Zen⚪️Maxi⚫️老荘禅🪷

Mega-threads of generative art🧵 Useful resources of generative art, artists, collectors, etc. can be found in replies and quoted tweets on each subject👇 deca.art/Generative_Max…

JEFFREY EPSTEIN HIJACKED BITCOIN AND NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT IT Jeffrey Epstein didn't just traffic people. He hijacked Bitcoin. We found it in the files. Exposed it on The Corbett Report today. Epstein funded the MIT developers who killed Bitcoin as peer-to-peer cash. His crypto advisor Brock Pierce ran the Bitcoin Foundation into the ground, then handed development funding to MIT where Epstein's money was explicitly earmarked for the core devs. We have the emails. Epstein invested in Blockstream, the company that only exists if Bitcoin stays throttled at 7 transactions per second. Then his money funded the developers who made that permanent. Pierce co-founded Tether. A University of Texas study found over 50% of Bitcoin's 2017 price pump came from unbacked Tether printing. The CFTC found only 27 cents backing every dollar of Tether. They manufactured the "digital gold" narrative with fake money. Tether has never passed an audit. Not once. No firm will even work with them. Then Howard Lutnick, Epstein's literal next door neighbor who lied under oath about their relationship, invested $600M in Tether through Cantor Fitzgerald. His firm now manages all of Tether's treasury reserves. Lutnick went from fundraising for Hillary Clinton to chairing Trump's transition team. He installed Bo Hines as White House crypto advisor. Together they pushed the Genius Act, which requires all stablecoins to be backed by US Treasuries, managed by Lutnick's firm. 10 days after the Genius Act passed, Hines quit the White House and became CEO of Tether's US subsidiary. The Genius Act is not crypto innovation. It is a backdoor CBDC that funds $3 trillion in additional government debt while making Lutnick's firm the biggest beneficiary. And there is something worse coming. The Clarity Act will tokenize everything you own. Your stocks, 401k, commodities, real estate. All programmable, trackable, seizeable. Combined with legal changes already made in all 50 states since 1994, when the next financial collapse hits, your assets transfer to the four largest banks with a click of a button. Every player is connected. Every move was coordinated. This is not Big Short 2.0. This is Big Short 2.0 on steroids, pre-planned and run by the same network that already owns the outcome.

Jeffrey Epstein and the hijacking of Bitcoin. Fail to read at your peril (brownstone.org/articles/the-h…) ...........This is the full circle. Epstein funded the MIT devs who killed Bitcoin as cash. Brock Pierce ran the Bitcoin Foundation into the ground, opened the door for Epstein’s money, brokered Epstein’s Coinbase stake, sat in Epstein’s mansion pitching Bitcoin to Larry Summers, co-founded Tether, and kept emailing Epstein until 2018. Tether then printed unbacked dollars to pump Bitcoin 50% in 2017. Howard Lutnick, who lied about cutting ties with Epstein, took over management of Tether’s $130+ billion Treasury reserves before he even joined the Trump transition. He pushed for Treasury Secretary, missed, landed at Commerce, installed his ally Bo Hines as White House crypto advisor, had Hines ram through the GENIUS Act, then watched Hines quit the White House and immediately become CEO of Tether’s U.S. subsidiary. Every single player is connected. Every single move was coordinated. The GENIUS Act entrenches the exact loopholes Tether has lived on. The CLARITY Act hands regulatory cover to the same insiders. The Bitcoin Strategic Reserve sits on top of a coin whose price was artificially inflated by the same stablecoin they now “regulate,” whose core development was funded by Epstein, and whose usability was deliberately destroyed by the people who profit from the fix. This is not Big Short 2.0. This is Big Short 2.0 on steroids, pre-planned, and run by the same network that already owns the outcome. They created the crisis (crippled on-chain Bitcoin), printed the fake money to pump it (Tether), positioned themselves to own the “solution” (Blockstream, Cantor, USAT), wrote the laws that protect their scam (GENIUS, CLARITY), and are now preparing to step in as the saviors when the bubble they inflated finally pops. They walk away with fees, stakes, revolving-door jobs, and permanent control over programmable money. We get every transaction tracked, every dollar programmable, and the last remnants of financial freedom erased under the banner of “innovation” and “stability.” This is not incompetence. This is conquest. What We Should Do The Epstein files are public. The University of Texas study is published. The CFTC fines are on record. The emails are in black and white. Shut down the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve immediately. It is built on fraud and serves as a distraction. Kill the CLARITY Act before it cements the control grid. Repeal the GENIUS Act and slam the backdoor shut on programmable dollars. Expose every connection. Name every name. Refuse to let policy be written on top of Epstein’s shadow. Support real alternatives: privacy coins, sound money protocols, anything that keeps control in individual hands instead of this parasitic elite network. Bitcoin was born to set us free. The files prove it was captured. The time to take it back is now. Watch the latest The Brownstone Show with Jeffrey Tucker & Aaron Day: Bitcoin Hijacked? Epstein Files, Surveillance, and the End of Freedom Money Join the conversation:

Last two days to visit the solo exhibition ‘hello world’ by @qubibien, curated by @kikanicolela. We can place hello world within a broader lineage of abstract animation. Pioneers like Norman McLaren experimented with scratching directly onto film, creating music and image simultaneously and revealing cinema’s material substrate. Like McLaren’s films — Dots, Loops, Blinkity Blank — hello world strips away narrative to expose something more fundamental: rhythm, pattern, the play of light and darkness. But where McLaren worked frame by painstaking frame, qubibi has created a system that generates its own infinite variations. hello world is not random, yet it cannot be fully predicted. It is not chaotic, yet it is never static. It exists in that liminal space where complex systems live — on the edge between pattern and surprise, structure and flux, in a balance between order and chaos. What makes this work so moving, so necessary in our current moment, is precisely this balance. In an age of algorithmic domination, where code increasingly determines our social relations, our information flows, our very perceptions, hello world offers us a different vision of what algorithms can be. Not tools of surveillance and control, but instruments for touching the generative principles of the universe itself. Not mechanisms of disconnection, but bridges back to the ancient human impulse to marvel at pattern, to seek harmony, to feel our participation in something larger than ourselves. qubibi: hello world November 1 – 15 Mariannenstrasse 33, 10999 Berlin Curated by Kika Nicolela In collaboration with @objktcom - #helloworld #qubibi #genart #tezos

MERIDIAN MONDAYS Left: Meridian #327 in the Topographic style by @mattdesl on @artblocks_io in the collection of @generative_maxi Right: My photo taken at sunrise while making a >1,100m ascent up the Colca Canyon in Peru on the morning of 1 January 2025.

@qubibien @Medium @fakewhale_xyz @ExpandedArt @FeralFile 20/ Absorbing Time: A Conversation with qubibi on ‘hello world’ @kikanicolela blog.objkt.com/post/absorbing…

@qubibien @Medium @fakewhale_xyz @ExpandedArt 19/ A Missive from the Artist Qubibi Around the Exhibition SOURCE @FeralFile feralfile.com/journal/close-…

1/ qubibi @qubibien @qubibi @0xDecaArt deca.art/generative_max…

The Collapse of the Contemporary Art Market A thread on value, trust, and the exhaustion of visibility. From our latest Fakewhale LOG insight, published on October 10, 2025, exploring how narratives of value rise, circulate, and fracture under the pressure of excess. ↓ L :: The stainless-steel “Rabbit”, Jeff Koons, 1986 R :: Installation view Damien Hirst To Live Forever For a While Museo Jumex 2024

Pairing & Sharing is caring @qubibien Mimizu last tango dpa3L34bf764Bn @Eko3316 Latent Ink #373

Ladies and gentlemen GM 🌞 It's a big day for me today. I am pleased to announce I have finally completed my Leftovers by @qubibien set. I bought my first leftover on the 28th of July of 2022. m2202131659png800x800 It slowly started becoming an addiction which led with me becoming the no.1 holder of Leftovers on the 21nd of February of 2023 by collecting 230221m01zIe27002700 and reaching 178 Leftovers. Later that year @thefunnyguysNFT took the throne with a massive scoop but I wasn't going to let it go without a fight. On July 15th with a small scoop of my own I reached 338 Leftovers collected, with m2202181209png1700x1700 being the one that sealed the deal. At roughly 2 AM I collected my 358th Leftover, m2202192206png1500x1500 1 (thanks @visualtowslee for the smooth trade) This one is a special one as it marks the completion of my journey (to an extent) with having collected every edition from the Leftovers collection. There are 396 pieces in the collection with 41 being 1/1s. I own 3x 1/1s so with 355 being the total number of editions I have finally achieved my goal set out 3 years ago. Quite funny that this happened almost exactly 3 years after I started collecting Leftovers 🥲

