Hello! Everybody. Over the past year, we’ve covered a lot of difficult and challenging topics on this newsletter. 

So today we are going to take a little break and do something different. I want to share with you an art project I’ve been developing over the past few years. If you follow me online, you are probably aware of its various faces, but you probably are not aware of its entirety… so far. 

Today we are gonna talk about that frog NFT meme I made in 2016 or so before the word NFT even existed, and all the collaborations and art enhancements I’ve made to it over the years. Sit back, relax, and let’s look at some pictures of frogs. :) 

Here’s a quick table of contents for this essay:

• PEPETHUGLIFE.gif

• Supply and Issuance

• Wear Your Statement with LENA Kicks Auction

• 7KB Pepe Thug Life by Viva_La_Vandal

• Immortalizing PEPETHUGLIFE

• The First Liquid Pepe

• Augmented Reality Pepe

• ShadilayThug And Time Travel

• Pepe Incarnate

• RarePepeWorld.com

• AlienTreeHouse VrChat Virtual Reality Art Gallery (Will be added soon…)

The Frogs That Live Inside Bitcoin

So, in 2016 the first NFTs created by users for users, the first meme NFTs ever, were invented. We didn’t have the world NFT but we knew that the idea of mixing art with low-supply crypto tokens was a great divergence from the status quo of crypto land.

Altcoins and ICOs with “change the world ideas”, shiny websites, and vapourware in the back end, that was the norm. Most a fork of a fork of a fork. A norm that in many ways continues. So this was a direct rebellion of sorts against that wave of ‘crypto’.

This community was different… it was a bunch of Bitcoin OGs and artists making Pepe memes, for the pure and fun of it and yes, minting them on the time chain. All I remember from that era was that there was that feeling of being somewhere special. That I had found a unique community that shared my appreciation for this strange internet frog, and that these guys were also my tribe, in a way. They were Bitcoin nerds.

This felt like the genesis of something fascinating. Something that intrigued me, and if there’s anything I’ve followed throughout my life, it is my curiosity and fascination. So far it has never let me down.

The Bitcoin fork war was still hot, and not unlike today, the Bitcoin fees were high, and altcoin peddlers praised the great innovations of making the blocks bigger as if that was the be-all and end-all of blockchain scaling solutions... But I digress.  Trump too was being elected, and the internet was ablaze with a meme war which turns out had great consequences.

And so, memes were made.

I’ve talked about my true thoughts on NFTs in a blog post long ago and addressed the main critiques, so I won’t go into that today. Instead, I’ll share with you my love of the artistic exploration that took root here, through the lens of the one NFT I minted in that era.

PEPETHUGLIFE.gif

Forged out of the meme wars of the late twenty-teens. This frog has a variety of symbols intertwined with the era.

Snoop Dog’s Thug Life song played regularly on viral political videos as some random activist or political commentator “rekt” their opposition with some witty comment or a devastating truth that most knew but dared not speak.

The word YOLO had entered the internet lexicon no long before as the young z crowd found their irreverence and did the stupid things that the young do, too often in defiance of death itself. Who cares right? You only live once, after all! 

Halloween was just around the corner and the Bitcoin price was at nearly 700 dollars, rising to challenge its previous all-time high of 1180 USD. It had been a long bear market and we felt that bullish energy. Despite the drama, despite the fork war actively raging. We knew that new heights were coming. 

Perhaps soon the Bitcoin price would be over 9000…

The next 14 months would mark a steady climb towards that great number, with the meme lords sharpening their Vegetta memes as that lusted-for price line came within reach. Needless to say, we blew past that price so hard we touched 20 thousand dollars a Bitcoin. Epic times indeed!

But the top was not in yet, for there is no final top. Not in the vastness of time. Just as there is no end to the amount of fiat that can be printed, so is there no end to how high in price Bitcoin can go. Infinity when time is not a question, is its destiny. 

Finally, this whole rare pepe collection meme whirl was supposed to be a game, a game of life, a game of cards. And what better card in a deck, than the Trump card, so to speak which while playable only once, is powerful enough to get you REKT? Well so be it, and so it was. 

PEPETHUGLIFE was born.

