Bitcoin Magazine
Mosaic: The Art Hidden in Bitcoin
A mosaic is an artwork assembled from fragments. From ancient Roman floors to Byzantine churches, artists have used pieces of stone, glass, and ceramic to construct images that have endured for centuries.
For the generative artist known as BitArt, those fragments are satoshis (or sats), the smallest units of bitcoin.
In Mosaic, a continuously evolving artwork developed through the Bitcoin Art Society (BAS), the numerical properties of satoshis are translated into color and spatial coordinates. Each contribution adds to an expanding composition of pixels resembling digital textiles, early computer graphics, or abstract paintings.
Rather than illustrating bitcoin through familiar iconography, Mosaic treats the network itself as artistic material. Satoshi positions and unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) become inputs for a rule-based system that determines the artwork’s appearance. BitArt begins with bitcoin’s underlying data and allows an image to emerge.
The approach recalls conceptual artist Sol LeWitt’s proposition that an artwork can exist as a set of instructions rather than a singular handcrafted object. Generative artists such as Vera Molnár and Manfred Mohr similarly explored how mathematical systems and computational procedures could produce visual compositions. Mosaic extends this tradition into an economic network shaped by transactions and human decisions.
The scale is extraordinary. According to BitArt, Mosaic now contains more than 127 million tiles and one billion layers. Viewing every layer at a rate of one per second would take over 30 years.
The project has also expanded into sound. Its musical component draws from the same satoshi data that generates the imagery, translating numerical values into an evolving score. Together, these elements create an audiovisual artwork shaped by bitcoin’s underlying structure and the contributions of its participants.
These experiments form part of the broader ambitions of Bitcoin Art Society, founded by Serge Ajamian and Yara Al Chammaa to support the creation, exhibition, and preservation of digital art on bitcoin.
For Al Chammaa, preservation is particularly personal. Following the 2020 Beirut Port explosion, which destroyed much of the artwork housed in her family’s gallery, she began reconsidering how cultural heritage might survive physical destruction. That experience helped inform BAS’s interest in bitcoin as a potential medium for preserving cultural works beyond the vulnerabilities of physical institutions.
BAS has since presented bitcoin-native digital art internationally, including Mosaic accompanied by live musicians at the Galileo Galilei Planetarium in Buenos Aires. Its inaugural artist residency features BitArt and CyberSea, whose practices investigate generative systems and blockchain-native artistic production.
Yet permanence raises questions beyond the durability of bitcoin’s ledger. Software-based art has long challenged museums to preserve not only underlying materials but also the technologies and experiences through which artworks are encountered. For Mosaic, what constitutes the artwork: the code, the rendered image, the accumulated contributions, or the experience of navigating the system?
At Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026, Mosaic will be presented on the conference’s main-stage LED installation, bringing its intricate visual structures to an architectural scale, similar to BAS’s immersive presentation at the Galileo Galilei Planetarium in Buenos Aires.
Ahead of the event, I spoke with BitArt about the project’s artistic origins, collective authorship, and the possibility of preserving an artwork that may never be finished.
BMAG: You’ve described bitcoin as a time-based transactional medium rather than simply a platform for displaying art. What first led you to recognize its underlying mathematical and economic structures as artistic material, and how did that thinking develop into Mosaic?
BitArt: Bitcoin records the movement of value through a sequence of events secured by computational work, creating a history that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse. What interests me is not just the individual event, but the sequence of events that led to it. In the context of art, this shifts the question from “What is the artwork?” to “What had to happen for the artwork to become what it is?”
With the advent of the Ordinals protocol, it became possible to assign a unique number to every satoshi. This opened up new possibilities.
From there, Mosaic developed almost naturally. I only had to highlight what was already there. Once every satoshi has an assigned ordinal number, it becomes relatively straightforward to determine its position and derive its color or musical parameters through a set of rules.
The interesting part is that these structures emerge from a system driven by human decisions, rather than one designed to produce art.
BMAG: Artists from Sol LeWitt to Vera Molnár have explored how predetermined rules can produce unexpected visual outcomes. In Mosaic, how do your decisions shape the system, and where does bitcoin’s underlying data take over?
BitArt: In a sense, Mosaic continues the tradition of rule-based art explored by LeWitt and Molnár, and builds on the concept of protocol art explored by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. But it introduces yet another layer: the input is the accumulated result of human decisions within an economic system.
My artistic decisions determine the rules of interpretation, but the underlying data determines the resulting visual and sonic structures.
The rules are deterministic, but the results are not necessarily predictable in practice. I find that tension particularly interesting. The artist creates the conditions under which something can emerge, rather than specifying what it should look or sound like.
BMAG: Participants contribute to Mosaic through their own transactions, becoming part of a composition that no single person controls. Does that make them collectors, collaborators, or something else?
BitArt: I think of authorship as something distributed across several layers.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that individual intentions can generate collective structures that nobody intended. Everyone contributes something specific, but the larger composition belongs to the system as a whole.
A participant can be a collector, but also becomes a contributor to the artwork’s evolving structure. The distinction between collecting and creating becomes less clear. Each contribution changes the work, but nobody, including myself, controls the resulting composition.
Authorship becomes less about controlling an outcome and more about establishing the conditions under which it can emerge.
BMAG: You’re developing a system for the upcoming Postmasters exhibition that will allow visitors to speak directly with artworks and receive responses. How does this differ from participating in Mosaic through bitcoin transactions? Are these different forms of communication through computational systems?
BitArt: Yes, both are intentional acts mediated by computational systems, but there is an important semantic distinction.
A contribution to Mosaic through a Bitcoin transaction is a non-verbal gesture that becomes part of a verifiable record. We can establish exactly what happened and how it changed the artwork. The action leaves a trace that the system can process directly.
Speaking to an artwork is different. Natural language must first be interpreted and translated into the formal language the artworks use to communicate.
In the first case, the action produces a verifiable change in the artwork’s state. In the second, it initiates a process of interpretation.
Both are expressions of human intention, but one establishes a computational fact, while the other opens up a space for interpretation.
BMAG: You’ve written about the creative uncertainty that emerges during programming and experimented with the relationship between real time and bitcoin’s block time. How important are unpredictability, chance, and duration to your practice? Has Mosaic produced results that surprised you or challenged your original intentions?
BitArt: I designed the algorithm for Mosaic to be as simple as possible. It’s deterministic, so its results are technically predictable and reproducible. From a technical standpoint, there shouldn’t be any surprises. Nonetheless, the results are full of unexpected and surprising elements.
I think there is an important distinction between something being computationally predictable and our ability to anticipate or comprehend its results.
Currently, Mosaic contains over 127 million tiles and over 1 billion layers. To view all the layers at a rate of one layer per second would take over 30 years. There are many things that have surprised me, and I’m still discovering new ones.
The temporal divergence between real time and Bitcoin’s block time is also interesting to me. Bitcoin evolves according to its own rhythm, independently of how and when we observe it. This introduces another dimension of duration into the artwork.
BMAG: The introduction of sound adds another dimension to Mosaic, with musical compositions generated from the same data that determines the visual structure. What can sound reveal about the underlying system that an image cannot?
BitArt: From the very beginning, Mosaic was built on three fundamental ideas.
The first is the possibility of capturing traces of human intention within a financial, algorithmic system and revealing visual and sonic structures from them.
The second is the development of a formal system in which Mosaic becomes meta-aware, in the sense of being self-referential and introspective, and capable of communicating and collaborating with other artworks.
The third is collective creation. Anyone can contribute to Mosaic and become part of its evolving structure.
Looking at Mosaic from any of these perspectives reveals something different about it. In the case of sound, it reveals melodic, harmonic, contrapuntal, and rhythmic structures that aren’t necessarily apparent in the visual representation.
Yet within the digital realm, the structures underlying the image and the music are closely related, sometimes almost identical. Perhaps the way we think about visual, sonic, and programmatic structures as separate domains is itself a limitation.
