GM

Are you a "happy i sold for a gain" or a "sad i didn't buy more" kind of person?

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

Satoshi vs Abe Lincoln

Context

Art platform sovrn is inscribing 10,000 images of pennies on Bitcoin and giving them out for free (technically they cost 1 Satoshi which is 0.00000001 BTC).

These come from coins they collected by sifting through hundreds of thousands of pennies and pulling out any pre-1982 copper ones they found. 

The inscribed pennies will be given out in late March, and they’re still doing WL raffles for that here. 

Meanwhile, the physical ones have been smelted down into this copper cube. Not sure why, but it looks cool and maybe that’s enough.

Our take 

The history of the penny is a sad one to recount on such a sunny day. But then again, when is it not sunny in [redacted undisclosed location]. 

It’s done nothing but lose value every year over the last century, to the point where they had to switch its material in 1982 from copper (which got too expensive) to zinc. 

Today they’ve been reduced to a mere inconvenience. I’m almost embarrassed holding these things – like I somehow made the conscious decision to keep worthless scraps of metal instead of stuffing them into the first tip jar I see or “accidentally” dropping them at my feet. 

And now we’re tempted to simply remove them from circulation entirely so we can stop getting these daily reminders of inflation’s warm suffocating embrace. My guess is eventually we will. 

But, as you may know, we’ve been granted a life raft of sorts. A superior penny in the form of Satoshis – the atomic unit of Bitcoin named after our Lord and Savior (bow your heads). 

And what’s more poetic than inscribing Satoshis with these quaint ancestral Lincoln coins, which perhaps more than anything symbolize the reason Bitcoin is gaining momentum in the first place, and which perhaps, centuries from now, might be one of the last places to find them?

Almost like an ancient warrior defeating his foe but then promising to carry their family name with them forever, as a weird trophy of sorts. Brutal. 

The one issue here is that even though these are free, you still have to pay Bitcoin fees which they estimate to be 0.0014 BTC, or roughly $100. 

So all in all, people need to collectively pay $1 million to collect these coins. 

Ay dios mio, the pennies might not be worth the trouble even on our make-believe chains. Fun concept either way.

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨

NOTE: These drops are lightly curated. Our only requirement is that they have recognizable founders. As usual, DYOR. To learn more go here.

GHOST IN THE NET by Kazuhiro Tanimoto

Good news for fans of last year’s Memories of Digital Data like me: Japanese artist Kazuhiro Tanimoto will soon be launching GHOST IN THE NET, a new collection on the Iconic art platform.

Continuing the theme of emotional permanence through digital objects, seen in a lot of the artist’s past work, each of these new abstract works aggregates many different sentiments, akin to what a person’s digital footprint might look like after they’re gone.

You can play around with a generator to get a feel for the outputs, which I find visually engaging.

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨

(loop (format t "~%")) by nouseskou

Fellowship’s daily.xyz program, purely focused on AI art up to this point, branches out to new genres with (loop (format t "~%")), the genesis NFT collection from Japanese artist nouseskou, which questions where and how we draw the line between “human-made” and “AI” art.

It showcases different nature and urban scenes which haven’t been processed with AI tools, yet contain artifacts commonly found in AI art, complete with algorithmic-looking vectors that seem to be generating the image in real-time (but are not).

The pieces are engaging not only on a conceptual level but also aesthetically. Plus, they’ve gone viral multiple times on Instagram, so I think I’m with them on this one.

✨Added to Top 25 ✨

STEPEPES by LORS

Lors, a pseudonymous artist dealing mainly in pepe-related artifacts, is dropping STEPEPES soon, an independent Ordinals follow-up to his work on Set 028 for Jack Butcher’s Opepen.

It features minimalistic animations of colorful characters with serious bobblehead vibes (some opepen, some original), walking on the canvas in a loop, forever.

For Opepen lore fans.