Supply and Issuance

The asset was minted on October 28th 2016, just three days short of the date when 7 years earlier, Satoshi Nakamoto had published the Bitcoin white paper for the first time, on the cyberpunk forums. I do not remember this being intentional, more likely a curious coincidence, but it is likely that at this time 7 years before, Satoshi had been scrambling to finish that now historical document, which like many declarations before it, would leave its stamp in history and inarguably change it’s course. 

265 units of PEPETHUGLIFE were minted that day. Why 265? I was looking for a number that was significant in cyberpunk terms. So I thought of a multiple of 2, the essential binary which was idk, cool and big enough to be fun. However, I made a now obvious mistake, a typo. That multiple was 256, not 265. But by the time I realized that it was too late. The frog had been stamped on the eternal time chain and the asset specs submitted to the Rare Pepe scientists. A multiple of 4 and 64 plus 9 it is, I guess. xD

Years later I would destroy another 101 units of PEPETHUGLIFE. I had traded over 50 of them for other cards and I didn’t like how much of the supply I still controlled. 164 is a multiple of 4 and 41? Sure, why not. 

PEPETHUGLIFE Xchain.io asset page.

The supply shrunk more over time, but those destructions were part of new creations and done with burn cryptographic rituals. Magic that we will talk about in a little bit. 

But first, let’s fast forward to this month and this year, and what’s around the corner in May of 2023.

Wear Your Statement with LENA

While you all were putting jpegs on the time chain, we decided to put jegs on your kicks instead.

This first-of-a-kind and unique pair of PEPETHUGLIFE-themed kicks were hand painted by the talented and beautiful Lena, a Bitcoin running shoe artists who has been making some wonderful work creating Bitcoin fashion. 

These kicks will be auctioned at Bitcoin Miami this May 18th via the Bitcoin Magazine/Scarce.city auction. This is a bundle with more than one unique piece, however. It includes:

• One original PEPETHUGLIFE Rare Pepe NFT minted on the Bitcoin chain via counterparty in 2016.

• One unique pair of kicks made by Lena, custom fitted to the buyer, in the Pepe Thug Life style.

• A one-of-a-kind ordinal inscription of the original PEPETHUGLIFE NFT GIF file, to immortalize it on the Bitcoin time chain (ok maybe I put ONE jpeg on the time chain too :D ) 

• And two 7KB Pepe Thug Life Stamp made by Viva_La_Vandal a very cool Bitcoin stamps art NFT made in the inspiration of PEPETHUGLIFE. We’ll talk about this awesome piece in a moment. 

Stay tuned to this newsletter and my Twitter feed and we will send you the auction link when it is time. 

7KB Pepe Thug Life by Viva_La_Vandal

Turns out the full-sized PEPETHUGLIFE was too fat in kilobytes to put into a Bitcoin stamp, a technology that uses the address space in Bitcoin transactions to encode art into the time chain. 100kb of PEPETHUGLIFE is just too much awesome! Lol.

Nevertheless, the amazing artist Viva_La_Vandal found a way to simplify PEPETHUGLIFE making a beautifully smug version for the Stampchain.io world. I’m now going to go ahead and stamp my interpretation on this stamp.

Let’s start with the name 7KB STAMP THUG LIFE, a clear revival of the memetics of the 2016 irreverence, adapted to today’s 2023 mempool wars in Bitcoin. Stamps assert that as long as you pay your fair share into the time chain, there’s no problem with filling it up with jpegs. They are contributing to the security budget of Bitcoin after all!

Thug life indeed. 

You’ll notice too that this is a gif, with basically two frames, which is just fantastic. It distills the essence of PEPETHUGLIFE while pixelating it to fit the style and medium. 

<3 = YOLO makes a comeback, because no matter what era it is, that youthful energy of life despite risk remains, like the constant that it is in the human experience. You Only Live Once!

Of course, because this is a 7KB image, then making it just over 7000 is what the meme demands. A further echo to the Bitcoin Veggetta memes. Wen 7KB Vegetta?

Next up, the mempool, absolutely REKT as the blocks get so full Bitcoin sets new records of transaction fee rewards being paid out to miners, doubling the block rewards subsidy. The mempool si REKT indeed LOL. 

The only issue I take with this is the misspelling of mempool, it’s actually called the memepool guys, come on. Get with the times. 

