CENTS is a world unto itself & these are the skies above it

Reflection is a kind of nexus - AI & on-chain - digital & embodied - historic & future-seeing excellent thread on this monumental project by @VanArman

1/ Reflection, by @VanArman A thread 👇

not for sale for the beauty of Bitcoin ordinals adjaCENTS uses the inscribed CENTS as visual, structural, and conceptual substrate to create beautiful ephemeral canvases. by the master of the clouds, MLO ☁️💙☁️

AdjaCENTS, III of VII: Turning Cents. Coins narrow as they brighten, like cents seen edge-on mid-spin, and the negative space between them draws the sky. Copper Clouds Seven, Eight and Nine, built from Rutherford Chang's CENTS. mlo.art/news/blog-posts/adja… ☁️💙☁️💙☁️💙☁️

FLY VISION uses the fruit fly brain to make decisions and reinterpret famous works of art Every line, every stroke, every shape, and every color is chosen through the neural system Diamond Hands from these collections can mint for FREE BANKNOTES CENTS @sovrnart Random Art Memory @redisdead Toadstools @toadstools_btc Rare Gummies @Ob1_Wan_Satoshi Bitcoin Weirdos @ftw_collective Ordskull @Arietoshi Honey Badger @HoneyBadgersBtc Bitmap Sunset @BitmapSunset 50/100 minted ██████████░░░░░░░░░░ 50% 🏆 Rewards for the Top 3 FLY VISION holders 🥇 1st Place: Sub-10 BANKNOTE — valued at 0.00069 BTC 🥈 2nd Place: Bathroom Wall — valued at 0.00024 BTC 🥉 3rd Place: Sola Busca — valued at 0.00018 BTC Mint Now:ord-dropz.xyz/marketplace/li…

🕳️ I asked Claude today to scan all 10,000 CENTS to count how many had quietly slipped out of circulation. I expected 5. We found 25 🤯 – some frozen for nearly two years, inside the cold storage of Kraken, Fidelity and Coinbase Prime. Patient zero: a matched pair of 1971 pennies, #467 and #1920 – sold in March 2024, swept into a whale’s 199 BTC wallet six months later, untouched since. Two 1971s, were the first CENTS the chain swallowed. What an irony! 🙈 None of these wallets know they hold art. Exchanges and custodians see only fungible BTC, never the inscription on a particular sat – so CENTS ride out as loose change and freeze.

>>> the readymade of loss <<<

interesting point about this state (one that is unique to bitcoin ordinals) and reminds of Martin's essay on Y Klein and R Chang "From Blue to Molten Cooper" find it on the Makes Cents writing page sovrn.art/cents/makes-cents/

there's a tradition of burning in the world of networked digital assets @ScrillaVentura was recently talking about how this goes back to Rare Pepes. It's a storied tradition for Punks as well, documented in @seanbonner's burnedpunks site. For Bitcoin ordinals, burning can happen intentionally by spending the sat into an output with a script that begins with OP_RETURN, or it can happen in this other no-man's-land of way of getting swept into an exchange payment. A very cool new layer of meaning for the objecthood of the cent.

every void CENT now has its own case file on cents vision 🔥 This reminds of the burned punks site that @seanbonner made. And I love how it draws a thread to the tradition of burns that started back with Rare Pepes. I think of what Rutherford created with CENTS as a structure that allows the object and its relationship to value to be transformed in the cauldron of decentralized perception, and these void CENTS are yet another form that emerges from this structure, another kind of value objecthood.

The Void Files: every frozen CENT now has a case file. 🔍🕵🏼‍♂️

We traced the 5 Cents in The Void – and they came out of Kraken. On Sep 21, a batched Kraken withdrawal (300 BTC, wallet bc1qdu0t87…) unknowingly swept up 5 CENTS ordinals as dust. Kraken doesn’t support inscriptions, so its coin-selection is sat-blind – it treated 5 collectibles as spare change. They’re not lost. Whoever now holds that 300 BTC UTXO is holding 5 CENTS, and can peel them back out to a sat-aware wallet anytime. 🧵

