Why Art on Bitcoin? A Personal Answer

Why am I releasing my new works (“Beacons”) as Ordinals rather than minting them on Tezos, Ethereum, or Base? The answer is both straightforward and convoluted.

Let’s start with the straightforward answer: inscribing art on Bitcoin is a platform-independent, fully on-chain, decentralized yet simple process. Anyone with a modicum of tech savvy can publish their artwork (or anything else) on the Bitcoin blockchain, and it will live there permanently (as long as BTC exists), in an easily accessible, decentralized fashion. Who wouldn’t want that?

Now for the more convoluted—and personal—answer. Inscribing on Bitcoin is like coming full-circle for me. Let me explain.

I first heard about Bitcoin around 2011 or 2012 but didn’t pay much attention to it. Over the next few years, something changed, and I began viewing Bitcoin as an intriguing computer-science experiment. So I bought my first BTC in 2015—around $200 then, which seems prehistoric now, but that was only ten years ago!

I had almost forgotten about my “experiment” when Bitcoin reappeared in my newsfeed during the famous 2017 bull run. If you’re unfamiliar with that period, here’s one fact that says it all: Bitcoin went from $1,000 to $20,000 between January and December 2017, which caught everyone’s attention!

After the inevitable crash, I spent a couple of years studying blockchain—and Bitcoin in particular—and published a book about it in early 2020. During that process, I also learned that the blockchain could be used to write non-financial data permanently, as well as to self-notarize documents via cryptographic hashes. In parallel with the book, I started a series of articles on Medium, breaking down the Bitcoin white paper section by section. I even began inscribing personal data on-chain—messages to my kids (that they might discover someday?) and photographs. It was all pretty exciting, but Bitcoin was still treated mostly as a financial-asset chain, and the community seemed reluctant to support anything else.

Drawn back to coding by my blockchain studies, I rekindled my love for code-based art. In the early 2000s, I discovered net art and joined a small artist collective. We published a series of experiments—one even won awards in Europe and was shown at several digital-art festivals.

When I was growing up, I took “coding classes” at the local science museum—which honestly were more fun geek hangouts than formal lessons. Nevertheless, we learned to draw with LOGO (the famous “turtle graphics” of Seymour Papert), and I taught myself BASIC to make silly games and map drawings. I remember how proud I was of my monochrome-green map of Africa, pixel-perfect country borders glowing on a CRT screen.

More recently, my passion for creative coding reignited when I shifted my focus to Ethereum. I was surprised to see not only that code-generated art was a real thing, but that many people were selling their pieces via ERC-721 contracts. I’ve never cared much about selling, but I do care about visibility—and slowly I dipped my toes back into the creative process, sharing work for others to discover. Ultimately, that led to my first generative collection, regenerate, which I released in 2023 on fxhash.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin itself had been “upgraded” via the Taproot soft fork (November 2021), but it wasn’t until a year later that developer Casey Rodarmor demonstrated you could use Taproot to inscribe full images on-chain and tie them to individual satoshis.

Although I loved publishing on fxhash and other platforms (koda, zeroone, rodeo…), I was uneasy knowing each work had to be tailored to that platform’s spec—and that the platform itself might one day vanish. Preservation became another concern, and Bitcoin Ordinals offered an elegant answer: a permanent “inscription” in any internet-readable format (GIF, PNG, AVIF, HTML, JS…), stored as raw bits on the blockchain—no intermediaries, nothing more. Cherry on the Bitcoin cake: not only can your code react to network events (a new block being mined, for example), but you can also update the inscription by re-inscribing on the same satoshi, giving the artist full control.

Inscribing art (or data) on BTC is the closest thing I’ve felt—in the digital realm—to drawing. You take your bits and bind them directly into blocks. Nothing else, nothing more. Does this mean I won’t release on other chains? Not necessarily—every chain has trade-offs (cost being a big one on bitcoin)—but I’m falling in love with the raw immediacy of dropping code straight into the blockchain and feeling the network’s pulse up close.

Final shill: Beacons is a long-form generative series that will be released in June 2025 as Ordinals via Gamma.io. You may think that using a platform contradicts my previous point— it doesn’t. While I wish a long (and prosperous) life to Gamma, Beacons will live forever on Bitcoin regardless of whether that platform remains accessible. Owners will always be able to access their mints. Each piece was designed specifically for Bitcoin and will evolve automatically with every “difficulty adjustment”—an event that happens roughly every two weeks to maintain an average ten-minute interval between blocks, regardless of how many miners the network has.

Long live the blockchain, long live the art!