Parango

(Digital) Art Collector

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a Web3 Ambassador at World Liberty Financial.

There are 12 of us on the team page. 4 are named Trump. 3 are named Witkoff. The page calls us "the passionate minds shaping the future of finance."

600,000 wallets bought our memecoin. They lost $3.87 billion. The family collected $350 million in trading fees. It launched 3 days before the inauguration. 80% of the supply went to CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC. I did not choose the names. I designed the allocation, the vesting, the timing, and the distance between the product and the President.

The distance is my best work.

I am the reason these events are unrelated.

World Liberty Financial sends 75 cents of every dollar to DT Marks DEFI LLC. That is the family entity. Zero capital contributed. Zero liability assumed. I wrote this into the Gold Paper. Page 14. The lawyers bound it in white leather. The binding cost more than the due diligence.

Justin Sun invested $75 million. He was facing SEC fraud charges. The SEC dropped the case. He is now our advisor. These events are unrelated.

Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to federal money laundering violations. He received a presidential pardon. The SEC dropped its lawsuit against his exchange the same week we listed our stablecoin. Then the exchange settled a $2 billion deal entirely in that stablecoin. These events are unrelated.

Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed of BitMEX pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations. All 3 received presidential pardons. Then the company itself was pardoned. $100 million in fines. Gone. An American first. These events are unrelated.

Sheikh Tahnoun of Abu Dhabi paid $500 million for a 49% stake that was never publicly disclosed. Then the administration approved semiconductor exports to his companies over national security objections. These events are unrelated.

Everything is unrelated. I track the unrelatedness on a dashboard I built. The dashboard has 7 columns now. I am proud of the dashboard.

On May 22nd, 220 people paid a combined $148 million to eat dinner with the America First president. Over half were foreign nationals. Justin Sun paid $18.5 million for the first seat. He visited the Executive Office Building the day before. I designed the seating chart. I put it on the Investor Confidence page. That page is doing well.

The team page lists 3 Witkoffs. All 3 are Co-Founders.

Steven Witkoff is the President's Middle East envoy. He testified as a character witness at the President's fraud trial.

His son Zach runs the crypto operation. His son Alex is also a Co-Founder. I have not been told what Alex co-founded.

The father runs the diplomacy. The sons run the platform. The family runs both. That is organizational efficiency.

Barron is 19. His title is Web3 Ambassador. The same as mine. Donald Jr. called the conflicts of interest "complete nonsense." Eric launched a Bitcoin mining company called American Bitcoin. America First. The mining partner is Hut 8. Hut 8 was founded in Canada. America First means the name.

On March 6th, the President signed Executive Order 14233 creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The order directs the government to hold Bitcoin. The President's family holds billions in Bitcoin. The executive order appreciates the President's assets by presidential decree. I did not write the executive order. I made sure it looked unrelated to the portfolio.

Trump Media put $2 billion of Bitcoin on its balance sheet. The ticker symbol is DJT. His initials. The press secretary said it is absurd to insinuate the President profits off the presidency. Forbes calculated his crypto holdings exceed the combined value of Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower. I would call that absurd too. That is my job.

600,000 wallets bought in. 1 of them asked why she could not withdraw her funds. I told her the protocol was experiencing dynamic market conditions. She asked what that meant. I sent her the Gold Paper. She said she had read the Gold Paper. I muted her channel. Dynamic means the conditions change. The condition that changed was her access.

A congressman called us the world's most corrupt crypto startup operation. We put it on a coffee mug. Ironic merchandise. $45. The revenue split on the mug is also 75/25.

My own tokens vest on a different schedule. I wrote that schedule. That is not in the Gold Paper.

The memecoin funds the family. The family funds the platform. The platform funds the stablecoin. The stablecoin funds the deals. The deals require the pardons. The pardons free the partners. The partners fund the platform. The President signs the executive orders. The executive orders inflate the assets. The assets fund the family.

I am the reason these events are unrelated.

[6529 @punk6529]

1/ On NFTs are Network Art

One common piece of feedback from TradArt (museums, curators and so on) is along the lines of:

"We have been collecting and curating digital art for decades. we know this field and, maybe a few NFTs are good digital art, and many, of course, are terrible digital art, or even not art at all, but collectibles really.
So we are charmed that you are so excited about your digital art NFTs but we have been excited about this field for decades."