BMAG: Your practice has been presented in contexts including the Whitney, ZKM, and ICC Tokyo, institutions with significant histories in digital and media art. Where do you see Mosaic within the broader history of generative and systems-based art? What does working directly with bitcoin make possible that earlier computational media did not?
BitArt: I see Mosaic as part of the tradition of generative and systems-based art, but I’m particularly interested in extending that tradition beyond the generation of images and sound.
I’m currently working on a show at Postmasters gallery in New York City in collaboration with BAS. The show will present Mosaic in communication and collaboration with other artworks.
In principle, any artwork that can be represented digitally can join the conversation, whether it’s Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Malevich’s Black Square, an artwork inscribed on Bitcoin, or music as diverse as traditional folk songs, Nine Inch Nails’ 34 Ghosts IV, and Ravel’s Boléro.
Through the system I mentioned earlier, these artworks can reference themselves and one another, exchange statements, and initiate collaborations using a machine-readable formal language. What’s particularly interesting is that the audience will also be able to join these conversations by speaking directly with the artworks in natural language.
Historically, discourse about art happened outside the works themselves, in texts, institutions, discussions, and criticism. Artworks remained largely silent objects of interpretation. By giving artworks the formal means to reference one another, reason about themselves and others, and exchange verifiable statements, the project treats discourse itself as artistic material.
Art history normally describes influence retrospectively. Here, through collaborations between artworks, influence becomes operative. Influence becomes something artworks can perform.
Bitcoin introduces another dimension by providing a shared, ordered, and verifiable record of these exchanges and the artworks’ histories of collaboration. Unlike a conventional computational environment, this record can exist independently of any single artist, institution, or platform.
The artwork is no longer simply the result of a process or the process itself. It becomes a participant in an ongoing process of interpretation, communication, and creation.
BMAG: Mosaic has already been presented in immersive environments, including the Galileo Galilei Planetarium in Buenos Aires. For Bitcoin Amsterdam, the work will be adapted for large-scale main-stage LED screens. How does that change the way audiences encounter the work, particularly when its original form is interactive and continuously evolving?
BitArt: The surface of the artwork is not fixed, and it is not what constitutes the artwork. It’s a manifestation of its state at any given time.
I like BAS’s approach of presenting it in intimate settings, large-scale immersive environments, and anywhere in between. Each setting allows the audience to experience a different aspect of the same underlying system.
In an interactive environment, the viewer navigates Mosaic individually, while on large-scale screens, the experience becomes collective. The audience encounters the artwork as it unfolds, rather than exploring it directly.
For the Postmasters show, I’m also developing a physical component that will provide yet another way of experiencing Mosaic.
What interests me is that the artwork can take on very different forms without changing its underlying identity. The presentation changes, but the system that constitutes the work remains the same.
Explore BitArt’s evolving Mosaic project through Bitcoin Art Society, learn more about its exhibitions and artist residencies, and follow BAS on X.
BAS will also present Art on Bitcoin: BAS Night at WiHH Gallery (What Is Happening Here) in Amsterdam on November 6, from 8–11 PM. Hosted in collaboration with Bitcoin Amsterdam, the evening brings together artists, collectors, and the bitcoin community for an exhibition and reception featuring food, music, and conversation. RSVP here.
Read more from BMAG’s Bitcoin Amsterdam series: The Undercurrent: Three European Artists on Making Money Visible and The Architecture of Money: Mapping Financial Power in the Age of Bitcoin.
The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) organizes international exhibitions, auctions, and artist collaborations exploring bitcoin and its cultural implications.
BitArt’s Mosaic will be featured on the main-stage LED screens at Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 5–6, 2026, as part of BMAG’s programming. Join us in Amsterdam and use code BA26-BMAG20 for discounted admission. Get your tickets here.
This post Mosaic: The Art Hidden in Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.
Although not technically the first virtual pet, the Tamagotchi handhelds certainly popularized the idea and made it a worldwide phenomenon. In the late 90s it was hard to go out in public and not see them dangling from backpacks and belt loops. They turned out to be more than a passing fad, too. There have been Tamagotchis in various forms since then, and one of the latest, the Tamagotchi Paradise, is uniquely hackable thanks to this custom UART interface.
The build starts with a simple and inexpensive CH340G UART adapter with a built-in USB interface. A custom 3D printed enclosure is used to house the adapter and also help to expose the interface to the Tamagotchi. This is done by wiring three pins to nickel strips, which are threaded through slits in the case and looped back around to create a pogo-style adapter for the Tamagotchi’s custom dock. Normally this would be used to link to other Tamagotchis, but in this case the USB-to-UART adapter mimics it, allowing for all kinds of in-game shenanigans. The project’s creator [Squalius] shows it off by connecting it directly to a browser tool in Google Chrome.
Not only that, but this can also be used to modify the software running on the handheld entirely, with the video showing demos playing not only Super Mario but also DOOM (of course). This isn’t too surprising given that these games are built with modern 32-bit ARM microcontrollers. For the 90s purists, though, it probably won’t surprise anyone to know that these devices have been the subject of various hacks almost since they came out.
Bitcoin Magazine
Ten Decrees: Old Masters, New Money
On August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon announced that he had directed Treasury Secretary John Connally “to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold.” The suspension was never lifted. Fifty-five years later to the day, Lucho Poletti unveiled the first of ten drawings responding to that decree.
Europe had experienced its own monetary upheavals. Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder worked during an era of expanding banking, credit, and speculation. Antwerp, where Bruegel worked, became one of Europe’s great commercial centers. Both painters populated their compositions with hundreds of figures, constructing elaborate worlds in which human behavior, social order, and moral judgment could be examined simultaneously.
Bitcoin artists have increasingly returned to this visual tradition. Pepenardo’s Master Cuts Out the Stone, exhibited by BMAG earlier this year, reimagined Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s The Surgeon as a study of who extracts and who is extracted from. Carlijn Kingma’s The Waterworks of Money, shown at Bitcoin Amsterdam last year, depicted the modern monetary system as an interconnected landscape. Complex systems seem to invite pictures that hold everything in a single frame.
Lucho Poletti has made bitcoin-related art since 2017, describing his practice as visual propaganda for the monetary revolution. A contributor to the Bitcoin Conference art gallery since 2021, he returns to Bitcoin Amsterdam this November with Ten Decrees.
The series reimagines ten paintings, four by Bosch and six by Bruegel, around money. Fiat, Latin for “let it be done,” becomes the organizing principle. Nine titles issue commands: let there be fury, profit, chaff, a game, folly, hunger, refuge, collapse, and ash. The tenth, Ultima Fiat, reverses that authority: let it be the last.
Unveiled on August 15, 2026, the anniversary of Nixon’s announcement, the series follows a biweekly release schedule beginning August 29 and concluding January 3, 2027, the anniversary of Bitcoin’s Genesis Block. Each drawing contains hundreds of figures and objects, with inscriptions often visible only at close range. The 30-by-20-inch prints, produced in editions of ten, form a composition spanning approximately four meters when arranged in two rows of five.
Five drawings have been released, most recently Fiat Moria, after Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs, on October 24. The sixth, Fiat Fames, follows November 7.
Ahead of Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 5–6, I spoke with Poletti about the recurring influence of Bosch and Bruegel on bitcoin art, the relationship between allegory and propaganda, and translating his densely detailed drawings to the conference’s main-stage LED installation.
BMAG: Bosch and Bruegel seem to be having a synchronistic moment among artists interested in Bitcoin. Both worked in what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, during a period when Antwerp was emerging as a major financial center and the Habsburgs were debasing coinage. What is it about transitional periods (like the current one) that draws artists back to Bosch and Bruegel and their densely populated landscapes?
Lucho Poletti: Because they had already solved the problem I was stuck with: how do you draw a whole society going wrong at once? Bosch and Bruegel put hundreds of people in a single frame, each busy with their own concerns. The system shows up in the sum of it. You don’t look at a Bruegel, you search it. It’s a great way to depict the effects of money, which nobody really sees and everybody feels.