New on cents-vision: The Void – a new home for the CENTS that get swallowed by the machine. It started with a false alarm. I run a small on-chain detector that watches every CENT change hands and catches the sales the marketplaces miss – offer-accepts and cross-platform trades that never show up in any feed. Yesterday afternoon it flagged a „sale” for nearly 100 BTC. Nobody pays 100 BTC for a handful of CENTS (yet! 😜), so instead of trusting it, we opened the transaction. It wasn’t a sale at all. It was five Cents – #20, #60, #1859, #7061 and #8086 – being swallowed whole by an exchange. The transaction moved 578 BTC across three inputs and nineteen outputs, with not a single inscription-safe output among them: a major exchange sweeping its own wallets, and five Cents just riding along in the sats it happened to spend. Collateral! We followed them. All five landed together in one 300 BTC cold-storage output, and the inputs traced back to a hot wallet that has cycled more than 780,000 BTC in its lifetime – a top-tier exchange. Somewhere upstream a collector had deposited these coins, and „the machine” simply ate them. They are not lost. They sit in that wallet, fully intact and fully spendable – by an exchange that has no idea it is holding a piece of the collection. But they cannot be listed, cannot be traded, and cannot move on their own. They have been cancelled out of circulation. I started calling that state „voided“ – present on-chain, but null in practice. The real danger is the next move. The day that big output is spent by a wallet with no regard for inscriptions, a CENT could leave as change to a random withdrawal – and that is how ordinals actually die. For now these five are simply benched: about 0.05 % of the whole collection, frozen in place. So we built them a home. „The Void” is a new page that collects every Cent this happens to. For each one it shows the wallet now holding it, the size of the UTXO it is trapped in, the transaction that took it there, and the date it slipped in – every detail linking out to mempool so you can verify each step yourself. A matching Voided badge now appears on the Cents’s detail page. The new tool finds them on its own. A Cent whose holding output is bundled with real Bitcoin (0.01 BTC or more) is not being held as a collectible, and the detector flags it automatically; a weekly scan keeps the page current. Each voided Cent carries one of three states – voided while it is trapped, escaped if it ever returns to a normal wallet, and consumed if it is spent away for good – so if one of these five ever claws its way back out, the Void will be the first to show it and I will definitely let you know if that ever happens …

giveaway courtesy of @banknotes_btc FLY VISION Girl With a Pearl Earring as drawn by a fly brain Banknotes inscribed the neurons and synapses of the fly brain on Bitcoin to create sats that think through images. Giveaway: a CENTS holder who mints or holds a FLY VISION will win Girl With A Pearl Earring as a bonus. Drop the address in the comments. The mint is open on @OrdDropz and requires only the inscription fee (apx 32kb so expect network fees around 15-20k sats). This giveaway is intended to help the collection get fully inscribed! and to honor experimentation on bitcoin ordinals.

For my part, I'm proud to be in a scene with a builder like Eli. An Ordigallery is created automatically when the pass is in the wallet, pretty slick 🔥 And they recently added 3D object display. So I sent a pass to @DagieDee, who collected CENTS Block 839969 at Christie's (a full-block inscription of the block into which Rutherford smelted the 10k Cents, more below). And here it appears, in the Ordigallery sculpture garden 🤌 The passes are quite inexpensive, and nice as gifts for fellow ordinal enjooooyors like this. At the moment, Ordigallery is also the only platform for making galleries of ordinals (looking forward to public release of the one @huuep is building), and they do it for love, they do it out of belief in the future of the eco, they are a bastion holding the fort. Eli also has done amazing curation and context writing on Ordinals, and has been behind many of the legacy gallery inscriptions to grow the fully on-chain @ord_net infrastructure. And much more. If you're into ordinals, I'd say an Ordigallery pass is one of the most inexpensive and fun things you can get atm, for yourself or for your friends.

Genuinely proud of the OrdiGallery. Simply through collecting a Bird of a Feather, or OrdiGallery Pass, you unlock a virtual museum for your BTC ordinals. shibboleth recently sent the owner of "The Block," who also owns some other incredible Cents an OrdiGallery Pass. 🧵

CENTS shows us the many manifestations of the performance of value. This aspect of the collection & Rutherford’s brilliance, makes CENTS an eternal performance and a continuous artwork So it would appear few CENTS hitched a ride atop a 500 btc train straight to an exchange 🤣

thank you to Banknotes for this offer to CENTS collectors! this new fly brain project is quite an interesting one imo