My fellow retards,
I wanna flood the world with my twisted thoughts
You can bid all day, but I can't be bought-Kid Rock, I Am the Bullgod
This is the sentiment of phon/ongod, distilled to its primal form. Though “I am the Bullgod” does not match “Bawitdaba” on flow or sheer memetic quality, Bullgod’s lyrics tease the secrets necessary to create art.
The cryptospace is filled with many personalities. There are creators and there are scammers, realists, idealists and nihilists. There are complete autists and there are true artists…An untrained mind might gravitate towards NFT creators as the artists, but to phon/ongod art is not that narrow.
In the earlier days of bitcoin there were ruthless fights over the vision to scale. There was no anointed leader to provide direction, just the specter of Satoshi and a disjointed heap of intellectual capacity. Thus it became the first true DAO, but not with token representation, but rather social capital. This is better than token representation anyway. It is very difficult to game. It takes a long time to build social capital, and very little time to burn it all away.
Known entities in the space pushed for different scaling protocols. For very brief background, the bitcoin blocksize was temporarily placed at 1mb as an anti-spam measure. Adherents to the bigger block party always point to this as a temporary fix. Adherents to small block vision do not care, and do not want to increase from 1mb. There was intense fighting on both sides. Lots of mud was slung. People’s reputations were destroyed, and some were exiled forever. Don’t believe me, go talk to Roger Ver about his bitcoin cash project.
Bitcoin is bitcoin because it has the longest chain of collective work. Bitcoin does not need to recognize any other chains, it doesn’t care about your opinions or what camp you are in for changing the protocol. Whichever design gets more collective money to burn electricity to add work to the chain is bitcoin. Small blocks won, but how does this tie into artwork?
A single bitcoiner who had become a core developer in ***2011*** decided not to actively fight everyone else, and rather focused his efforts on where his competitive advantage lies. Instead of fighting to change the parameters of the protocol, he began work on a soft fork—one which did not break any consensus rules, such that the bitcoin protocol could scale and would not require drastic changes such as updating block size limit. Soft forks are desirable in that they add functionality and are backwards compatible. That dev was Peter Wuille.
Peter found a way to remove *some* of the block data that wasn’t necessary for the consensus rules into a separate location. He “segregated” the witness data. In effect this decreases the amount of data that needs to be included in each transaction, thus allowing more transactions to fit into a given block. This increased transaction throughput on bitcoin without any hard forks or in protocol breaking changes.
Peter is an artist. He brush is keystroke, his canvas is an algorithm. He chose to remove himself from fighting and instead contribute his artistic capital to move bitcoin further along. How can you contribute your competitive advantage to move Phonon further along?
It would be remiss not to mention one other piece of performance art that happened this week. Previously mentioned that the NFT creators may not be the most artistic, but one NFT owner sure is:
An anon NFT owner with address 0x650d agreed to post a single lot of 104 Cryptopunks for sale at the Sotheby’s auction house in Manhattan. The event was hyped. Panelists were brought in to provide perspective, expensive champagne was flowing, and bidders were eager to sink real money into some digital artwork.
They never got a chance. At the last minute 0x650d pulled the auction and rugged all of the attendees. Those wealthy speculators never got the chance to buy the collection. Their hopes and dreams were built up, only to cause utter despair. Anon rugpulled Sothebys. v impress.
Crypto art can come in many forms. Whether through beauty via coding, or performance pieces, this ecosystem is blessed with ingenuity.
Join in the process at the official phonon DAO discord.
Tips to phonongod.eth will be invested in bounties that advance the Phonon project.
Hatemail to phonongod@protonmail.com will be scathingly considered.
Targets for the marketcap of PHONON DAO remain:
$1b by Q2 2022, $12b by EOY.
On the high end, $300b marketcap in 3 years.