Udi Wertheimer

on this saturday morning i am going to WALK INTO FIRE for no reason whatsoever 🔥🔥🔥 since i’m still known as the “ordinals guy”, i want to pose a question to ordinals fans: why was this @SHL0MS auction not on ordinals? why isn’t @Jediwolf (the auction winner) an ordinals enjoyer? as is often the case in crypto, ordinals folks might be tempted to say that the reason is “because they are stupid and uneducated” but that of course would be unequivocally false while i’d agree in principle that, ALL ELSE BEING EQUAL, a timeless piece like this one could have much to gain from being stored forever on bitcoin… the fact is that all else is NOT equal: 1. one simple superficial reason is that there simply isn’t an easy platform to auction 1-of-1 ordinals. even if some obscure, half-baked ones exist, they do not carry manifold’s trusted brand and relatively simple UX. attempting an auction with the lack of smart contracts and with slow blocks is genuinely a miserable experience. i would know 2. more fundamentally, there just aren’t enough people who have ordinals wallets with meaningful amounts of BTC in it who are ready to bid at a moment’s notice. a stealth-dropped auction relies on the existence of an audience that is ready to bid. if shl0ms’ monet auction required people to download and install a new wallet and then bridge into BTC, it necessarily would’ve settled at a lower price, if at all. when my team prepared for large mints/auctions on ordinals, the playbook included a campaign to have potential bidders pre-fund their own wallets weeks in advance, because we knew that otherwise the bid simply wouldn’t be ready in time. this type of thing tends to be overlooked but is absolutely critical 3. quite frankly, most people who are serious about collecting digital art have a (much) stronger affinity to ethereum. that is just the reality, and ignoring this reality is not going to help ordinals artists be more successful. there are much fewer digital art patrons who are ordinals-native, and targeting them exclusively isn’t a very wise business decision i’m saying all of this not to dunk on ordinals but because i genuinely do still think that bitcoin should play a bigger part in digital art than it currently does. but the ordinals protocol and ecosystem are very far from perfect and if we want to improve bitcoin’s standing in this sector we need to acknowledge that and work on solutions i think eventually a more compelling vision might look more like “artwork stored on bitcoin, but accessible everywhere”. it’ll require the ordinals community to drop their (largely un-earned) pretentiousness about other chains, but ultimately could improve bitcoin’s standing in the art world i genuinely think that if “inferior image” was still an ethereum nft auctioned on manifold, but with the metadata pointing to permanent storage of the artwork on bitcoin, it would’ve been an even stronger piece than it already is. those who care about art on bitcoin would do well to work towards making that a possibility for the next time a piece like this emerges.

as for the nft: it was underpriced. this event will be taught to future kids in LLM-based history classes as the moment that the art world had to contend with AI dominance. every child will recognize it

the monet by @shl0ms is the creme de la creme of performance art mass-rage-baiting is the most elusive art form that exists. so many variables have to fall into place for it to be effective and yet when it works you can’t help but ask “how did i not think of that myself” because it feels so naturally obvious dragging the entire hive mind kicking and screaming into a taboo realization, instantly destroying all previous models, and doing it so effortlessly that it feels like the conclusion was never even in question history was made yesterday ladies and gentlemen. you just don’t know it yet

there is no reason for spotify to be an app brothers it’s a catalog of songs. it’s literally nothing. a year for now your phone will play a song for you on its own, it’ll just know when is a good time to start playing a song and which one it should be. and then a year later it’ll also generate the song on the fly. none of this matters. enjoy the spotify icon while it is still visible to you, you lil shits. you will long for these days

the age of mobile apps and homescreen icons is almost over anyway if you still have homescreen real estate you might as well do something memorable with it. you won’t have it for long

on this saturday morning i am going to WALK INTO FIRE for no reason whatsoever 🔥🔥🔥 since i’m still known as the “ordinals guy”, i want to pose a question to ordinals fans: why was this @SHL0MS auction not on ordinals? why isn’t @Jediwolf (the auction winner) an ordinals enjoyer? as is often the case in crypto, ordinals folks might be tempted to say that the reason is “because they are stupid and uneducated” but that of course would be unequivocally false while i’d agree in principle that, ALL ELSE BEING EQUAL, a timeless piece like this one could have much to gain from being stored forever on bitcoin… the fact is that all else is NOT equal: 1. one simple superficial reason is that there simply isn’t an easy platform to auction 1-of-1 ordinals. even if some obscure, half-baked ones exist, they do not carry manifold’s trusted brand and relatively simple UX. attempting an auction with the lack of smart contracts and with slow blocks is genuinely a miserable experience. i would know 2. more fundamentally, there just aren’t enough people who have ordinals wallets with meaningful amounts of BTC in it who are ready to bid at a moment’s notice. a stealth-dropped auction relies on the existence of an audience that is ready to bid. if shl0ms’ monet auction required people to download and install a new wallet and then bridge into BTC, it necessarily would’ve settled at a lower price, if at all. when my team prepared for large mints/auctions on ordinals, the playbook included a campaign to have potential bidders pre-fund their own wallets weeks in advance, because we knew that otherwise the bid simply wouldn’t be ready in time. this type of thing tends to be overlooked but is absolutely critical 3. quite frankly, most people who are serious about collecting digital art have a (much) stronger affinity to ethereum. that is just the reality, and ignoring this reality is not going to help ordinals artists be more successful. there are much fewer digital art patrons who are ordinals-native, and targeting them exclusively isn’t a very wise business decision i’m saying all of this not to dunk on ordinals but because i genuinely do still think that bitcoin should play a bigger part in digital art than it currently does. but the ordinals protocol and ecosystem are very far from perfect and if we want to improve bitcoin’s standing in this sector we need to acknowledge that and work on solutions i think eventually a more compelling vision might look more like “artwork stored on bitcoin, but accessible everywhere”. it’ll require the ordinals community to drop their (largely un-earned) pretentiousness about other chains, but ultimately could improve bitcoin’s standing in the art world i genuinely think that if “inferior image” was still an ethereum nft auctioned on manifold, but with the metadata pointing to permanent storage of the artwork on bitcoin, it would’ve been an even stronger piece than it already is. those who care about art on bitcoin would do well to work towards making that a possibility for the next time a piece like this emerges.

as for the nft: it was underpriced. this event will be taught to future kids in LLM-based history classes as the moment that the art world had to contend with AI dominance. every child will recognize it

the monet by @shl0ms is the creme de la creme of performance art mass-rage-baiting is the most elusive art form that exists. so many variables have to fall into place for it to be effective and yet when it works you can’t help but ask “how did i not think of that myself” because it feels so naturally obvious dragging the entire hive mind kicking and screaming into a taboo realization, instantly destroying all previous models, and doing it so effortlessly that it feels like the conclusion was never even in question history was made yesterday ladies and gentlemen. you just don’t know it yet

there is no reason for spotify to be an app brothers it’s a catalog of songs. it’s literally nothing. a year for now your phone will play a song for you on its own, it’ll just know when is a good time to start playing a song and which one it should be. and then a year later it’ll also generate the song on the fly. none of this matters. enjoy the spotify icon while it is still visible to you, you lil shits. you will long for these days

the age of mobile apps and homescreen icons is almost over anyway if you still have homescreen real estate you might as well do something memorable with it. you won’t have it for long