This sounds totally reasonable but it is also totally wrong.

The fundamentally important thing about NFTs is not that they are digital art, but that they are network art.

2/ Digital Art is art of the computer, in its many forms.

Mainframes are computers. PCs are computers too.

But modern digital SLRs are also computers, as are tablets and phones.

3/ Computers, of course, have been the defining technology of the last 50 years, they have reshaped society, how we work, think, play, communicate, organize, love.

So, of course, artists, collectors, curators, casual viewers have been influenced and changed by digital art.

And the museum curators are right. Digital art has been interesting since the 1960s and is on its fifth generation at least: algorithmic, generative, graphics, interactive, immersive.

4/ OK, so great - "There has been digital art for 60 years, NFTs are digital, it is the latest of a long line of digital art, this is what we are saying, we will slot it into the "net art" category"

No! It is a trap. The fact NFTs are digital art is not at all the important thing about them.

5/ Digital Art is made on computer (broadly defined) or may live on a computer or both.

NFTs may or may not have been made with a computer but they definitely do not live on a computer.

NFTs live on the internet!

6/ What I am saying here is not a vibes concept. It is a hard technical fact.

People sometimes look at a hardware wallet and get confused and think that their NFTs (or ETH or BTC) are "in the hardware wallet" like it is some form of USB drive or something

7/ Of course that is not where your BTC, ETH, cool cartoon character with a hoodie and flashing xcopy NFT lives.

It does not live in your Trezor.

It lives on ~10,000 Bitcoin or ~10,000 Ethereum nodes that each form a special purpose global network called Bitcoin or Ethereum

8/ Whether your NFT is 100% on-chain (like a generative art ETH NFT) or 100% in the optional but not required to hold but most do anyway part of BTC (Ordinals) or partially on the Solana network and partially on the IPFS or Arweave network, the main picture is exactly the same.

9/ Your NFT is not on your PC, it is not on the PC of the MoMA, it lives on a specialized, permissionless, open to everyone in the world, network.

When you "own" your cryptopunk, what you actually have is the password to move a specific cryptopunk to somewhere else in the network.

You can't remove it from the network, you can't move it to the safe in your house.

Your NFT is of the network, in a way that the Picasso in your living room is not.

10/ Before everyone says "aha, I knew NFTs were a scam, just a receipt" I would like to kindly remind you that Bitcoin works this way too.

You don't "own" a bitcoin, what you actually have is the password to move certain "Unspent Transaction Outputs" to somewhere else in the network.

You can't remove your bitcoin from the network, you can't move it to the safe in your house.

Your bitcoin is of the network, in a way that the gold coin in your safe is not.

11/ All of the interesting things about NFTs emerge from their networked nature.

The fact that they are default public. The fact that they are composable and programmable. The fact that they are transparent. The fact that their provenance is 100% perfectly pristine. The fact that they can make rock solid assertations of truth (this NFT was created right now, randomly, based on this algorithm). The fact that they can organize groups of people.

None of this emerges because they are "digital art"
All of this emerges because they are the first and only natively network art.

They are art that is quite literally of the network, that lives in a network, that does not live in a computer, a home, a gallery and museum

12/ My curational mental model is very different from TradArt on this topic.

They split as follows:

(Non-Digital) Art | Digital Art (including NFTs)

I split like this:

(Non-Digital) Art and Digital Art | NFTs

13/ In other words I think a cool digital graphics installation at the MoMA is fundamentally no different than a Lichtenstein at the MoMA

By their nature, they are physical, individual, assets tied to a specific place, time and owner.

It is cool and interesting that one was made with a computer and one was not, but this does not change their fundamental physical nature.

Whether the MoMA owns an oil on canvas or a hard disk with the graphics files, it is still personal property of the MoMA in the way we have understood property for tens or hundreds of thousand of years

14/ NFTs (and BTC) are something different altogether. They are everywhere at the same time. If the MoMA buys a Fidenza, it does not have exclusive physical possession of the actual colors and lines of that Fidenza.

Those lines are represented as data within a certain block of the Ethereum blockchain, which has been replicated to 10,000 plus computers around the world.