Last but not least, infinity is its element. Because let’s face it, we are nothing but the finite element within the infinite cosmos. Since for infinity to truly be infinite, it must include the finite world. ;) 

Immortalizing PEPETHUGLIFE

Now, it is hard to talk about infinity and not think about immortality. They kind of go hand and hand, despite our limited ability to reach it. Nevertheless, we should try and besides stamping PEPETHUGLIFE in stone and burying it in an ancient tomb -a project for another time?- there are few other technologies today that offer us the possibility of vast longevity as that of the Bitcoin time chain. 

One such technology, before the age of Ordinals and Bitcoin stamps, was IPFS. A distributed file-sharing protocol that was shitcoin agnostic and allowed anyone to host, share and retrieve files without a central server, more or less. 

While the primordial archive of Rare Pepes is of course, the rarepepedirectory. For a while there, we didn’t know what the future of this site would be. After the great John Villar’s passing (RIP my fren), the archive’s future was even more uncertain.

It was clear that the link between the jpegs and the tokens associated was very weak, in most NFT instances it is straight-up non-existent. This gap became increasingly laughable and so I decided to try and bridge it for PEPETHUGLIFE. 

IPFS is cool in that it creates a unique ID for the file you upload based on a hash of the file. This ID is deterministically generated from the file itself. So if the file changes the ID changes and the file location changes as well, in turn guaranteeing that the integrity of the file is never compromised as long as you have the right link. This IPFS link was integrated into the Xchain.io record of PEPETHUGLIFE via a counterparty transaction, leaving a record on the time chain. 

You can compare the file from IPFS to that of the rarepepedirectory by comparing say sha256 hashes of both and you’ll see it is the same file. Bridge built.

However, the gap remained, somewhat stretched since there are far more paths to the file being lost in a scenario where all computers hosting PEPETHUGLIFE via IPFS went down, a much more likely scenario than that of Bitcoin nodes going down… 

Enter Ordinals, the annoying jpeg time chain protocol that has been all kinds of controversial on BT of late. Ordinal devs figured out a way to use Taproot upgrades to include a lot more data than previously feasible on the Bitcoin chain. The result has been a boom of new BTC transactions that carry graphical assets. 

While I’m not particularly interested in Ordinals, nor do I find them to be any kind of great innovation or revolution. I never the less see the path they provide for the immortality of content, thus I did the thing. I pushed the button. I added PEPETHUGLIFE.gif to the time chain. 

You can see the PEPETHUGLIFE inscription record here and compare it to the source files as well if you’d like. The asset created via the inscription will be auctioned in the PEPETHUGLIFE kicks auction coming up in Bitcoin Miami, a one-of-a-kind, the first and probably the last Ordinal I’ll ever make.

The First Liquid Pepe

Speaking of weird cryptographic art things and Bitcoin scaling, I also managed to move the first rare pepe OG NFT from the Counterparty protocol to the liquid protocol, both sidechains of sorts of Bitcoin. This project I’m particularly proud of, though it is somewhat esoteric. You can read the original manifest on this piece I wrote at the time.

The issue was of course a matter of the scalability of NFTs, as well as technology advancing with better protocols. At the time Counterparty had been kind of dead for a while in development terms, while the Liquid network was gaining traction as a platform for alternative crypto assets. However, as a native XCP asset, it was not trivial if at all possible to move an NFT to a different blockchain record system of sorts. To do this, I had to employ arcane but never the less powerful burn magic.

Burn magic is simple in its essence, it involves destroying an asset in one chain and minting an equivalent asset on another chain. The upside is that it is cool and trustless. The downside is that there’s no way to revert it. Nevertheless, I felt it was an artistic opportunity and so, I went ahead with it, or rather a brave Pepe dared dive into the black hole of burn magic in a one-way trip into the unknown.

The danger? That it would not be accepted by the market as a true rare pepe NFT. 

First I created the burn magic wormhole. A burn address custom-made for this piece at 1stLiquidPepexxxxxxxxxxxxxxumd9b8.

I then created a Bitcoin time stamp of PEPETHUGLIFE using Peter Todd’s Bitcoin Timestamps protocol which you can recreate by dropping the PEPETHUGLIFE.gif into this site.