MIMIZU was made from 2018 to 2024. Started as video work, became static visuals from 2021. HEN @objktcom @verse_works @manifoldxyz @ExpandedArt @DataGalerie @heft_gallery Last Tango at @nguyenwahed @Highlight_xyz was the final chapter. Won't open that box again unless something very special comes up. So now we can only revisit the MIMIZU someone has. That's why I'm thinking of doing this daily thing. It's for looking at. 😌🪱

Created the key visual for Issey Miyake’s IM MEN! Looks like it was such a wonderful show! 🙌✨

ETH's pivot back to L1 scaling is too little, too late: The "L2 scaling" roadmap is to blame for ETH's horrible performance Even the 5x increase proposed by 2026 gives ETH 1/40 the capacity of SOL now, & only by 2029 will ETH reach 1/8 the speed of SOL now... ETH is cooked! 🧵 ETH is losing so hard it hurts! The reason is abundantly clear: ETH's "L2 scaling" roadmap. It is not marketing, UX, vibes, the ETF or even PMF. Any blockchain (L1) that does not scale simply cannot compete; that is the bottom line! The "L2 scaling" roadmap has been parasitic, as it allowed these for-profit, centralised & permissioned L2's to take the majority of users while only passing a fraction of those fees back down to ETH's L1. This is what absolutely wrecked ETH's economics, as we can see in the chart below. Because inflation reversed dramatically at the very same time blobs (L2 scaling) were first properly implemented: This is how ETH managed to lose its lead to SOL & I am not at all convinced it can regain its position now. As the damage has already been done, even ETH's blue-chip DeFi protocols like UNI & AAVE are already committed to migrating away from ETH, as they are moving to their own app-chains. Realistically speaking, SOL offered a faster, cheaper & more secure product that is also far more decentralised compared to ETH L2's. Explaining how SOL was able to overtake ETH so dramatically: All while SOL's capacity remains several orders of magnitude higher, even when we account for ETH's updated, more optimistic roadmap. While completely ignoring that SOL's development is not static either! ETH's pivot away from L1 scaling was a total betrayal of the cypherpunk ethos & the equivalent of an L1 committing seppuku. In the least honourable way possible, as people sold out for the sake of L2 tokens & equity, a traitorous act. Born from a seriously perverse set of incentives that allowed underpaid devs to become millionaires by not scaling the L1 & launching rent-seeking L2's instead... The thread linked to below goes into far more detail about exactly why "L2 scaling" does not work & why it will never work: x.com/Justin_Bons/st… Major props to @dankrad for his latest proposal to increase the gas limit x100 over 4 years! That would allow ETH to compete with SOL, even if the timeline is still too long from my perspective: He is precisely the hero that ETH needs, even if he is not the hero ETH deserves. Unfortunately, the pushback on GitHub indicates pressure for far more conservative numbers. Explaining one of the many reasons why I remain sceptical that such an aggressive proposal would ever actually pass. Nonetheless, even discussing this type of change is still a very big deal: My History with ETH: This is all coming from one of ETH's biggest supporters, as I mined ETH within the first week of launch in 2015, with my 15-kilowatt mining farm at the time. Even defending ETH against all of the criticisms as an active bitcoiner. All while the fund I manage: @CyberCapital (the oldest liquid token fund in the world!), has had ETH as its largest investment ever since its launch in 2016! That is up to early 2023, when ETH's pivot away from L1 scaling became final & clear. This is when I turned critic, predicting ETH's downfall at the peak of its prominence, specifically due to its "L2 scaling" roadmap: What was particularly surprising was how fast I was ostracised for going against the party line, as I went from a respected community member to persona non grata pretty much overnight. That hurt, from the attacks & blocks, as I formerly respected many of these people. So this latest narrative shift is vindicating for me, even if I doubt that the recognition from the ETH community will ever come, as it is far more convenient to ignore voices like mine, even if that is to their detriment. Now that the L1 scaling narrative has returned on ETH, which I applaud. Despite all of the ridicule I received for that very same position. Even if I still think it is too little, too late now. I certainly had to reconsider the thesis around ETH over