They also lived through a money problem a lot like ours. Silver from the Americas poured into Europe through Seville and on to the bankers in Antwerp. Prices across Western Europe rose sixfold over 150 years. Philip II defaulted in 1557 and the crash spread across all of Europe. Two years later Bruegel painted Netherlandish Proverbs, a village where everyone is absorbed in something foolish and nobody can see the whole.
The four Bosch pieces are about appetite: the temptation, and the bill that shows up after. The six Bruegels are about the crowd, and how society behaves once the rules stop making sense.
BMAG: The series draws on the original meaning of the F-word every bitcoiner knows. Nine of your titles use fiat as a command, while the tenth, Ultima Fiat, seems to reverse that authority. How did you arrive at Latin as the language of the series, and why does the final decree change speaker?
Lucho Poletti: Fiat was never a noun. In Latin it’s a verb, “let it be done.” It’s the word God speaks in the Latin Genesis before the light comes on: fiat lux. Someone with authority says so and it happens. That’s a literal description of how fiat money comes into existence, so I wanted the verb in every title.
Latin wasn’t a stretch for me. I’ve titled work in it for years: Moneta Divina, Cypher Deos, and Novus Moneta Seclorum dating back to 2020. The dollar already speaks it, too. Turn over a one-dollar bill and there are three Latin mottos on the back. Ultima Fiat, Fiat Lucrum and Furia Fiat had their names before the series did. Once there were three decrees in concept, I kept going until I had ten, and the name for the whole series became obvious. Ten Decrees has the Ten Commandments sitting under it, which suits work rebuilt out of painted sermons. In Fiat Lucrum there’s a lighthouse at the top left with FIAT LUX GENESIS 1:3 engraved into it. The title is the phrase rewritten for the money printers: let there be light turned into let there be profit.
Nine of the decrees are issued to you, in the flat voice an institution uses. Let there be profit, let there be hunger, let there be a game. The tenth is the only one we get to say back. Ultima fiat means “let it be the last,” which is closer to a plea than an order. Every one of us has been living under the first nine since 1971, whether we noticed or not, and Bitcoin is how we issue the tenth. It closes the series on January 3, the anniversary of the Genesis Block, which also happens to be my birthday.
BMAG: Bosch and Bruegel constructed extraordinarily complex visual worlds where allegory, satire, religious symbolism, and everyday life coexist. Their paintings invite close inspection but rarely offer a single, definitive interpretation. In Ten Decrees, you’re borrowing their compositions while introducing a more explicit critique of the monetary system. How do you approach the relationship between ambiguity and message in your work?
Lucho Poletti: The words carry the message so the people don’t have to. Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights doesn’t have a single word in it. Fiat Lucrum has more than fifty lettered objects, and some are as blunt as a protest sign: four money presses lettered QE-1, QE-2, QE-3 and QE-∞, and a little hand-lettered card on a broker’s desk that reads genius, we print, you pay, have a nice day. Nobody has to wonder what I think of the money system.
I keep the ambiguity in the people. In Fiat Lucrum there’s a crowd cheering a woman who holds up a $ on a golden staff under a sign that says ETF, and that crowd is wearing my mask. So is the man signing the leverage contract, and so is the woman taking the mortgage. In Fiat Palea a man in the mask is knee-deep in a pile of printed bills. Bosch drew his own neighbors into the middle of the garden, and I drew mine. If the ₿ on a forehead were a badge of honor, I wouldn’t hand it out like that. It’s more a badge of the aware, the initiated. Knowing the money is broken doesn’t make one a saint.
I’m careful with endings too. These pieces show the exit while not promising a way out. Near the middle of Fiat Moria there’s a lit doorway with MONEY ₿ BETTER WORLD over the arch, and a plain-faced man on the step looking back at the square. He hasn’t gone in yet, and nobody’s stopping him. Where you’d be standing in that picture is your call.
BMAG: In Fiat Lucrum, your reinterpretation of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, you introduce a system of waterworks: pipes, reservoirs, and flowing liquidity. Bosch often allowed viewers to recognize things that the figures within his paintings could not. What possibilities does that kind of visual allegory offer you when depicting something as abstract as the monetary system?
Lucho Poletti: What Bosch never had in his garden was plumbing, so I gave it some. Water organizes the whole of Fiat Lucrum. It starts clean high in the mountains on the left, pours out of a machine in Eden and settles in a reflecting basin. Cut into the basin’s wall there’s an inspection window with fish swimming behind the glass. Somebody built a viewing port into the reservoir so you could check it, and every full node on the Bitcoin network is that window.
Downstream the water widens into a lake. In the middle sits a glass tank lettered FRESH LIQUIDITY, with BOTTOMLESS engraved on the bowl, and eight people are having the party of their lives inside it. The valve wheel that controls the flow is on top of the dome, outside the glass, where none of them can reach it. Monetary policy gets set by someone who isn’t at the party. And the tank leaks. From there the water runs orange, down a stream and over a waterfall into a pool where a tick with a $ on its cheek drinks it through a hose.
That’s the Bosch trick you’re describing. The bathers can’t see the leak or the valve, and you can see both from across the room. Richard Cantillon worked out around 1730 that new money helps whoever gets it first and costs whoever gets it last. I drew it as a watercourse because everybody already understands water: whoever’s upstream drinks first, and everyone downstream gets what’s left.
BMAG: Looking across the series, are there particular details, references, or artistic decisions that you feel are especially important but might be overlooked by viewers? What would you want someone encountering these drawings for the first time to spend more time looking at?
Lucho Poletti: Up close is where these work, and most of what matters in them is small.
Start with the plain faces. Everybody spots the Satoshi masks and the $ skulls first because they’re the loud ones, but the plain faces belong to the people the system is happening to. In Furia Fiat a line of bald men crawl on their hands and knees with red tubes plugged into the backs of their skulls, and the red is the same color as the fluid in a bowl a few meters away that says TIME. That’s what’s being drained out of them. In Fiat Palea, Adam and Eve stand under a serpent with a $ for an eye. They’re wearing the mask, but neither of them has a ₿ on the brow yet.
Then look at how characters connect across a distance. In Fiat Ludus a sack lettered STIMULUS sits on a bench next to an older figure, and a little way off a kid walks away with the same sack on his back, lettered THE BILL. A blindfolded boy feels around with his arms out while the man lunging in beside him holds up a bunch of $ balloons the boy can’t see. Even the enrollment forms are signed by Seymore Debt and Max D. Out.
In Fiat Palea a broken crate stenciled EXECUTIVE ORDER 6102 sits in the straw, and further back, bolted across a vault, a plate reads WINDOW, NO REDEMPTION. Roosevelt took the gold in 1933 and Nixon closed the window in 1971, and I put the two close enough that you read one and then find the other. Up higher in the same piece, a guy in the mask with WHOOPS across his vest is pouring gasoline on a burning bank. In Furia Fiat, the $ skulls stand on GNOSIS and clutch books of knowledge, keeping them for themselves.
The bubbles are dated. Fiat Ludus has a sphere with tulips growing out of the top, marked 1637 and 1720, and another with a hen sitting on a WALL STREET egg, marked 1929 and 2008. Variety’s front page the day after the 1929 crash read WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG. Some of the skies have thin straight lines of cloud behind the smoke, the kind a plane leaves.
Watch the prices, too. A price in dollars only goes up: at CANTILLON’S hot dog stand in Fiat Ludus the 5¢ is crossed out and the sign says $9. A price in sats only goes down: a fish stall in Fiat Moria has 4000 crossed out, then 2000, and now it’s 1000 SATS. In Fiat Ludus, the carrots changing hands have dropped from 7,500 to 3,000 SATS on the chalkboard next to the dollar hopscotch.
The Latin is there to be read. MORITURI TE SALUTANT, those who are about to die salute you, is carved around the rim of the arena in Fiat Ludus. EX NIHILO, out of nothing, is cut over an empty vault in Fiat Palea. In Fiat Moria the $ skull leaning out of the window has a plaque on either side of him: MUNDUS VULT DECIPI, the world wants to be deceived, and $TULTORUM INFINITUS EST NUMERUS, the number of fools is infinite, with a $ for the S. Fiat Lucrum has a little panel that runs a whole life in four stops: school, debt, work, death.
