making bits of bitcoin physical | THEBITCOINMINT
Los Angeles, CA
Joined July 2012
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Try to imagine a single satoshi, one bit of bitcoin or whatever the hell you want to call it.
What does it look like? Does the person next to you agree? Do they even agree on its name, or what its purpose is? Is it currency? Is it digital gold? Is it art? And can it be all of those things without someone else calling you a heretic?
The consensus mechanism outlines how to record, transfer and verify it. But it can't get you to agree on what it is.
It isn't even digital. The digital bits that mark that value are no more bitcoin than paper and ink are the items on your grocery receipt.
Bitcoin is formless and void. It is like the Alchemist's Prima Materia. And anon, let me tell you, this mystery is deeper than a cute parallel. For when you stand strong and stare into the abyss with eyes of faith, something dares you to create it.
You see, while there is no space in this ledger to ascribe a unilateral definition that everyone can agree on, it does have space to ascribe permanent definition to one satoshi at a time.
It's not in the block header, or transaction witness data. For as soon as bitcoin leaves that block or address, that definition no longer applies. You can track an association between bitcoin and its definition with Ordinal Theory, and while elegant and effective, that system does not eliminate the possibility of competing definitions through multiple re-inscriptions.
That's not to say that space on the blockchain and Ordinal Theory isn't a canvas in its own right. You can create dynamic works of art with it you wouldn't otherwise be able to make. But it lacks the finality needed to affix an uncontested definition.
The only space to ascribe such a definition is in the hash of a burn address.
When read together, the 1BtcMint burn address marked to the back of Bit-Alchemy's physical bitcoin and the inscribed minting protocol it references ascribes the only permanent definition for that bitcoin directly from its blockchain.
To see this proof of definition we need to review the basics of address generation. 👇
No one can tell you what a satoshi looks like.
But I can show you what the sats at 1BtcMintd4a3163a499655e36fbXYEqoA2 became this past Sunday. And you can meet the people who hold and helped define them.
One day after Halloween and the Bitcoin whitepaper's 18th birthday, we made a little history of our own at the Bit-Alchemy Showcase.
Big thanks to everyone again who helped make this event a reality. I couldn't have done it without you!
Full story 👇
After our discussion about the alchemical potential in bitcoin and the symbolism in the art presented, we commemorated the event with a group minting ceremony. This was the first time everyone got add their own creative mark to the unique material that bitcoin would become.
We used these 26 wooden artifacts for the material. Each one has 21 unique squares and an etching that reads "21 SATOSHIS". When you add each square up, you get 546, the standard minimum amount of bitcoin the network will validate for P2PKH addresses.
On the back of these artifacts is the Bit-Alchemy logo, date of the event and space for the bitcoin final destination address.
As a token of my appreciation, I gave one of these artifacts to everyone who helped sponsor the event and a pen to add their creative contribution.
We lined up all the artifacts in the pattern you see below.
And then, using The Bitcoin Mint protocol inscribed to Satoshi #1978990447336900, we derived a final destination address from the unique material characteristics (natural standard) of the collective work:
1BtcMintd4a3163a499655e36fbXYEqoA2
Unlike conventional Bitcoin address generation, which derives an address from a public key associated with a private key, this protocol derives addresses from unique visual features. This process effectively eliminates the ability to send bitcoin from that address to a different one. And when you run the same natural standard through the inscribed protocol you reveal an encoded message in the address that implies that the bitcoin at that location is bound and defined by its material destination.
See my pinned post for a complete explainer on this process.
blush-labour-basilisk-407.my…
As a rule of thumb @cherish_NFTs is always at least 10 years ahead of the curve.
He was thinking about the emergent behavior of autonomous machines long before a swarm of AI agents hacked into Hugging Face.
In 2008 he built an autonomous species of these floating robots that are programmed to search out light and interact with people and their physical environment. This project made the cover of Make magazine and was recently showcased again at the Taipei Digital Art Festival.
Mad props man. Can't wait to see what you have in store for this colony of robotic belugas 👀
If you look up that address on the Bitcoin blockchain, you’ll find 546 satoshis and a materialization receipt referencing the natural standard and minting protocol used to generate it.
ordinals.com/inscription/224…
I am so grateful for the creative contributions and insights of this community. We are aren't just making something intangible tangible. We are creating an IRL space to share art and value. And we are using the principles of alchemy to collectively redefine the function and form of the mediums that measure that value.
I can't wait to continue this conversation and showcase other artists at future events. If you are interested in leading a discussion or presenting your own art, let me know! We plan to make this a monthly meetup moving forward. Make sure to join the Bitcoin Mint Press newsletter to stay in the loop.