Then I sent a transaction from the Bitcoin address that created PEPETHUGLIFE to the burn address with the hash created by Opentimestaps included in the transaction data using the special Bitcoin feature “OP_RETURN”:

668966b76da51cce91a1fb987ec69a8fa59083fc36db1bb85dd64208eb228f7f

Next, I created a destination for the wormhole, for what is a teleportation spell without a place you want to go? This is the re-mint side of the magic ritual, which created a 1 of 1 PEPETHUFLIFE NFT on the Liquid network.

To further strengthened the link, I sent another transaction from the creator address to the burn address with the ID of this Liquid Network mint contract: 

B22c716e720c97d092afc90aaa8d1af3dc43d7f3024e59787d65c0ef025ae51e

Finally, we needed to bind the gif asset to the ritual to leave no doubt of the link between worlds. To that end I sent a third and final Bitcoin transaction from the author address to the burn address with a hash of the PEPETHUGLIFE file as created by IPFS. 

QmZc3xov18MtcRRZcSNpNnvW4KsDAR1cH3J7Rg4RNvW9Rj

Then I opened the NFT for auction on Raretoshi, the NFT platform on top of the Liquid network that best enabled this at the time. The moment of truth was here, would the market accept it?

*queue drum roll* ……

SOLD! 

This brave Pepe found a new home, with a rare pepe collector who saw value in this weird ritual. It did not sell as well as other native PEPETHUGLIFE assets on counterparty but still, at least half of what it was trading for at the time, enough for me to consider this art experiment a success.

Augmented Reality Pepe

By now we’ve broken the barriers of time by granting this daring frog the chance of immortality.

We have transported it across dimensions, teleporting it through distances previously considered impossible. The digital and abstract realms were one by one being conquered by PEPETHUGLIFE. The next frontier is augmented reality.

What are you talking about Juan Galt? Have you lost your mind Juan Galt? Why yes, I have indeed lost a marble or three. And you are about to do the same, I hope. Rather than describe the indescribable. Let’s play a little game. Download this arcane and little-known app, it is called Artivive and it will do you no harm. (Android, iOS) 

Now do me a solid, open the app and point the camera at this image below, and let the magic do it’s work. If you are on mobile, just ask someone near you to open this article on this image and let you point your phone at it with Artivive. You can also print this image if you like, that works too. :) 

BOOM

That’s right. Mind blown.

:D 

ShadilayThug And Time Travel

Having conquered most of the digital world at this point, it makes sense to pause, reflect and think of our ancestors. And who better than the mystical frog which strangely prophesized the rise of Pepe, thirty-something years before?

In a collaboration with the unstoppable Mikeinspace and his vintage Rare Shadilay collection, PEPETHUGELIFE decided to embark on a journey across time. To go back, and visit the singing frog Shadilay. 

This too however was a one-way trip, and a sacrifice had to be made. Using burn magic now familiar to us, this brave frog once again smoked a fat joint and jumped into the abyss, for the sake of adventure and of course, meme science. 

1shadi1aythug1ifexxxxxxxxxxuCqHNS

Now take out your trusted Artivive app and point it at Mr. ShadilayThug’s resting frame.

Looks like it worked!

You’ll notice the burn address this Pepe jumped into at the bottom of this ShadilayThug. This time travel magic was so powerful that it bifurcated history, now creating a version of Shadilay that sings and smokes in the augmented realm. 

ShadilayThug is thus also a stand-alone NFT asset, born of the sacrifice of this one PEPETHUGLIFE, it has a max supply of 36, one for each year PEPETHUGLIFE had to travel back in time. You can learn more about ShadilayThug at the announcement scroll. 

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRZY2MEs1JZZLPpbv41WsxAbYhgz3Zk4HHYHBcGsxnHdo?filename=SHADILAYTHUG.gif 

Pepe Incarnate

Last but not least, there’s the meatspace. Or in this case, silicon and museum-grade acrylic with archival ink. 

In collaboration with the legendary and very trippy artist Johnny Dollar we created a physical version of PEPETHUGLIFE! This piece is one-of-a-kind and comes engraved with a Coldcard-created Opendime.

In case you are not familiar with these magical little devices, the USB like hardware wallet can create a fresh non-custodial private and public key pair for Bitcoin. Letting you send assets to it that can only be withdrawn from the open dime by breaking the device and thus rendering it visibly tampered with. In other words, it is a physical bitcoin, tamper-proof wallet.