the last few weeks. Even though I would love to be proven wrong, the current prognosis is not good at all when we objectively compare & contrast. Such an increase several years ago would have convinced me to stay with ETH, but today it amounts to no more than a "token" increase. Simply increasing gas limits only takes ETH so far, as it is a brute force approach. More elegant designs are required to push the envelope. Something ETH in truth is utterly incapable of without serious long-term engineering efforts, which have been deprioritised due to the "L2 scaling" roadmap. That is where it caused the most harm, as the gap now is so incredibly large. Governance Ultimately, if we dig down deeper, ETH's governance is the cause for all of these failures. Because that is how these terrible decisions were made, I am convinced things would have worked out very differently with a better decision-making process. This is why I am an advocate of stakeholder governance today. Having the owners actively vote over major decisions makes perfect sense in terms of the effectiveness of decision making & fairness. This is also a model that has been proven to work in traditional company ownership as well. Especially compared to the alternative, which is centralised control & gatekeeping of the codebase by a relatively small cabal of elitist devs, often in ivory towers. Who are also extremely vulnerable to capture by external parties, such as "L2 scaling" interests. This is also why adding a decentralised treasury from fees & inflation further secures the neutrality of the chain by providing an L1-biased source of funding. Something that has been demonstrated by OG chains such as DASH, DCR & XTZ over long periods of time. Unfortunately, the people in power at the top of this relatively centralised pyramid structure. Have actively opposed the idea of stakeholder governance. This should not come as a surprise, as people historically rarely surrender their own power & influence voluntarily. A historical rule with very few exceptions. In truth, the ETH developers by 2021 & 2022 should have been "fired" & replaced with ones that could deliver on the original promise of sharding. A form of L1 scaling that would have allowed for massive capacity increases without increasing node requirements, true horizontal scaling without compromise. Now, chains such as NEAR, EGLD & SUPRA have fully delivered on this promise. This exposes the ETH developers who said this was "too hard" for ETH to implement! Stakeholder governance would have also solved this problem by defunding mediocracy while promoting excellence. That is called accountability, due process, divisions of power & actual decentralised decision making, in other words, good governance! Conclusion This has been the first glimmer of hope for positive reform in years, exceeding my expectations of what is possible within ETH politics. I want ETH to succeed, as the damage done by BTC & ETH failing in my eyes has done immeasurable harm to our industry, likely setting us back decades. So, ETH turning that failure around to a success would make me overjoyed! That is why I remain vigilant & watch for changes carefully, as I have for BTC for all these years as well. While also applying as much pressure as I can through such critiques. However, the actual governance structure of ETH is highly centralised, along with the fact that these people are, for the most part, all invested in these L2's. Unless, ofcourse, they have finished dumping on retail & they are desperate to remain relevant while literally watching their main chain die over the last few years... This is not a popularity contest or tribalistic game to me; I do not care who delivers on the promise of crypto. Or even the moral character of the actors involved. Scalability on the L1 is an absolute must; that is what really matters, & ETH has spent the last few years vilifying this idea & its proponents. While actively promoting centralised L2's that can all censor & steal user funds. This will be something that will be very difficult for a lot of the egos involved to admit, creating further resistance to change. Another unfortunate consequence of highly centralised governance. I went from being a bitcoiner to a bitcoin critic & ETH supporter. I then went from being a SOL critic to a supporter in light of ETH's failure to scale. There is a high probability that I will change my mind again in the future. I do not care if that will be ETH, SUI or even ADA! It is the cypherpunk revolution that matters & right now ETH still stands in the way of that dream. ✊

