin ledger when he designed it.

But the rounding of pepe's wallet is controlled by Rooney and is less transparent.

Is there a network that is both open and transparent and that keeps a more complex ledger?

They immediately thought of the Ethereum chain (ETH), which was just beginning to take off.

This is ETH (Bushi)

There are many differences between the Ethereum chain and the Bitcoin chain, but let's just pick the most important ones.

This is to support "non-homogeneous tokens".

You can think of Bitcoin as sheets of dollars, dollars are dollars, my dollars are dollars and your dollars are dollars, and if I exchange a $100 bill for your $100 bill, it's the same as if I didn't exchange it.

In other words, bitcoin is homogeneous.

But on Ethereum, I could create a weird kind of dollar, like drawing a different picture on each hundred-dollar bill, so everyone wouldn't get a homogeneous dollar bill. For example, my $100 bill has yellow mice on it, and your $100 bill has garlic on it.

At this point, I'm going to give you pikachu $100 for your garlic $100, you have to think about it, you might like garlic more than you like electric mice, so you might not want to trade.

This "non-homogeneous Token" is simply called NFT (Non-fungible Token).

In this way, the whole technological process goes on inside the heads of the two geeks in the larval lab.

1. They first used a "generation engine" to generate 1W exquisite pixel images, named Cryptopunks.

2. Then run a password calculation on each image to condense it into a 64-bit password.

3. Write each password as an NFT to the Ethereum ledger.

They decided to give away these NFT heads for free.

You read that right. It's free.

Busy for a long time, free to everyone, they have what good?

In fact, they were hiding a trick: they gave away only 9, 000 heads and kept another 1, 000.

Hall and Watkinson, respectively

On June 9, 2017, the Larva Lab tweeted the good news, then sat inside waiting for the throngs.

However, after five days, there were no visitors, only a few sporadic people came to collect hundreds of...

Cryptopunks and Pepe are different, although each has a rebellious face, but no one knows them.

How am I supposed to go out with something nobody knows about?

Everyone will think that.

It's free, but there's an 11-cent Ethereum handling fee. No one's money comes from the wind...

Only people who really think these avatars look good and are willing to pay a few cents will apply for these suspicious punk avatars.

Of course, they chose the rarest images first, such as "Alien" (nine) and "Ape" (24), which were sold out in the first five days.

Among the onlookers, one figure lingered for a long time: Jason Abruzzi.

Jason Abbruzzese's Twitter avatar is also very pop.

Jason Abruzzi was a reporter for the technology website Mashable at the time.

He interviewed Hall and wrote a detailed analysis of Cryptopunks called "This Ethereum-based project May Change the way we think about digital art."

As people's lives move online, status symbols are bound to follow.

He said.

The article was published on June 19.

Within 24 hours, all the remaining heads were wiped out. There's this guy, he got 758 heads all by himself.

(7) Anne Blassegdel & NBSP;

Actually, more people haven't noticed Cryptopunks in 2017, but many have heard of "Cryptokitties."

Crypto is a beta version that went live on October 19, 2017, six months after Crypto Punk, but crypto is clearly more sophisticated than Crypto Punk.

That's because crypto's creative team, Dapper Lab, has added a number of game elements, such as two cats that can mix genes to produce kittens.

Cryptokitties

But this property is both a strength and a weakness. Once "strategy" is emphasized, crypto cats are categorized as games, not collectibles.

Games will eventually move into gaming circles, and collectibles will eventually move into collectibles.

If you look back in history, it was a bull market in cryptocurrencies.

In early 2018, bitcoin had just hit what was then an all-time high, and an "epic meeting" was also taking place in New York.

Hall, the founder of Cryptopunks, Mark, the product mastermind behind Cryptokitties, and Rooney, the founder of the Rare Pepe Wallet, gathered at the Rare Digital Arts Festival on January 13.

This is a meeting of the NFT gods.

At that event, a rare pepe was auctioned for $3.90 million.

That's the one down there, Homer Pepe.

Homer is the cartoon image of the Simpsons. It may surprise you, but the reason this graph is worth so much is because it's an "error" that says "minute" instead of "mintue." (WTF...)