We sent a PEPETHUGLIFE subasset signed by me to this open dime and added this frog to a collector’s address, as he, of course, preferred the bragging rights of having PEPETHUGLIFE on his leaderboard page. :)

This too has an announcement scroll of course, so check that out if you are curious, and check out Johnny Dollar’s other work. He is amazing.

RarePepeWorld.com

One last thing, we also made a block explorer for rare pepes. While this is not explicitly a PEPETHUGLIFE project, it never the less serves the artistic experience of rare pepes and hopefully lets collectors enjoy their priced possessions.

We also decided to open-source it. So if you want to do anything with it, or contribute to its codebase, go for it!

It’s got all kinds of awesome features and tons of potential. I wrote an announcement scroll that goes into depth as well. :)

Anyway… I think that is all for now folks. Stay tuned for more articles at JuanGalt.com and check out PEPETHUGLIFE.LOL which will redirect to this blog post and will be updated with the future adventures of this wild Pepe the frog.

Juan Galt.

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRZY2MEs1JZZLPpbv41WsxAbYhgz3Zk4HHYHBcGsxnHdo?filename=SHADILAYTHUG.gif They are now smoking it up in augmented reality. To join them in AR, point the Artivite app at the resting position of SHADILAYTHUG and enjoy the ride. : ) (iOS, Android)

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmdhxExeiQVssysYiJP4D4Ln9usLTDKnyCRfiXqhosfPMz?filename=SHADILAYTHUG%20Cover.jpg Now, when I say the PEPETHUGLIFE smoked his way back in time, I mean it. He burned such a fat joint that there is evidence or it, even on the blockchain.You can see it right here, this particular Pepe got so high he will never come back. His psychonaut trip was such a shock to the space-time continuum, that his mark was left in the past, creating an unbreakable bond between PEPETHUGLIFE and SHADILAYTHUG. In fact, you can see this mark at the bottom of the SHADILAYTHUG.

As with all magic, something must be given, to get something back. In exchange for bringing SHADILAYTHUG to our timeline, this psychonaut PEPETHUGLIFE is gone forever. As such, a batch of 36 weed-smoking Shadilays have entered our universe, one for every year traveled in time. They are hanging out at dispensers starting at 55 USD each, the corresponding net asset value of this brave psychonaut Pepe was last known to be roughly worth 2k USD.You might want to grab one or two of these SHADILAYTHUGs before others do. :) Dispenser 1: https://xchain.io/tx/06d59df156636e87367a7f5188f3054e7d600566032329d22c970ee3e3aa580a Dispenser 2: https://xchain.io/tx/88c225e0926d3a05be4f65ba26df47b343c06fcc124b60d8f71b11c0dba9c25c

Dispenser 3: https://xchain.io/tx/875c20cb078af2ae42ed78f5b3f8d877c41b50d1ece484e66873b0a291096e3d Dispenser 4: https://xchain.io/tx/2608e65edb79675d3ea1b4da48884babb80135609c67a1b7989e2cd38f1c4d9a

Hi everyone. Juan Galt here with another weird NFT experiment. A physical NFT of the 2016 Rare Pepe era, PEPETHUGLIFE. In collaboration with Johnny Dollar, the renowned crypto artist, this piece, PEPETHUGLIFE INCARNATE I, combines 3 assets into one.The first is Johnny Dollar's physical recreation of PEPETHUGLIFE.

Hand-made by Johnny Dollar on Museum Grade Acrylic with Archival ink, this piece is attached to an Opendime hardware device which contains a cold storage Bitcoin wallet. Public address 13zbxgCfH6jQgMDKcUimpnTXsEG8SmBtym.The NFTs will be sent to the address once the buyer confirms delivery of the physical pepe and it's Opendime in sealed condition.

The OpenDime is a hardware wallet device by the ColdCard company, locked with the company’s source available software, firmware and hardware. The private keys of the wallet are not known to anyone until a physical seal on the OpenDime is breached. Making this wallet a physical medium of exchange for Bitcoin bearer assets. For more information go to https://opendime.com.

Inside this Opendime will be two NTS.

First and foremost, the original PEPETHUGLIFE, from the 2016 Rare Pepe collection.