And in Fiat Moria there’s a small round time machine with NO RETURN on its side and 1944-2026 on the dial. A man is climbing out of it, staring at the village. 1944 is Bretton Woods, when the world tied its money to the dollar and the dollar to gold. He left then and he’s only just arrived, and he can’t quite believe what he’s looking at.
None of that comes with a caption. You find it by standing close for a long time, the way you would with a Bruegel, and the finding is the whole point.
BMAG: Each drawing is 18,000 pixels wide, populated by hundreds of figures, with every Satoshi mask drawn by hand and details that only reveal themselves up close. You’ve described the work as “crafted, not generated.” At a time when AI can convincingly imitate the Old Masters, what significance does that labor have for you, and how does it shape the way you want these works to be experienced?
Lucho Poletti: “Crafted, not generated” is a phrase I came up with to sum up where the work in these pieces actually is. There are machines in my process, but they’re only one part of it. A model I trained on years of my own work does the rough first pass on a composition. I think of it as an apprentice. Bosch came out of a family workshop, and the masters of his day leaned on assistants for the groundwork so their own hours could go into the meaning. Mine roughs out the scene and gives me a base to build toward the standard they set. Then I spend weeks on each piece in a grueling manual process in Photoshop, making the decisions and drawing in hundreds of figures, objects, symbols and phrases until the art says what I mean.
AI can imitate the look of a Bosch or a Bruegel pretty convincingly now. What it can’t do is mean anything. It won’t decide that the valve on the liquidity tank in Fiat Lucrum belongs outside the glass, where the bathers can’t reach it. It won’t decide that the slop on the ground should be piggy banks wired into the money presses, each with its own name: SAVINGS, PENSION, NEST EGG. It doesn’t make jokes either. It’s never going to sit a fool in a jester’s cap on a platform lettered TAKE IT AT FACE VALUE while a $ skull does his makeup. My personal philosophy is that if I don’t do the majority of the work, it’s not my art. I hold myself to that, and anyone who looks at these up close can see a person made the decisions that matter.
That’s how I’d like people to take these in: up close, and for a long time. I don’t ask anyone to trust me on how they were made. The work answers that better than I can.
BMAG: You’ve been part of the Bitcoin Conference since 2021, and this November Ten Decrees comes to the main stage at Bitcoin Amsterdam, not far from the historical centers where Bosch and Bruegel worked. These drawings are extraordinarily detailed, designed to reward close inspection. How are you approaching their translation to monumental LED screens, and does exhibiting them in the Netherlands carry any particular significance for you?
Lucho Poletti: The prints were meant for one person standing close to search the work and find details that speak to them. An LED wall gets a thousand people at fifty meters, which is an amazing opportunity to create a visual experience for the still pieces, so I’ve done my best to create a compelling one for each piece.
Each one gets fifteen seconds, in the order they were released. The big center wall carries the center of each piece in one slow pass from left to right, so the room gets the shape of it. The screen on the right opens on the Bosch or Bruegel it came from, with its name and date, and halfway through it wipes across to mine. The screen on the left side pulls out lateral details you’d never catch from the floor, like the ship of fools riding the mast in Fiat Moria, or the pigs feeding at the DEBASED trough. All five released so far play back to back as one loop, old master and new money side by side the whole way through.
The Netherlands matters to me. Bosch spent his whole life in ’s-Hertogenbosch, about an hour south of Amsterdam by train. Some of Bruegel’s proverbs are still in use in Dutch: people still say someone hangs his cloak to the wind when he turns with the crowd, and in Fiat Moria, a man wearing a Satoshi mask jumps off a mountain, holding his cloak in his hand—a reference to the Dutch proverb about changing one’s position to suit the prevailing winds.
Amsterdam has its own chapter in this story. The Bank of Amsterdam opened in 1609 to give merchants a money nobody could debase, and for over a century its bank guilder traded at a premium over ordinary coin because people trusted the silver was in the vault. David Hume held it up as the model of a fully backed bank. It had been lending to the Dutch East India Company quietly, and when that became public in 1790 the premium vanished and the bank declared itself insolvent. I can’t think of a better city to show a series about monetary decrees and trust, two months before the last one lands on the Genesis Block anniversary.
Lucho Poletti’s Ten Decrees will be on view on the main stage at Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 5–6, 2026, as part of the Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) programming. Explore Poletti’s detailed write-ups on each Decree for a deeper look at the artwork, symbolism, and historical references throughout the series, and follow him on X.
Read more from BMAG’s Bitcoin Amsterdam series: The Undercurrent: Three European Artists on Making Money Visible and The Architecture of Money: Mapping Financial Power in the Age of Bitcoin.
The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) organizes international exhibitions, auctions, and artist collaborations exploring bitcoin and its cultural implications.
Join us at Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 5–6, 2026, and use code BA26-BMAG20 for discounted admission. Get your tickets here.
This post Ten Decrees: Old Masters, New Money first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.
Loomerang made its first sale less than 12 hours after it went live in June. A customer in Houston bought a shirt designed by Joe, an independent artist in Japan.
Four months later, the Seattle-based marketplace for artist-designed T-shirts has 40 artists from 15 countries and recently expanded to India.
Loomerang works by handling everything but the art. Artists open storefronts for free, set their own prices, and get 60% of what’s left after manufacturing costs. The company prints, inspects and ships every order, for now out of co-founder Matt Koyama’s garage.
Koyama described Loomerang as an attempt to run a more responsible business in a capitalist system, one built around people who spend their lives working on a craft.
“How can we reward them for that rather than making them feel like they’re being pushed to the margins constantly?” he said.
Loomerang was started in early 2024 by CEO Vijay Roy, a nearly 11-year Amazon veteran. He and Koyama had worked together on Amazon’s print-on-demand book business. Koyama joined as a co-founder a few months later and went full time this spring after leaving Xbox. A third co-founder, Arka Majumdar, leads design.
The company is bootstrapped. Its 14-person team is spread across Seattle, Minnesota and Kolkata, India, and the founders aren’t taking salaries.
Koyama, who also spent time in gaming, sees the same pattern across creative industries.
“The best stuff comes out of the indie space because these are the people that are willing to take risks, to invent, to revolutionize,” he said.
We caught up with Loomerang for this edition of GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight.
In 50 words or less, give us your startup’s elevator pitch?
Talent is everywhere. Opportunity isn’t. Loomerang connects people with the artists and stories behind their clothes: a tattoo artist in Seattle, a painter in Pune, India, an illustrator in Ibaraki, Japan. Artists launch apparel brands for free and keep most of the profit. We print, inspect and ship every shirt.
What problem are you obsessed with solving?
Starting an apparel brand is expensive. You need inventory, a manufacturer, a storefront and a way to reach customers. Most talented artists can’t take that risk. The ones who license their work to big brands usually get a small cut. We want to flip that by removing the upfront cost, handling production with real care, and making sure the artist keeps most of the profit.
What surprised you after talking to customers?
Almost nobody knew who designed their clothes. The exceptions were luxury pieces from designers who were already famous, or a shirt someone bought directly from an artist at a market or art fair. Those people could tell us the artist’s name and why the piece mattered to them. We’re trying to give every Loomerang purchase that same feeling.
How has AI changed the way you build your company?
We’re very intentional when using AI, because it’s a threatening presence for many of the artists we work with. We don’t use it to make art. We use it behind the scenes in our code and operations, and in tools that help artists with practical work like upscaling files. Keeping our overhead low means more of each sale goes to the artist.
What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?
People think it’s too good to be true. Artists pay nothing to join and keep 60% of the net profit on every sale. The first question is usually, what’s the catch? There isn’t one. The fashion industry has trained artists to expect a small cut of what their work earns. We think that’s backwards.
What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year?