At this party, there was a woman with a camera in her hand.

This is no ordinary lady, this is Christie's photography specialist Anne Blassegdel.

After listening to this group of people's speech, she couldn't wait to make an appointment with two tech geeks in the larva lab to talk about life.

Annie's Twitter avatar

As a photographer, Annie was plagued by a Bug:

A photographer's work is only valuable after death. Because when you're alive, there's always a new one coming out.

The more you make, the less valuable it is. Collectors are only willing to pay top dollar for your work if they know you're dead. But at this point, you no longer enjoy the money...

Seeing the Cryptopunks, Anne had an Epiphany.

It turns out that the scarcity of a work of art can be guaranteed by cryptography through the technical means of blockchain:

Once the art is on the chain, it is protected by enormous computational power. Even the two geeks in the larva lab couldn't change a single pixel themselves.

She is quick to point out that for your art to reach a wider public, it must go to galleries and auction houses.

So Ms. Hall and Ms. Watkinson began attending art forums and getting to know many gallery owners.

My first stop was to try my luck at an art gallery in Zurich.

To suit their tastes, they decided to downgrade the presentation of digital art to traditional art -- they printed out a dozen heads, framed them opiously, and stuffed the password of their Ethereum wallet onto a piece of paper, sealed in mediaan-style wax.

A few days before the opening, the gallery owner took Watkinson and some of the rich and powerful in finance to dinner, and after a meal, the 12 NFTS were nearly sold out.

Watkinson flew back to New York and printed 12 more NFT, which were also wiped out.

Everything looked so bright.

However, the digital art dream supported only by the tyrants outside the circle is a tulip bubble.

The crowd was in full swing, unaware that the winter of cryptocurrency had arrived unexpectedly. The price of all NFT's plummeted, and even Cryptopunks became unpopular.

Like a wild fire sweeping through, nothing but ashes.

But just before the fire, there was a small incident in one corner of the country.

8. Claire

In 2017, Claire, a post-00s female artist, and Mr. 703, a cryptographic expert, met by chance online.

Claire is a screen name, and So is Mr. 703.

But they share a belief that crypto art has a bright future.

Mr. 703 gave Claire the heads of three Cryptopunks and made Claire promise not to sell them, no matter how valuable they were. Because this kind of art belongs in momA...

Why would Mr. 703 be so generous as to give such a gift to a girl he has never met?

Because Mr. 703 is the guy we mentioned earlier who grabbed 758 Cryptopunks. After that, he gave away 55 heads (including three for Claire) and sold them, leaving 703 before calling himself "Mr 703".

But Claire clearly doesn't have Mr. 703's strong convictions.

In 2018, after seeing the value of all NFT heads drop by 90%, Claire looked in the mirror and was still the same frail, depressed artist with no idea where the money for her next meal was.

She quit the NFT groups, stopped talking to "Mr. 703," bought a used iPad, bought a drawing app for $10, and started doodling to try and make some money.

She was too busy making a living to look back.

Under the ashes, where no one watches, new shoots are quietly growing.

Back in 2017, around the time Claire and Mr. 703 met, a website called Opensea was launched. It was created by Alex Atala and Devon Finzer.

Alex Atallah (left) and Devin Finzer (right)

Unlike the code heroes who go it alone, Opensea has been raising funding since its inception and growing as a regular company.

In 2018, Opensea received $12 million in funding from Y Combinator, the accelerator run by tech startup guru Paul Graham. Lean on the strength of capital, leng is to endure teeth winter.

Paul Graham, the author of the famous book Hackers and Painters.

In 2021, the quadrennial cryptoworld boom came back, and Opensea raised $1 billion, growing from a sprout to a giant tree in an instant.

This time, the NFT world has its own native NFT market, instead of looking down on the tycoons of auction houses and galleries.

Cryptopunks, of course, became a hit on Opensea.

It was only then that the distressed Claire remembered that she still had three NFT heads.

She took her favorite #1629, the girl with pink hair, and replaced it with a Twitter avatar.