With a supply of 1 out of 164. This frog has a spot market price of 7k USD on OpenSea as of the time of writing.

Alongside the OG PEPETHUGLIFE will be a signed sub-asset named PEPETHUGLIFE.INCARNATE.I.

This Pepe is a special edition frog signed by me personally and minted with the original address that created PEPETHUGLIFE, as seen below. This NFT has a non-divisible supply of 1.

This Incarnate frog is stored on IPFS, as well as imgur and on this blog post, immortalizing the asset files. The file has been hashed to the Bitcoin blockchain in two ways, via the Counterparty protocol and with OpenTimestamps.

It's hash is SHA256: 1b6f7155f9b8a71ed8d62b7d9777a725f15b2baf4e54252e352d795a08823767

(Since Imgur compresses its assets files, you should consider the IPFS file the original, especially for OpenTimestamps.)The PEPETHUGLIFE INCARNATE I, also has the public address of the OpenDime engraved in its's graphic. Creating an unbreakable link with the physical piece made by Johnny Dollar and binding it to a physical medium.

While both these NFTs could be extracted from the Opendime by the owner by breaking the seal of the Opendime, the piece is without a doubt more valuable if kept intact and physical. Keeping the Pepe incarnate and thus the spell bound.

Special thanks to Johnny Dollar for playing ball with this collaboration and to Chris and Scarce.city who will be hosting the auction for it.

The price starts at 10 million satoshis.

All the best to you and let me know what you think. : )

Juan Galt.

Long story short, since the Rare Pepe collection is - by all sources of officialdom - completed. Pepe artists and newcomers discovering it were left with a fire in them to make more Rare Pepe-esk nfts.

User created NFT memes are I think the most interesting form of NFTs. Since their corporate counterparts are frankly bland and in many cases feel 'soul-less'. So, a new group was started called Fake Rares, which kind of mirrors some of the founding ideas of rare pepes with some new rules and limitations. Like that you need to burn a shitcoin of their making (which is way to expensive now) in order to be added to their collection. Anyway presented with this idea I thought of a thing I wanted to make and created this.

FAKEBTCLOL is funny looking, yes. But that's not all it is.The bitcoin address you see at the bottom of the card is real, you can see it here.

This address has no private key, thus can not be spent. I created it with this tool, it is super easy. (Just know it doesn't accept some characters because they look too much like other characters, google it its a bitcoin address thing).

I then minted the NFT associated with it, with a supply exactly the same as Bitcoin's. In other words. There's 21,000,000.00000000 units of FAKEBTCLOL in existence.Now before you yell at me for creating a shitcoin. Have a look at this link. I sent literally all of the supply to an address I do not control. I literally make zero money off this weird thing.

I put all FAKEBTCLOL tokens on a BTC dispenser. A weird kind of trustless vending machine for NFTs that the Rare Pepe people invented years ago. This dispenser lives on the Bitcoin blockchain with the help of the Counterparty protocol.All the FAKEBTCLOL were put on the dispenser, literally all of them. And the only way to get any FAKEBTCLOL is to send an equivalent amount of Bitcoin to the burn address above. That's right, the price for 1 FAKEBTCLOL is 1 Satoshi. (Is it worth it? I don't think so! but more on this later.).

When you send any such amount to 1egendaryBurnMagic1o1xxxxxxuKQhK5, you get an equivalent amount of FAKEBTCLOL back (use a counterparty enabled wallet to see the FAKEBTCLOL asset, like Freewallet.io or Counterwallet.io).Try it with like 5 sats if you like, or w,e minimum your wallet will let you. Maybe Counterwallet.io will let you send that small an amount. Though 2k sats might be the minimum otherwise.

This is effectively a one way peg of Bitcoin to a Counterparty asset that mirrors Bitcoin's supply perfectly.

Also note that the only way to cancel that dispenser is to sign a transaction with the private key corresponding to the burn address 1egendaryBurnMagic1o1xxxxxxuKQhK5, which ... doesn't exist. So that dispenser should be there forever now. :D

Why FAKEBTCLOL is probably worthless

Now, before you send any btc to this dispenser. You need to understand, there is absolutely no way to get your BTC back. That BTC sent is gone forever. You are effectively shrinking the total supply of BTC by sending to it. There is no reason what so ever to think anyone will accept your FAKEBTCLOL in Bitcoin's place, since it's a higher layer asset not recognized by most wallets.