Holding off on new products. We planned to add hoodies and crewnecks before the holidays, but we decided to prioritize our artist roster and our quality promise. We’d rather ship fewer things we can stand behind than have a wide product range we aren’t fully ramped up on.
What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?
Build something that creates value for people instead of taking it from them. It’s slower and harder, but those are the kinds of companies we need in today’s world. Technology keeps making it easier to cut people out. The best businesses will find ways to bring more of them in and lift them up.
We’ll know our company has made it when…
An independent artist’s first thought for launching a brand is Loomerang, not a big platform that pays them a fraction of what their work is worth. When artists in Seattle, Pune and everywhere else make a real living through us. And when “who made this?” becomes a normal thing to ask about your clothes.
Humanity has been sending robotic explorers to Mars since the 1970s, and for our efforts we’ve been rewarded with not only incredible imagery of the Red Planet’s magnificent desolation, but a wealth of information about the alien world and how it’s changed over the last several billion years. But comparatively, we know almost nothing about the planet’s two moons, Phobos and Deimos. In fact, as recently as the 1960s, there were some scientists that believed the unusual shape, mass, and orbit of Phobos hinted at the possibility that it was no moon at all, and was in actuality a derelict spacecraft of some type.
Once the first Viking probes arrived at Mars, we had the photographic evidence and up-close measurements to prove that Phobos wasn’t artificial. But even today, we still don’t know exactly what it is. The data suggests that it’s not solid rock, and that large voids may be hiding under its surface. While we can be fairly sure there won’t be any mummified remains of Martian astronauts to be found within Phobos, vast deposits of ice are a tantalizing possibility.
With the launch of the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission earlier this week, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) hopes to bring us one step closer to understanding the formation and structure of Phobos. Should everything go to plan, MMX will deploy a small rover to its tenuous surface in 2029, and by 2031, a sample return capsule will bring pieces of the mysterious moon back to Earth for further study.
It’s only natural that we’d imagine Phobos and Deimos to be similar to Earth’s moon, but the reality of the situation is very different. For one thing, the Martian moons are absolutely dwarfed by our nearest celestial neighbor. Phobos has a diameter of just 22.2 kilometers (13.8 miles), and Deimos is even smaller at roughly 12.6 km (7.8 miles). For reference, Luna is approximately 3,474 km (2,159 miles) across.
Due to their low mass, putting a spacecraft into a stable orbit around either of the Martian moons isn’t really an option. Some clever maneuvering will put the MMX mission within range of both Phobos and Deimos at different points during the mission, but it won’t be able to stay around for long.
As such, final approach to Phobos will look more like a slow-motion “crash” than a traditional landing. A close comparison would be the OSIRIS-REx mission, where the spacecraft effectively “bumped” into the asteroid Bennu while collecting its samples. The impact velocity will need to be very low to prevent the spacecraft from bouncing off, and even then, some reports indicate that JAXA expects the craft to make at couple of hops before finally settling down.
The situation is compounded by the fact that we still don’t know what the surface conditions are like on Phobos. Based on previous observations, it’s expected that the moon is covered with a layer of fine regolith that could make traversal difficult for the mission’s Idefix rover. Indeed, one of the rover’s primary mission goals is to determine if wheeled motion in such an environment is even viable.
Landing a crewed vehicle on Mars and successfully bringing it back home afterwards is perhaps the most daunting engineering challenge ever conceived. There’s even a solid argument to be made that it’s currently beyond our technological capabilities. The energy requirements of making a propulsive landing on the planet and then lifting off and getting back into orbit are enormous, and will very likely require in situ propellant production to refuel the craft between the two phases of the mission.
Landing on Phobos or Deimos however would require a small fraction of that energy. Moreover, due to their low orbital altitude, the moons would make ideal outposts from which to make detailed observations of Mars. This close proximity to the planet also means human operators on Phobos could directly command robotic vehicles on the Martian surface without the transmission delays that make real-time telerobotics from Earth impossible. While such a mission might not have quite the same symbolic impact of actually putting boots on Mars, it could be a valuable stepping stone towards that eventual goal.
The viability of such a landing may well depend on the findings of Japan’s Martian Moons eXploration mission. Not only in terms of the actual mechanics of rendezvousing with Phobos and touching down on it, but should the mission succeed in returning surface samples, we may be able to confirm whether or not the moon is made from ejected Martian material. Should that be the case, there will likely be even greater interest in studying the planet’s strange little moons up close.
Smart TVs running operating systems from Samsung, Vizio, and Roku continue sending data to automatic content recognition (ACR) endpoints after users opt out of tracking in the devices’ settings, according to research published on Monday. The paper from Northeastern University researchers points to potential privacy violations from some of the biggest TV brands.
ACR captures video screenshots or audio clips from smart TVs and sends the data to remote servers, where it's used for things like measuring content viewership and serving targeted ads.
The paper, "Watching the Watchers: Privacy Analysis of US Smart TV Automatic Content Recognition," examined eight smart TV OSes across 12 smart TVs from 10 manufacturers (Amazon, Hisense, LG, Roku, Samsung, Sony, Supersonic, TCL, Vizio, and Westinghouse) to examine when smart TVs use ACR and how effective opting out of user tracking is.
© https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/modern-living-room-with-smart-tv-and-remote-control-royalty-free-image/2226225055
Most founders believe investors fund ideas. In practice, they fund evidence. An investable business shows, publicly and on paper, that it solves a real problem, is led by people who can execute, and is already gaining momentum. That is why PR strategy for startups matters: it puts that evidence in front of the right people before the first meeting.
This is where most startups fail. A CB Insights analysis of 101 startup post-mortems, summarised by the CMO Council, found that 42% of failed companies cited “no market need,” ahead of running out of cash (29%) and not having the right team (23%). Investors know these numbers, so they test for demand first.
What to show: Customer interviews, waitlists, pilot results, and a bottom-up market estimate. Seed investors want to see how you calculated your market size, because the method reveals how well you understand your customer and competitive position.
Many investors weigh the team above the idea. They often look for co-founder history, since shared history tends to predict how a team handles pressure. A strong team covers product, sales, and operations, with visible domain experience.
What to show: founder bios with proof of past delivery, credible advisors, and key hires already made.
Traction is demand made measurable. The bar has risen meaningfully since 2021, and investors now expect stronger proof that a product works in the real world. Traction is judged by growth rate rather than absolute size, so steady week-over-week momentum can outweigh a larger but flat number.
What to show: revenue, active users, retention, signed partnerships, or letters of intent.
Investors want to know how you make money and whether the model improves with scale. Pricing, margins, customer acquisition cost, and payback period should be explainable in two minutes.
Weak monetisation and poor marketing both appear in the failure data compiled by Quake Capital, where a lack of marketing was cited by 14% of failed startups.
What to show: unit economics, a revenue model, and a realistic path to profitability.
Too much competition was cited by 19% of failed startups in the same research. Investors will ask what stops a larger player from copying you. Your answer might be proprietary technology, distribution, brand trust, regulatory know-how, or community.
What to show: an honest competitor map and the specific reason customers choose you.
Running out of cash was the second most-cited failure reason in the CB Insights data. Investors reward founders who know their burn rate, runway, and use of funds, and who keep clean records. Tidy books also speed up due diligence.
What to show: A simple financial model, a use-of-funds breakdown, and milestones tied to each funding stage.
This is the factor founders most often underestimate. Investors and partners search for you, and increasingly they ask AI tools about you.
Press coverage, expert commentary, customer reviews, and consistent messaging act as independent proof of everything above. Credibility built early shortens every later conversation.
Many founders bring in outside support at this stage, whether an in-house communications lead or a media partner such as 9-figure media, because third-party validation is hard to manufacture alone.
A practical PR strategy for startups links each investor concern to a public asset:
Sequencing matters. Start with the assets investors will check first, which are usually your website, founder profiles, and any existing coverage. Then build outward with earned media.
Specialist firms such as 9-figure media can help founders shape that narrative, but the underlying proof still has to come from the business itself.