With her profile picture, she got 1,000 followers a month on Twitter. The influx of fans brings not only popularity but also real purchasing power.

Claire put her work up for sale on Opensea, and people actually placed orders, selling several paintings and making more than $6,000 worth of ETH. One of those buyers was Mr. 703.

A photographer named Justin Aversano contacted Claire and asked if he could borrow the #1629 image, which he had a chance to put on digital billboards around New York City.

Claire quickly agreed.

Justin Aversano

Sure enough, #1629 appeared on a digital screen near the Museum of Art in New York City in May 2021.

Mr. 703's prediction seems to have come true -- it's not in momA yet, but it's three blocks away...

Clare felt her heart swell with desire to see it for herself.

It took three days and nights to drive from her small town to New York. She stuffed a mattress into the back seat of her car and started it. At night, she parked her car in a Walmart parking lot, slept in it, went to the walmart bathroom in the morning, and drove again.

And so, on June 5, 2021, she finally arrived in this dizzying cosmopolitan city.

She parked her car and walked quickly over to the tall electronic screen, behind which sat the pixelated girl with pink hair and black hat, squinting at the world and saying nothing.

It's fucking punk.

Claire dug out a soft piece of paper from her bag, wrote her name on it, then solemnly drew a small flower next to it, the exact same as the one behind her Twitter name, held it up to her face and snapped a picture with her phone.

She posted the image on Twitter with the caption: 'Sleeping in my car for days to get here. Worth it.'

To the surprise and blessing of Twitter users, she detour to the coast of Connecticut, the seafood rich American version of Dalian, and treat herself to a hearty meal of lobster rolls.

But Claire didn't keep her promise to Mr. 703.

In the summer of 2021, her mother was hospitalized and needed surgery. She sold two Cryptopunks for $6.80 and $1.80 to rent a room near the hospital to share her bed.

All she had left was #1629.

After much hesitation, she bought a pink wig. It's hard to say whether #1629 became her or she became #1629.

NFT is just an illusory picture. But in Claire's life, this "illusory picture" has followed her through the years in strange ways. In the uneventful life, she has her own heroic moments.

Nothing could be more real.

Claire's self-portrait

Pak (9)

One of the earliest Cryptopunks claimants was Erick Calderon.

He is a businessman and amateur artist.

After the NFT fire, he also started his own NFT website, ArtBlock.

Erick Calderon

His site is interesting. None of the artists on it can draw their own works, but must use automatic art generation techniques like Cryptopunks.

Therefore, art works on ArtBlock are abstract in style.

Like this one, Ringers, from the artist Dmitri Cherniak.

Ringers series NFT

(1000 pieces in total)

In 2021, a ringers-generated work, known as "Goose," sold for $5.8 million.

Money didn't make Dmitri feel special anymore. In 2022, he decided to do something more performance art. Every day in January, he would generate a piece with Ringers and send it to a random Ethereum wallet.

Of course, there's a good chance that the wallet isn't used at all, or that if it is, its owner doesn't notice the pie in the sky.

But That's what Dmitry wanted to do, writing on Twitter: "Think of it as a celebration of birth, life and death."

Actually, there's another guy who did that.

Picasso once deliberately left his paintings on a bus.

There are other star art projects on ArtBlock, such as Trossets by Anna Carreras.

Trossets

(1000 pieces in total)

Like the Heavenly Bodies of Ento.

Heavenly Bodies

(400 pieces in total)

Of course, the stars of the NFT movement, two geeks at Larva LABS, are hardly idle, launching a new 3D-style NFT called Meebits.

Meebits

The 3D style, in fact, indicates their ambition to enter the meta-universe and.

In the era of web pages, a person's head is a picture, but in the meta-universe, the image of a person is three-dimensional, to have a face and a butt, like seven degrees of space can do 360 degrees of movement without dead Angle.

So, Cryptopunks is Pixel and Meebits is Voxel. The two are in the same vein.

For now, however, these stories are only a prologue to the NFT world.

In any field, there is a moment in history when the "pioneer" gives way to the "great god".

In these deep blue waters, real whales are beginning to emerge.