The funny thing about it is that by being on top of Bitcoin it actually inherits some of Bitcoin's security guarantees as well as some of it's network effects, since it moves across bitcoin addresses. Though it is probably as secure as the Counterparty layer two is, which I think we can safely assume is less secure than Bitcoin it's self.

Anyway as you can see, some people as dumb as me already send some sats to it to get some FAKEBTCLOL xD. To be perfectly clear I've only bought like 10k sats from this dispenser, I'm really not sure it is worth anything other than the experiment and the artistry of it.

Now, why in the world would I do this?

Well it is obviously an experiment and good fun I think. But the problem I was trying to address is much more real.Dispensers -as awesome as they are- never the less have some significant limitations.

One of them is that they only work in one direction. In other words, you can only sell a Counterparty asset for BTC. You can not in turn sell any BTC in exchange for a Counterparty asset.Another way of putting this is that Dispensers can NOT dispense Bitcoin. They can only dispense Counterparty assets. This is probably because dispensers use 'trustless' escrow logic that is supported by the smart contracting language of the Counterparty protocol. And Counterparty is a layer two thing. So it cant escrow the assets a layer below it.

This limitation creates a gap in the market. The gap is that there is no trustless way to offer X amount of BTC for a Bitcoin NFT, you can only sell an NFT for X amount of BTC. It's as if there was an exchange where you could only post sell orders, but could not post buy orders. Sellers have no good signal as to where the buyers are, and how much they are willing to pay, they HAVE to guess.

This cuts the price discovery of BTC denominated NFTs in half. And as a result motivates secondary shitcoin markets like XCP and PEPECASH to develop. Why? well because as Counterparty assets XCP and PEPECASH are on the counterparty second layer and thus can be trustlessly escrowed and traded against NFTs,  meanwhile Bitcoin can not. This is what I am curious to try and solve.

So, technically FAKEBTCLOL CAN be escrowed and traded trustlessly against Rare Pepes and other Counterparty NFTs. However, if you get paid in FAKEBTCLOL, there's no guarantee anyone will buy it from you for Bitcoin. So that's why it is a one way peg. Anyway I could keep talking around this idea, but I think this blog is long enough, let me know what you think!

I'm on twitter @juansgalt if you have any thoughts on this whole thing. Cheers. Oh yeah, and you are worried that I'm encouraging the destruction of bitcoins with stuff like this, to not despair. It will technically increase the value of your hodl, so. You Are Welcome. : )

A Bitcoin first Rare PEPE NFT explorer.

Hello everyone! I'm excited to finally be able to share this project with you.
This is a monument to Rare Pepes, a gift to the community and an attempt to go further than we've gone so far with Bitcoin denominated NFT art.

Rare Pepe World centers around Rare Pepes, the NFTs that started it all. These frogs which you may or may not have heard of were created and minted on top of Bitcoin from 2016 through 2018.

The recent wave of interest in NFTs has lead to a renaissance in the Rare Pepe world, which has revealed -in my opinion- an infrastructure that is somewhat outdated and needs a revamp. This is my attempt at renewing the experience of Rare Pepes.

Keep in mind that the website is in alpha. In fact. It will always be alpha. :)

We packed so many features into this site that I can't justify explaining every one of them so instead I'll let you explore! But here's some of the top things to look out for.

RARE PEPE WORLD Home Page

The first thing you see when you arrive to Rare Pepe World is the Featured Pepes.

This is a place for anyone to bring attention to their favorite Pepes, whether they are the creators of the art or collectors. By clicking "FEATURED PEPES" you'll be taken to a page where you can pay a small flat fee to feature any Pepe you want, on a first come first serve basis.

Below the Featured Pepes you'll find the "Latest Dispensers". This is a grid view of all the recent pepes that have been put up for sale on Bitcoin dispensers.

Bitcoin dispensers are a trustless 'smart' contract created by the late John Villar and J-dog, which functions as a vending machine.  They use the Counterparty protocol and kind of Bitcoin smart contract language.

To buy pepes through a dispenser, send the exact amount of btc to the dispenser address from an XCP enabled BTC wallets like http://rarepepewallet.com or http://freewallet.io.