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Fidelity, a leader in asset management with nearly $5 trillion in AUM, is set to make waves in the RWA market by tokenizing its Treasury Digital Fund (FYHXX). thedefiant.io/news/defi/fide… #Fidelity #DeFi #Tokenization #Web3 #AssetManagement #Finance #Ethereum

Roger Ver’s the guy who rebuilt lives—hurricanes in Texas, earthquakes in Puebla, a failing school in Antigua saved with $100,000. He’s trained women in Nigeria with tech skills, handed out laptops to kids, and quietly paid for surgeries—like a torn ACL—without a word of thanks needed. He funded Christmas for Antigua’s poor and lifted a widow after her husband’s death. Generous. Ethical. Silent. Now he’s the one trapped, facing an unfair fight. We know him as a hero—he deserves freedom, not chains. Sign the letter at freerogernow dot com. Share this. One minute can free a man who’s given everything.

“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them." — Dalai Lama Leftover💎231227w23fZd25002500 @qubibien

BTC is fool's gold Do not take it seriously as an investment: BTC is an emperor with no clothes; a mere meme coin Without capacity, scarcity, privacy, DeFi, or even long-term security, BTC has no legs to stand on! We must break the collective delusion before it is too late! 🧵 All of the qualities of Bitcoin we hold dear: Censorship resistance, immutability, financial sovereignty & decentralization; are no longer championed by BTC but by its children instead. All of BTC's original cypherpunk principles have been lost to its own swamp of corruption; A story as old as time: As power corrupts & absolute power corrupts absolutely: BTC was effectively captured by a relatively small group of people who managed to entirely pivot the purpose, vision & fundamental design of BTC. This did not happen without a fight. That history is now known as the block size debates, cumulating in 2017 when "Bitcoin Core" "won" & Bitcoin lost. One of the greatest tragedies is that most people are still being misled in regard to the reality behind this story: Read "Hijacking Bitcoin" to learn more about that history! There is little hope left for change in BTC, as the decision-making/governance is dominated by this very same group today. BTC's governance is effectively a type of "GitHub" dictatorship. The biggest change Core managed to push is blocking any future increases to BTC's capacity, contrary to the original plans for Bitcoin, as Satoshi had clearly laid out in his writing that he intended BTC to SCALE! The truth is that today, optimistically, BTC is only capable of about 7 Transactions Per Second! This means BTC cannot be used for anything significant at all; even the much-lauded "digital gold" "use case" does not work. (speculation alone is not a use case!) Tragically, this also means that the only way BTC can gain further "adoption" is through centralized custodians: The antithesis of Satoshi's original vision! People can pretend like it is working fine, as all usage has been driven off by this uncompetitive behavior. The chain does work fine for as long as no one uses it. However, as soon as any significant amount of people tried to actually interact with the BTC blockchain, fees would skyrocket & transacting would become extremely unreliable, at which point people leave. This cycle has been happening on a small scale for several years now, explaining why high fees cannot be sustained & only come in the form of fee spikes; This particular dynamic is also what spells doom for BTC in the long run, as this change by Core has also ruined the long-term security model, as these fees were supposed to pay for the security of the network. Core has effectively changed the economic design of BTC to rely on a small number of TXs with extremely high fees instead of a large number of TXs with extremely low fees. This not only destroyed all utility but also annihilated the long-term security model, as this expectation of users paying high fees is totally unrealistic in a competitive environment. This will all cause BTC to completely collapse in on itself in 8 to 12 years, at which point an inflation increase beyond the 21M limit will be the only way to at least keep the chain alive. This will certainly happen, as certain Core developers have now made this very clear. This, in particular, will also cause the chain to splinter more, hastening its demise. There are also several compounding death spiral effects that will occur during this same time period. All while the capacity is so low that people will not actually be able to exit, causing a "bank run" like situation. That is because even today, it would take months for every BTC holder to move their coins. BTC is pretending to be something it is not; it cannot be money (No Medium of Exchange without capacity) & it is a terrible Store of Value without long-term security or scarcity. Furthermore, if all of the proposed benefits cannot be scaled to the masses, it is pointless. Because at that point, we are only playing pretend so that the price can keep going up. At a certain point, the price will not be able to keep going up & a reckoning will have to take place. We have covered the math, the history, the consensus & economics in far more detail in some of my other articles, so please read those if you want to go deeper; I can reference them in the comments if you ask as well. This article is intended to be a shorter & more digestible journey into these ideas, as my other work is far more thorough, maybe too thorough, explaining my motivation to write this. You will also notice despite the massive amount of hate this thread will get, there will be hardly any reasonable counter-arguments; that is because there are none; we are correct to predict BTC's doom! People often attempt to put BTC into its own category, to avoid comparison. That is because BTC does not survive an objective comparative analysis, as it is a dinosaur destined for extinction. BTC is a cryptocurrency, a technology, it is not divinely ordained, no matter how much people project their religiosity onto it. We have to assume some of the bigger players already know all of this & are playing games with retail. Big money might often be evil, but it is rarely stupid. Because the timeline for BTC's technical collapse is mostly set in stone (8-12 years), we should expect a "social" collapse to occur before that, so buyer beware! I am still the same Bitcoiner I was in 2013 when I first joined: A hardcore supporter of cypherpunk principles through the mass adoption of cryptocurrency. Somewhere along the way, BTC left behind the "mass adoption" part, turning it into a purely speculative plaything for the rich. BTC changed, not me; I am still that same Bitcoiner! Support Bitcoin by abandoning BTC & allowing Satoshi's vision to come alive by supporting Bitcoin's children. The next generation is our salvation, as we refuse to sacrifice our principles, Bitcoin's principles, for the sake of BTC! 🕊️

“Fashion is about dressing according to what's fashionable. Style is more about being yourself." — Oscar de la Renta Toccata #36 @msoriaro @andreasrau_eu @fx_hash_

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