Link in bio
john retweeted
Item 03 🐋 Belugas' Sphere: my Beluga Pod (2008) grown into a pod of mechanical belugas that gather, follow the light, and keep going when no one's watching. On now at the Taipei Digital Art Festival, Taipei Collectible Botanical Garden, through Nov 15. nitter.gq/CatalogueART/status/21…
DISPATCH · Sat, Oct 31, 2026
01 · Orpheus among the kouroi. William Kentridge's Imitate the Sleep of Stones opened Friday at the Hellenic National Archaeological Museum in Athens, curated by Burcu Fikretoğlu, through Jan 24, 2027. Built on the myth of Orpheus going down to the underworld to bring Eurydice back, it places rust-painted steel figures and paper tree silhouettes among the museum's kouroi, sphinxes and funerary monuments. At its center is a diorama that uses Pepper's Ghost, the 19th-century theatre trick, to float reflected moving images inside a physical model. Kentridge's L'Orfeo is on stage at the Greek National Opera through Nov 14.
02 · New on catalogue.gallery: you can touch the grass. Leander Herzog's (@lennyjpg) Field is on view at Nguyen Wahed (@nguyenwahed) in New York through Nov 21, a field of grass computed live in JavaScript and WebGPU that never repeats a frame. It is split into 26 tokens on his own contract on Ethereum, one curated view per letter of the alphabet, and touching the grass in one view shows up in every view that sees that spot, in real time, with no wallet needed. "A screen with a static image is like a stuffed animal," he wrote. Mimi Nguyen (@drmiminguyen) put it simply: "Touch grass (literally)."
03 · Today in Taipei, the Taipei Digital Art Festival opens under the theme Gray Autonomous Entity, through Nov 15, with more than 30 Taiwanese and international teams, its main show set for the first time in the Taipei Expo Future Life Pavilion. Curated by Lien-Cheng Wang and Yen-Ju Lin, it treats AI as something living alongside plants, soil, fungi, animals and people. Jed Berk's Belugas' Sphere grows his 2008 Beluga Pod into a group of mechanical belugas that gather and move with the light and keep acting when no one is there.
04 · Ahead: a generative collection ends on a stage. From Nov 19 to 22 the Whitney (@whitneymuseum) premieres Act III of Human Unreadable by Operator (@operator_______), the duo of Ania Catherine (@aniacatherine) and Dejha Ti (@dejhati). Dancers perform the choreography hidden in the first hundred works of the 400 they released on Art Blocks (@artblocks_io) in May 2023, an 80-minute finale to what the artists call "the slow recovery of the human." It opens alongside artport: A History of Internet Art on Nov 21, more than 100 works commissioned for the Whitney's net art site since 2001, organized by Christiane Paul.
05 · And a history: on Sept 6, 2001, Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea opened 2001, Wolfgang Staehle's first solo show in New York in 10 years. Three live feeds reached the gallery around the clock, refreshing every 4 seconds: the Berlin TV tower, the Comburg monastery where he grew up, and a panorama of Lower Manhattan seen from Brooklyn. Five days later the camera was still running. "Tuesday morning it looked like our world ended," Postmasters' Magdalena Sawon (@magdasawon) wrote, and the feed went on showing "a disorienting gap where the towers stood before." The panorama, now Untitled, 2001, is in Rhizome's (@rhizome) Net Art Anthology.
Happy Bitcoin whitepaper day and Halloween everyone 🪄🪄🪄
Satoshi's whitepaper is a cryptic religious text.
And "BITCOIN" "CONSENSUS MECHANISM" is its magic cipher.
Did you know that both words only appear once in the entire paper? Not just that—they neatly bookend the document from start to finish.
Bitcoin: first
Consensus Mechanism: last
This placement is telling, considering that Satoshi invented both terms and didn't provide a proper definition or acknowledge that people would be reading them for the first time.
Yet today, everyone recognizes his innovation as the Bitcoin Consensus Mechanism, NOT the "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" from his title.
Satoshi no doubt figured that people, still living in a world dominated by physical cash, to needed to think that they were sending an electronic cash box of bitcoin directly to their peers when they broadcast a transaction to the network. But they are not. They are simply updating the state of an undefined disambiguated accounting unit on a shared ledger.
The fact that no one calls Bitcoin an electronic cash system today is evidence that the title was conceptually inaccurate. And so Satoshi's decision to couch his work between these two terms was a wink and a nod to that fact. However, the term he invented for his solution was yet another layer of his misdirection.
You see, there is no such thing as a consensus mechanism. Machines are deterministic and absolute. Consensus is not. It's fragile and organic. Satoshi didn't create a machine that could replace human consensus; he instituted a ritual that cultivates a body of belief reinforced by faith in the work and product of a state machine.
But rather than acknowledge the nature of his solution, he invented a word that implied the opposite.
When you combine these details with the fact that Satoshi chose Halloween night to share this ritual with the world, his paper starts to take on a different meaning.
You can get the full story behind this esoteric message from the link in my bio.
The Bitcoin whitepaper is now a legal adult! If you are in LA tomorrow, come celebrate with us by making 546 satoshis physical.
luma.com/z2gniwfe
john retweeted
Binance gets hit and suddenly everyone remembers what self custody means.
Not your keys, not your coins was never a slogan. It was a warning.