Anyone can see them, anyone read them, anyone can render them. Anyone can download an Ethereum node and copy them. Anyone can write a smart contract that interacts with them.

Nobody has to ask the MoMA's permission. Nobody has to ask the artist's permission.

15/ This is not radical, this is beyond radical.

If I strolled into the MoMA and hooked up my art project that interacts with their digital exhibition or their canvas on the walls without their permission, I would be arrested and banned for life.

If someone deploys a smart contract that says: "you can mint this NFT if you have a Fidenza and if your Fidenza is a spiral, your mint will look like this", nobody can stop them and nobody will stop them and, because of this, everyone will actually say "great, have fun"

16/ NFTs are a breakthrough of the exact same order of magnitude as Bitcoin is. They are not a continuation of digital art.

They are a fundamentally different type of property, in the same way that Bitcoin is a fundamentally different type of property.

17/ Do the examples look trivial right now?

"this mint is derived from this other mint - who cares?"

This is because every important new thing looks like a toy.

18/ We barely have understood what can be done with NFTs, let alone done it.

The next few years will be full of amazing experiments and, by the end of the decade, we will start getting a hang of what can be done.

There will be so much more to come on this.

19/ But to close this thread off, let's go back to where we started, to the most simple explanation of NFTs.

NFTs are network art (and collectives and games and identities)

The first time in human history this was possible was in the early 2010s.

We are the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of such a grand adventure. It is going to be so much fun.

[Jebus @Jebus]

Gonna be an interesting 4 years

[mert @mert]

if you're a curious person, crypto is a generalist's dream

you get to mix:

- hardware
- software
- cryptography
- economics
- game theory
- governance
- politics
- startups
- payments
- finance
- networks
- open source
- art
- culture

[Verse @verse_works]

William Mapan
Sketchbook A (Print Only) #12

[SuzanneNFTs @nf_suzanne]

The Bull case for Digital Art. A thread 🧵 1/10

[6529 @punk6529]

2/ Long-form on-chain generative art is an act of faith by the artist and the minter.

Unlike almost any other art form, neither the artist nor the initial collector know what the piece will be at the moment it is collected.

This is, for me, the most magical part about it.

[jack @jackbutcher]

wen reveal? forever

[Parango @parango_crypto]

@RichardNadler1 @lennyjpg @ExpandedArt @fx_hash_ @postanika tz1cGqFdAtBxRLkDU84ckUVXTaDgU9cKNf3B

[Frank @frankdegods]

It’s been a year since I first wrote this tweet.

[Parango @parango_crypto]

I collected 315 NFTs from 81 creators in 2022, spending a total of 5.59K tez.

my top creators are:

@zancan
@kimasendorf
@studioyorktown
@Nicolas_Sassoon
@Yazid

see yours at https://t.co/fmGaTfxLty #objktReview

[6529 @punk6529]

1/ Art is an important aspect of human society because it allows us to express our emotions, ideas, and creativity in a visual or tangible form.

[Matrica 🔳 @MatricaLabs]

Thank you for 1 Year 🎂🔳

What first originated as a passionate vision from our founders has now grown into a company that serves over 1.7k communities & 287k users.

We're truly grateful for all the support we've gotten on this journey, & look forward to many years to come. 💙

[y00ts @y00tsNFT]

Who controls the memes
controls the universe

[DegenDaVinci @DegenDaVinci]

For the first time, a Solana project is a top 5 PFP project.

@BoredApeYC 66.99E
@cryptopunks 66.45E
@MAYC: 13.7E
@moonbirds 12.5E
@DeGodsNFT (DeadGods) 7.6E (+2.6E from $Dust so far)

I met with @frankdegods to learn where it goes from here:

[bunny 🍌 @DaBunnyOFFICIAL]

the exact moment before a mf buys a nft

[bangerz @bangerz]

I wanna bridge the gap between WebYou and WebMe

[LilMoonLambo @LilMoonLambo]

This is still the greatest crypto video of all time

[Karabear.eth @karaholiday17]

I dont even know who needs to hear this but

You’ll never be as down bad as the dude who bought a large pepperoni pizza for 10,000 Bitcoin 11 years ago