Investors now research companies through answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Earning citations there is known as Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). The foundational study is the Princeton-led paper GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, presented at KDD 2024. It found that adding citations, quotations from relevant sources, and statistics can raise a source’s visibility in generative responses by over 40%, with results varying by query domain.
Investors back startups that prove demand, team strength, traction, a workable model, defensibility, financial discipline, and credibility. A deliberate PR strategy for startups makes that proof visible, and GEO-minded content makes it citable when investors and AI tools go looking.
7 Factors Investors and Partners Look For in an Investable Business was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
[kati]’s Clotty might run DOOM and game-ify the menstrual tracking process with a playful Tamagotchi-like aspect, but don’t let that distract you. It is, at its heart, a personal menstrual cycle tracking device that is defined as much by what it does do as what it doesn’t.
What doesn’t it do? Well, it will never quietly upload one’s menstrual tracking data to a remote server. Nor will it harvest, mishandle, disclose, or sell that same data. Shamefully, that alone sets it far apart from the wide range of period tracking services and apps out there. Also setting it apart is its cheerful lack of discretion. As [kati] puts it, she wanted Clotty’s design to scream “HELLO I AM A PERIOD TRACKING DEVICE” and at this she absolutely succeeded.
Clotty uses an RP2040, color LCD display, and a small variety of sensors built into a palm-sized, uterus-shaped PCB complete with touchpad ovaries. Right now it’s still in its early stages, and basically at the point that everything works hardware-wise and the essentials are there for software, but it’s still in active development. Keep an eye on Clotty’s GitHub repository for updates as features get fleshed out.
Of course, as [kati] observes, the core validity of a device can be defined by whether it can run DOOM, which of course Clotty can. You can find [kati]’s fork of RP2040-DOOM here.
[kati] has a knack for designing effective hardware that gamifies functions and incorporates a playfulness to the design that’s a delight to see. Take a moment to check out her Slightly Sentient D20 which is another excellent example of the kind of work she does.
Bitcoin Magazine
The Architecture of Money: Mapping Financial Power in the Age of Bitcoin
Money determines where we live, what we can afford, and how wealth accumulates across generations. Yet the mechanisms that create and distribute it remain largely occluded, even as their consequences become harder to unsee. For Dutch artist Carlijn Kingma, investigative financial journalist Thomas Bollen, and monetary researcher Martijn Jeroen van der Linden, that disconnect became the impetus for The Waterworks of Money. This ambitious project maps the hidden architecture of the financial system through drawing and animation, rendering it understandable to the people living within it without flattening its complexity.
The Waterworks of Money depicts the financial system as a vast network of reservoirs, channels, and pumps, revealing how money moves through banks, governments, businesses, and households. Some areas receive an abundance of liquidity, while others remain perpetually dry. The resulting drawing operates simultaneously as an artwork, an educational tool, and an examination of financial power.
The project emerged from two years of research, including interviews with more than 100 experts across banking, government, academia, and monetary reform movements. Kingma spent more than 2,200 hours translating that research into an intricate architectural landscape. Bollen, whose investigative journalism examines the workings of the financial system, and van der Linden, whose academic research explores money and monetary reform, helped develop the economic research and narratives behind the work.
One of the project’s scenarios explores a monetary future shaped by bitcoin. As bitcoin enters traditional finance, an alternative monetary system either challenges existing structures of financial power or eventually becomes part of them, and the project’s collaborators have watched both happen.
Ahead of Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 5-6, where Bollen joins two panels, I sat down with all three of the project’s collaborators to discuss making money visible, the relationship between monetary systems and inequality, and bitcoin’s place in Europe’s financial future.
BMAG: The Waterworks of Money illustrates the financial system as a network of reservoirs, pumps, and channels, with some parts of society receiving abundant liquidity while others remain dry. After two years of research and interviews with financial experts, what surprised you most about how money actually works? What do you think the public most fundamentally misunderstands about it?
Thomas Bollen: What surprised me most is that many people inside the system know a great deal about their own corner of it: interest rate derivatives, asset management or mortgage lending. Very few of them can oversee the larger system in which they operate.
What is clearly not well understood is that banks create new money when they make a loan. They are not just intermediaries that pass on the savings of their depositors.
But can you blame ordinary people for that? During the research phase we spoke to many bankers and even a CEO of a major bank who did not know they were working for a money creating institution.
If we want to improve understanding we should start at our schools and universities. Many textbooks still get it wrong, and economics education hardly pays any attention to it. In 2022 even the Riksbank’s prize in economics (the Nobel prize that is not really a Nobel prize) was awarded for research that presents banks as mere intermediaries.
BMAG: One of the central ideas in The Waterworks of Money is that money doesn’t flow evenly through society. Housing affordability has become a major issue in Europe and the United States, while asset prices and financial wealth have increasingly outpaced wages. How much of this inequality results from the design of our monetary system, rather than broader economic forces?
Thomas Bollen: It is impossible to capture that in a precise number, because so many factors play a role. But it is quite clear that the money system exacerbated inequality enormously during all those years when credit was extremely cheap.
Ray Dalio, founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, summed it up in 2019: “Money is free for those who are creditworthy.” For everyone without money or creditworthiness, it was out of reach.
Cheap credit for rich people and large multinationals (who used it for share buybacks and M&A deals) drove up the price of shares, and of houses. Bank money creation produced a specific kind of inflation: asset inflation. Wealthy households and large multinationals, who already owned those assets, profited far more from it than people without them or small businesses that did not have the same kind of access to cheap credit as their larger competitors.
BMAG: The Waterworks of Money is filled with details that help explain how the financial system works. What was the most difficult part of the monetary system to illustrate? Did anything you learned during the research change how you approached the drawing?
Carlijn Kingma: The biggest challenge was the way all the parts are connected. How do you show that clearly?
Water is the obvious metaphor for money, and it takes you a long way. Liquidity, cash flows, money drying up: they are already in the language of finance. It was also great for connecting the different parts of the system, because I could draw the pipes and canals that run between them.
But in some places you need more than that if you want to be completely accurate. Money comes in many forms: commodity money, public money, private credit money, and further out short-term debt and repo contracts can also serve as money or near-money. It was not possible to draw that many different kinds of water running through the system.
BMAG: The Waterworks of Money has been shown to both art audiences and people interested in economics, including at Bitcoin Amsterdam last year. Have you noticed differences in how these audiences respond to the work? Has their feedback influenced how you think about the role of art in explaining complex ideas?
Carlijn Kingma: The response depends on what people already know. Visitors with more financial knowledge usually laugh more, because they catch all the small jokes. We renamed Basel III to “Babel III”, for instance, because the bank rules written after the crisis add up to about three bibles.
In our bitcoin future scenario, The Republic of a Thousand Coins, we put in a lot of jokes about central bankers. You can see Alan Greenspan there as an inflatable doll. That works best if you know who he is, and the bitcoin crowd knows far more about monetary history than the general public.
Above all, we noticed that art opens doors. The drawing gives people a visual starting point for a conversation. Even without any prior knowledge, the metaphor lets you see the social outcomes of how money flows.
BMAG: Your research has examined how financial crises can reinforce the influence of institutions considered too important to fail. More recently, you’ve explored the growing power of asset managers such as BlackRock and Vanguard. Are we witnessing a genuine transformation in how financial power operates, or have the same underlying problems simply taken new forms since 2008?
Martijn Jeroen van der Linden: Following the crisis of 2008, there was a general consensus among mainstream policymakers, think tanks and many economists that the banking sector needed to be repaired. In Europe, the influential de Larosière Group concluded that the causes of the crisis were excessive leverage, opaque securitisation, shadow banking risks, and fragmented supervision in the EU, and argued that “repair is necessary and urgent.” The banking repair consisted of new and stricter regulations, stronger coordinated supervision and new crisis management procedures. The underlying architecture remained unaltered, meaning that fundamental change never occurred.