On March 11, 2021, Christie's auction house sold an NFT, "Everydays: The First 5,000 Days," by illustrator Beeple.

Unlike other works of art generated by electronic algorithms, Beeple is a model. He started drawing one painting a day on May Day 2007, and by 2021 had amassed 5,000 works.

He pieced these 5000 pictures together into one.

The painting sold for $69.3 million.

Everydays: the First 5000 Days

That's no problem breaking the record for the most expensive work in NFT history. And since it says "the first 5,000 days," there must be "middle 5,000 days" and "the last 5,000 days," which is probably around 2035.

But what's really scary is that Beeple's record didn't even stand for a year.

On December 2, 2021, a mysterious corner of the Internet began a 48-hour sale.

The thing for sale is called Mass.

During those 48 hours, you can buy as much as you want, but after the deadline, there's only so much mass left in the world.

Based on the amount of mass each person has, the system on the blockchain will give you a block of material in real time, which is your NFT.

The more mass you have, the more mass you have.

The interesting gameplay is that Mass can be traded. If you have 10 masss and I have 20, and I buy yours, I have 30, and at the same time, my NFT gets bigger.

Used "substances" traded on Opensea.

As mass passes from hand to hand, the matter in this space starts to move and collide. Like our universe, no one can predict exactly how these stars will evolve and merge.

This is a dynamic NFT, as well as performance art.

The name of this art is The Merge.

A total of 28,983 buyers bought the Mass for a total of $9,180.

The figure is significant not only because it sets another NFT record, but also because it sets another historical record: the highest price paid by a living artist at a public auction.

The previous record was $91.1 million, set in 2019 by Jeff Koons' 1986 sculpture "Rabbit."

Jeff Koons and his creation Rabbit.

It's like a declaration:

The Everest of digital art has overtaken physical art.

What is more interesting is that The artist behind The Merge, named Pak, no one knows his real name, face, male or female.

No one even knows if he's an individual or an organization.

But his creativity is recognized. (Let's just say it's "him.")

As early as March 2021, Pak was noticed by Sotheby's when two of his works, "The Pixel" and "The Switch," sold for $136 and $140, respectively.

This is not an unloaded image, this is The Pixel.

On September 30, 2021, he developed his first social experiment, The Lost Poet.

In total, 65,536 AI-generated poet avatars sold for $70 million.

The Lost Poets"

Back to The Merge.

On December 4, 2021, Pak announced the launch of a mysterious website, Mass. Black.

The site currently has only one front page, which apparently hides The deeper gameplay of The Merge that Pak did not reveal. From here, it looks like the auction was just the beginning of a larger project.

As a result, Pak gradually became a god, and he was called "Satoshi Nakamoto of the NFT world".

Pak has 33 million followers on Twitter. To some extent, these concerns are not blind because, as Pak says, he wants to prove that NFT is far more than a JPEG.

This is a list of the top 10 most expensive works sold in the NFT world as of February 2022. (Click to see larger version)

At The very least, The Merge has demonstrated that NFT can rely on programs, code, and philosophical design to create a wider range of possibilities than traditional art, to reach a point of The soul that traditional art cannot reach.

At The bottom of The NFT website NiftyGateway, which The Merge logs on, it says:

We won't rest until a billion people collect NFT.

(10) The rebels

Many people have hotly questioned whether NFT is art at all.

It's like when people questioned whether Andy Warhol's cans were art.

The reason for the skeptics is that these works are not "beautiful" in the traditional sense.

However, please note that the highest peak of human art has never been achieved by pure "beauty", but by the critical and questioning spirit embodied in them.

"Mona Lisa" is bright, because she used a pair of human gentle eyes, contempt of the millennium darkness of the Middle Ages.

"Starry Night" is timeless because the blossoming branches reach behind the sky. It is a soul holding a paintbrush and trying to gather courage to break through suffering.

When art begins to flatter power, it ceases to be art.

From this point of view, pepe the Frog is small, and the cypherpunk avatar is simple, but they observe and try to interact with The Times in a distributed way.

When upset, they also have no problem raising a middle finger to The Times -- a distributed, non-traceable, technology-protected middle finger.