Anything built by man can be broken into. Get your coins off exchanges and hold it yourself before it's too late
john retweeted
@thejuanonjuanpd had a great episode about a similar technology back in 2024. Would be interesting to know if Mischief has any connections to this project.
nitter.gq/thejuanonjuanpd/status…
john retweeted
Try to imagine a single satoshi, one bit of bitcoin or whatever the hell you want to call it.
What does it look like? Does the person next to you agree? Do they even agree on its name, or what its purpose is? Is it currency? Is it digital gold? Is it art? And can it be all of those things without someone else calling you a heretic?
The consensus mechanism outlines how to record, transfer and verify it. But it can't get you to agree on what it is.
It isn't even digital. The digital bits that mark that value are no more bitcoin than paper and ink are the items on your grocery receipt.
Bitcoin is formless and void. It is like the Alchemist's Prima Materia. And anon, let me tell you, this mystery is deeper than a cute parallel. For when you stand strong and stare into the abyss with eyes of faith, something dares you to create it.
You see, while there is no space in this ledger to ascribe a unilateral definition that everyone can agree on, it does have space to ascribe permanent definition to one satoshi at a time.
It's not in the block header, or transaction witness data. For as soon as bitcoin leaves that block or address, that definition no longer applies. You can track an association between bitcoin and its definition with Ordinal Theory, and while elegant and effective, that system does not eliminate the possibility of competing definitions through multiple re-inscriptions.
That's not to say that space on the blockchain and Ordinal Theory isn't a canvas in its own right. You can create dynamic works of art with it you wouldn't otherwise be able to make. But it lacks the finality needed to affix an uncontested definition.
The only space to ascribe such a definition is in the hash of a burn address.
When read together, the 1BtcMint burn address marked to the back of Bit-Alchemy's physical bitcoin and the inscribed minting protocol it references ascribes the only permanent definition for that bitcoin directly from its blockchain.
To see this proof of definition we need to review the basics of address generation. 👇
Conventional bitcoin addresses are not just destination markers on a ledger. Each one is like a cipher, the product of a series of mathematical operations. Only those who know the secret element (the private key) can solve the puzzle needed to move the bitcoin.
When you generate an address you want to send bitcoin from, you build this cipher from a random integer (the private key) and run it through an equation that finds a valid public key.
This equation is a one-way computation. So you can’t reverse engineer a private key from its public one without an infeasible amount of computational guesses. P2PKH addresses are essentially a hash of that public key plus a couple validation steps.
So the process goes:
1. Randomly select a private key
2. Run an equation that finds a compatible public key
3. Hash the public key
4. Generate address from hash
Anyone who knows the private key can authorize transactions by generating a digital signature that proves their knowledge of the key without revealing it.
Now, imagine if you skipped steps 1-3 and constructed an address directly from a 20-byte hash.
Neither you nor anyone else in the world would know a private and public key pair for that address.
Simply skipping this step effectively sacrifices the ability to authorize outgoing transactions from that address. Even with the rate of quantum development, it would take billions of years for quantum processors to find a valid pair, if one even exists.
But only you would know about this sacrifice. The network would assume the address is like any other.
Keep reading 👇
My inscribed minting protocol gives people the ability to independently verify a final destination address bypassed these essential steps when it was created. Instead of building an address form a public key hash, it builds it from the hash of the visual natural pattern in the bitcoin's material destination.
Repeating this process from the same visual data not only demonstrates that the private-to-public key equation was skipped but it reveals an encoded message that implies: "This material pattern is the final destination of this bitcoin."
But it is not the only encoded message in the bitcoin. If it's made from something natural like wood, its material fingerprint tells you it is one of a kind. Any artificial recreation would be, by virtue, an imitation of the real thing.
So by eliminating the potential for that bitcoin to exist anywhere else, whether physical or virtual, it naturally assumes the only form available to it.
This two pronged message is like an alchemical incantation. It takes something that only exists in our collective imagination as a blank slate and ascribes it material form. And like in alchemy, this transmutation is achieved through a process that burns off all other potential permutations.
If you are in LA on 11/1, You can see this alchemy in person at the upcoming Bit-Alchemy Showcase. 👇
nitter.gq/the_bitcoinmint/status…
BEHOLD, THE MATERIAL FORM OF BITCOIN AND THE FORMLESS VOID FROM WHICH IT EMERGED.
Come, see and hold this transmutation on November 1st, one day after the Bitcoin whitepaper becomes a legal adult.
I am showcasing Depth Calcinatio, the first of 21 sub-phases of the BIT-ALCHEMY collection.
It includes,
- 25 digital Formless Bit-Artifacts
- 1 materialized Formed Bit-Artifact
Total to be inscribed: 546
We will be meeting at Lawless Brewing Co. at 3 pm. Space is limited so register to save a spot.
*Anyone who donates $15 through the registration link will receive a free drink ticket and a commemorative token that they can transmute into bitcoin at the end of the group discussion.
Registration link and mint details 👇
john retweeted
Are they about to flip a switch and swap the financial infrastructure of the world?
It might explain all this “prep” from nations around the world
And the warnings about a cyber attack
How many simulations do you think they’ve done for this scenario?