But the architecture remained fragile. Take, for example, 2023. When Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse got into trouble, the crisis playbooks developed after 2008 stayed in the drawer. The US authorities guaranteed all SVB deposits, including the more than 90 percent above the insured limit. In Switzerland, the state backed the rescue of Credit Suisse by UBS.
Advocates of banking repair often claim to have made the system safer. But the inherent fragility of funding long-term loans with runnable bank deposits is still there. Even with all the regulation, you cannot prevent a bank run, and that fragility is precisely what they refuse to solve. The banking system only survives because of massive public safety nets and privileges given to banks.
Large powerful non-banks have indeed emerged but they do not play a pivotal role in money and payments. This is a key distinction between the two sectors.
BMAG: Bitcoin began as an attempt to create money outside the control of governments and banks. Today, it’s increasingly held through investment funds and traditional financial institutions, including some of the same powerful asset managers examined in your recent work. Does this integration strengthen bitcoin’s ability to change the financial system, or risk reproducing the concentration of power it originally sought to challenge?
Martijn Jeroen van der Linden: As a financial asset, bitcoin has benefited from investments from traditional financial institutions. But the increasing use of bitcoin as an investment has compromised its promise of an alternative payment system.
At the same time, bitcoin and the rise of stablecoins have challenged the banks on their payment infrastructure. The banks are now innovating too: look at Wero, the payment wallet that a group of European banks launched in 2024. That is a change. But it is something different from the structural reform of money and banking.
BMAG: Your project imagines bitcoin as an alternative to the existing monetary system. Amsterdam also has a remarkable history of monetary experimentation, from the development of modern financial institutions to David Chaum’s pioneering work on private digital cash decades before bitcoin. Given that history, how do you see bitcoin’s role in Europe’s financial future? Has your perspective changed since you began working on the project?
Thomas Bollen: What I appreciate about bitcoin’s design is that it resembles full reserve banking. A bitcoin is not a claim on something else, so it carries no risk of a bank run. Bank deposits are: they are a promise that you can withdraw your money at any moment, while the bank can never keep that promise to all its customers at once.
We can learn a lot from our history. The Amsterdamsche Wisselbank, founded in 1609 and often seen as the world’s first central bank, started out as a full reserve bank: every bank guilder was backed by coins in its vault. It went under only after it secretly began lending more and more to the Dutch East India Company.
That is the risk of every monetary experiment: it can go in the wrong direction. In the crypto world, all kinds of companies started copying the banks. They lent out their customers’ bitcoins, while those customers still saw their coin-balances in their accounts. Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX shows how this practice can go horribly wrong.
Thomas Bollen will participate in two panel discussions at Bitcoin Amsterdam on November 6, 2026, on the Treasury Stage. Europe’s Monetary History & Future: Austrian Economics, Banks & Bitcoin (11:00–11:30 AM), alongside Rahim Taghizadegan and Willem Middelkoop, and Staat vs. de Markt: Hoeveel Overheid Hebben We Nodig in Geld? (1:55–2:25 PM), alongside Paul Buitink and Simon Lelieveldt.
Watch the full two-part animated exploration of The Waterworks of Money on YouTube and support the project by purchasing a signed, limited-edition print by Carlijn Kingma or making a donation toward its continued research at waterworksofmoney.com/buy.
The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) organizes international exhibitions, auctions, and artist collaborations exploring bitcoin and its cultural implications. Learn more at museum.b.tc.
Join us at Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 5–6, 2026. Get your tickets here and use code BA26-BMAG20 for discounted admission.
This post The Architecture of Money: Mapping Financial Power in the Age of Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.
Walmart's $60 Onn 4K Pro challenges Google's $150 TV Streamer. Here's what the extra $90 buys — and which streaming box offers better value.
The post Walmart’s $60 Onn 4K Pro Takes On Google’s TV Streamer — Is the Pricier Box Still Worth It? appeared first on TechRepublic.
Walmart's $60 Onn 4K Pro challenges Google's $150 TV Streamer. Here's what the extra $90 buys — and which streaming box offers better value.
The post Walmart’s $60 Onn 4K Pro Takes On Google’s TV Streamer — Is the Pricier Box Still Worth It? appeared first on TechRepublic.
Bitcoin Magazine
The Undercurrent: Three European Artists on Making Money Visible
Amsterdam helped lay the foundations of modern finance, but its artists were among its earliest critics. When speculative bubbles burst across Europe in 1720, Amsterdam printers and satirists responded with The Great Mirror of Folly, a collection of engravings and plays exposing the excesses of financial speculation.
Nearly three centuries later, the city hosted another monetary experiment. David Chaum, the cryptographer whose work on anonymous communication helped lay the groundwork for the cypherpunk movement, came to Amsterdam in the 1980s to work at CWI, the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science. Around 1990, he founded DigiCash to develop private electronic cash. The company went bankrupt in 1998, a decade before bitcoin, but the dream of digital money was already taking shape.
Last year at Bitcoin Amsterdam, BMAG exhibited The Waterworks of Money, in which Dutch artist Carlijn Kingma, working with financial journalist Thomas Bollen and researcher Martijn Jeroen van der Linden, depicted the monetary system as a vast irrigation network, with some areas flooded by liquidity while others remain dry. The drawing makes a complex financial system legible, exposing the mechanisms through which money is created, distributed, and concentrated.
This tradition of questioning money and making its hidden dimensions visible continues in the work of three European artists exhibiting at Bitcoin Amsterdam this November. ZETRA, RYR, and Cypherpunk Now draw from graffiti, political printmaking, hacker culture, and early bitcoin communities to explore the changing meaning of money.
Martin Fischer joined the Prague art collective Ztohoven in 2003, a group known for inserting a fictional nuclear explosion into a live Czech Television broadcast. In 2014, the collective opened Paralelní Polis, a hackerspace whose café accepted only bitcoin, and Fischer designed its logo. As he told Bitcoin Magazine’s Aaron van Wirdum in 2020, the arrival of a screen-printing press the following year prompted him to produce his first prints. Since 2020, he has worked under the name Cypherpunk Now, developing a visual record of bitcoin’s evolving culture.
RYR and ZETRA both emerged from Germany’s graffiti scene but approach money from different directions. RYR uses currency itself as material, making paper from shredded banknotes, pigment from their ashes, and concrete grenades filled with shredded cash that he calls “artifacts from the future.” ZETRA, who began painting in the early 1990s and discovered bitcoin in 2017, examines what money can buy. His TOMATOSOUP paintings revisit Andy Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans to chart changing prices in dollars and bitcoin, while THE BIP39 SERIES explores the 2,048 words used in bitcoin wallet recovery phrases, including 1206/NOTE, a collaboration with Polymerbit.
Bitcoin has shaped these artists’ practices, their livelihoods, and the communities around them. Its growing acceptance by banks, investment funds, and corporations has also prompted some difficult questions about the movement’s original ideals and where its culture is heading.
BMAG: Andy Warhol turned Campbell’s soup into an icon of consumer culture, taking an ordinary commodity and elevating it into fine art. Your TOMATOSOUP series returns to that image but introduces something Warhol largely left outside the frame: the changing value of money itself. How did the idea of reworking Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans first come about, and do viewers immediately recognize the commentary on inflation?
ZETRA: We frequently see iPhones and houses in our bitcoin Twitter timelines, showing how they become cheaper in BTC terms. I thought it would be fun to take something from art history instead, something more visually appealing, like Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Can.
For my TOMATOSOUP painting, I used real stickers placed on the can to show how the price of soup has increased in USD over the past decades, compared with the lower prices we might expect in BTC terms in the decades to come.
Bitcoiners looking at TOMATOSOUP generally understand it immediately. They know they’re in a better position as the purchasing power of fiat money continues to decline through inflation. Other viewers usually need a bit of explanation, and I’m always happy to help them understand.
BMAG: In THE BIP39 SERIES, you draw from the 2,048 words used to generate bitcoin wallet recovery phrases, turning ordinary words into artworks with a deeper significance for bitcoin holders. Can you unpack the different layers of inspiration behind the series and what they reveal about bitcoin, language, and the ownership of money for someone unfamiliar with these concepts?
ZETRA: Everyone who moves their precious sats into cold storage encounters 12 or 24 of these significant words, often early in their journey as a bitcoin newcomer. As mentioned, there are 2,048 words in a carefully curated list representing the power of self-custody.
I started going through the words one by one, imagining how each could be visualized in a physical form: the key visual for the word, its corresponding number, the style, and the medium I would choose. There are millions of possibilities for bringing these words to life through bitcoin art.
1044/LIST was the obvious choice to kick off THE BIP39 SERIES. Naturally, it features all 2,048 words presented as a list. As an ’80s kid, I had to choose 1638/SMILE as the second piece: a proper yellow smiley face, with the number 1638 in place of the eyes. It’s a fine art print on Alu-Dibond beneath a 6 mm acrylic glass cover. So clean.
Another work in the series is 0388/CORN, an obvious homage to Warhol once again. THE BIP39 SERIES will be an ongoing project for many years to come.
BMAG: You shred banknotes into paper and burn them to produce pigment. Artists have long manipulated currency to question where its value resides, but your work goes a step further by making destruction part of the creative process. Is there a contradiction in destroying money to create an artwork that may ultimately be worth much more?
RYR: Money is essentially a narrative system built on collective belief and obedience. It has worked for hundreds of years because we collectively agree on the story it tells and the value it represents. I’ve always been fascinated by that idea, particularly how something as ordinary as a banknote can carry so much meaning, authority, and perceived value.
I was looking for a different way to tell that story, both conceptually and physically. Back in 2017, I had an exhibition title in mind: To Cut a Long Story Short. I liked the cheekiness of it, especially in relation to money and the stories we attach to it. Shredding banknotes became a very literal interpretation of that title, but it also opened up an entirely new artistic medium for me.
Ultimately, I’m not simply destroying money. I’m taking an existing story, cutting it into pieces, and using those pieces to tell a new one.
BMAG: Your concrete weapons are presented as relics from a future in which the fiat wars have already ended. Yet bitcoin is increasingly held through the very financial institutions it was designed to circumvent. Is that a victory for the movement, or have the institutions simply absorbed the alternative?
RYR: I think that’s precisely what makes the story so interesting. When I created the concrete weapons, I imagined a future in which the traditional financial system had already fought its battle for survival. The weapons had become fossils, archaeological artifacts from a monetary conflict that future generations might struggle to understand.
My concrete weapons represent a future in which that battle is already history. Whether bitcoin ultimately wins or becomes part of the very system it challenged remains to be seen.
BMAG: Much of your work is made from the physical remains of money, at a time when currency is becoming increasingly digital and invisible. Do you think people are losing something in their understanding of money as it disappears from everyday physical experience?
RYR: I think we’re losing a physical connection to money, but not necessarily our understanding of it. Money has always been a narrative built on collective trust, whether printed on paper or represented by numbers on a screen. What fascinates me is how something as abstract as value can be represented by a physical object.
I don’t necessarily believe that art has to be authentic or entirely original. Almost everything has been done before. To me, art is a wonderfully human, almost plebeian way of expressing an opinion and giving ideas a physical voice.
Bitcoin will likely evolve into a much broader and increasingly regulated financial asset, but I hope its grassroots culture and artistic identity remain visible. That’s something my fellow artists and I will continue to contribute to, preserving the spirit of a movement that was cultural long before it became institutional.
BMAG: Paralelní Polis wasn’t just a place to discuss alternative monetary systems or a hacker meetup; its café was one of the first to adopt bitcoin as money. What were the early years of Paralelní Polis like, and what has your own experience been selling artwork for bitcoin?
Martin Fischer: Paralelní Polis was founded in 2014, during a bear market. The funny thing is, none of us who founded it even knew what a bear market was. We didn’t think of bitcoin as something that could make us rich. We saw it as uncensorable money and understood the changes it could bring to society. There was no speculation involved, and that’s what made those early days so great.
I sold my first screenprint for bitcoin in 2017, almost ten years ago, and many more since then. But practically every sale was a matter of survival. I spent most of the bitcoin I earned financing my next projects and continuing to make art.
I never managed to accumulate much bitcoin, but looking back, it gave me something far more valuable than investment returns: the freedom to remain an independent artist.
BMAG: Political printmaking has a long history in Europe, from Amsterdam’s financial satires of 1720 to twentieth-century protest posters. Your work emerged from Ztohoven, a collective that famously hacked a live television broadcast to show a fictional nuclear explosion—an audacious intervention, even by today’s standards. Ztohoven challenged institutions through disruption, while bitcoin uses game theory and economic incentives to create an alternative. Do you see bitcoin as a continuation of that same spirit of intervention, and your prints as an extension of it?
Martin Fischer: I think there’s a connection, but I wouldn’t say it’s exactly the same thing. With Ztohoven, we used art to question authority, challenge institutions, and expose how easily reality can be manipulated. Bitcoin doesn’t need to make a statement or provoke anyone. It simply offers an alternative that works without asking anyone for permission. That’s a much more interesting form of disruption to me.
But today, bitcoin has become so corporate and so intertwined with traditional banking that it’s hard to still see it as an anti-establishment movement. I don’t see this as a betrayal of its original ideals, but rather as a natural consequence of its success. That doesn’t mean I like where things are going.
What’s strange is that bitcoin’s fundamental principles haven’t really changed, but the way people perceive and use it certainly has.
And my screenprints? I still work with the original idea of separating money from the state while exploring the myths, memes, and legends of the bitcoin age. That’s what I enjoy most.
BMAG: Your Amsterdam presentation brings together more than a decade of work documenting bitcoin’s evolution from an underground movement to an increasingly institutionalized financial system. Looking across those prints today, has the movement changed more than you expected, or has your own perspective changed? Which of your prints are your favorites?
Martin Fischer: I like remembering the old days, when we were all part of the same tribe and our main enemy was Faketoshi.
Today? We have culture wars over JPEGs, Ordinals, BIPs, OP_RETURN, over what’s spam and what should or shouldn’t belong on bitcoin. What makes me saddest is that people who once fought together against censorship and for freedom now spend enormous amounts of energy fighting each other over what others should or shouldn’t be allowed to do with bitcoin.
Maybe it’s a natural consequence of bitcoin’s success. The bitcoin community has changed enormously, and so has my perspective on it. I’m definitely much more skeptical today of the idea that technology alone can automatically change society for the better.
As for my favorite works, Bitcoin Meteorite is definitely one of them. In this piece, I reworked the meme of banking dinosaurs watching their own extinction, incorporating the abstract from the Bitcoin white paper. It gave me my fifteen minutes of fame when Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert brought it into the spotlight.
Then there’s Cypherpunks of the World. This project is important to me not only as a celebration of the cypherpunks and their legacy, but also because of its complexity. It started as a series of original collages, continued through handmade screenprints, and eventually evolved into animated NFTs and a virtual gallery. It’s one of my most elaborate projects, connecting different techniques and media while staying true to the original idea.
Among my more recent works, I really like Out of Order from 2023. It’s an incredibly detailed screenprint, and the first one where I finally managed to make absolutely no printing mistakes. That alone makes it special to me.
I also love St. Satosius Contra Draconem (2025), which is inspired by the classic depiction of Saint George fighting the dragon, reimagined through bitcoin mythology.
Works by ZETRA, RYR, and Cypherpunk Now, alongside other European artists, will be presented at Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 4–6, 2026, as part of the Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) programming. Additional artworks and editions will be available through https://shop.museum.b.tc.
Explore more work by the featured artists at ZETRA, RYR, Cypherpunk Now, and www.martin-fischer.cz.
The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) organizes international exhibitions, auctions, and artist collaborations exploring bitcoin and its cultural implications. Learn more at museum.b.tc.
Join us at Bitcoin Amsterdam, Get your tickets here and use code BA26-BMAG20 for discounted admission.
This post The Undercurrent: Three European Artists on Making Money Visible first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.
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