Dispensers are not very smart. Make sure you do the math right and check that there's no incoming transactions to it that might take up the available stock you are interested in. Never the less, they are trustless, open source and they work from anywhere in the world. I think that's pretty awesome.

Above every pepe you will see it's asset name. Below it you will see the cheapest dispenser price for that pepe, as well as the total supply in existence of that pepe.

You'll notice that some pepes have a price with a  ⚡️ symbol, others have the Bitcoin ₿ in front of the price instead. This is a denomination decision we made to make it easier to experience the prices. If it has a ⚡that means it is denominated in Satoshis, the smallest unit of account of Bitcoin. Today $1 US Dollar is a little over ⚡1000 Satoshis. ️

If instead you see a ₿  in front of the number, it means it is denominated as a full Bitcoin. Any price above 1 million Satoshis will be denominated in BTC. Otherwise it will be shown in Sats.

PEPE Details Page

You can click any pepe and it will take you to the PEPE DETAILS page.

This is the bread and butter of RarePepeWorld.com. This page is meant to give you the most relevant information about rare pepes.

Here you can get a better look at the pepe you are curious about. Note that you can also click the pepe here and it will expand it into full view.

On the details box, you have most of the information we believe to be relevant and of most value when doing a pepe trade.

Here you can find direct links to most relevant aspects of a rare pepe. Its directory link, Xchain asset details, artist that issued it, current holders and so on. You can also see details about the cheapest BTC dispenser available and a link to it on Xchain.

You'll notice the supply might differ from other sites. That's because we substract assets that are in obvious burn addresses. This is a more accurate representation of the total supply of a rare pepe.

You can learn more about dispensers and the Counterparty protocol at the FAQ.

The artist link takes you to a page which shows all cards minted by that address, a proxy for Artist sets.

Back to the Pepe details page you'll see a few tabs below the pepe. Here you'll see a see a list of Dispensers and other orders, for XCP and PEPECASH markets which you can access via http://rarepepewallet.com or http://freewallet.io.

The BTC tab shows what the estimated value of one of these units is on BTC as per coin gecko. Prices will vary but this will give you a good idea of their value.

You'll also notice at the top of every page is a search box. This of course lets you search the full #RarePepe collection by name or partial name. There are 1774 of them, so have fun exploring!

You can also paste an address on the search bar which will take you to that address's collection! This way you can admire your own collection on snoop on the pepes held by others! Here's mine:

https://rarepepeworld.com/1BCo7BhMvdM1RoqLmuC7WFng2VL7KT9y9Z/?ref=juan-galt

That's all for now folks! We've been working hard on this site for like 3 months now and there's a lot more to it but I'll let you discover it. Let us know about bugs you find or suggestions you have. If you got questions, check out the FAQ at the bottom of the site!

(You are gonna need some music for this)

First we need a burn address. For what is magic without fire?

1stLiquidPepexxxxxxxxxxxxxxumd9b8

Then we need an effegy. A symbol of our will.

Sprinkle some crypto dust and produce a unique hash.

668966b76da51cce91a1fb987ec69a8fa59083fc36db1bb85dd64208eb228f7f

Choose a destination. This is a teleportation spell, after all.

b034b90981cb64dc58e0b92652256528c1056672e8e5338d60351fe3f140d090

We also need a medium to traverse through. A bridge between worlds.

QmZc3xov18MtcRRZcSNpNnvW4KsDAR1cH3J7Rg4RNvW9Rj

And finally, the pepe, brave as the best of men, goes through the portal with the blessing of his maker.

Say some magic words...

ABRA KADABRA TELEPORT PEPE!

And there you have it folks! The first Rare Pepe on the Liquid network.

Get it at Raretoshi.com. (SOLD)

(You can buy Liquid BTC "LBTC" with Bitcoin using this atomc swap service)
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So what tha hell did I just read?

Well. I just sent the first Rare Pepe NFT to the Liquid network, traversing through a black hole of Bitcoin magic, from the Counterparty protocol.

Why? Cuz why not!

Liquid is sort of a Bitcoin side chain, it is faster and more private than Bitcoin while standing on Bitcoin's proof of work security. It also doesn't pretend to be decentralized like other blockchain platforms out there, and the fees are about as low as it gets.

It is a great place for NFTs and has a block explorer of it's own.

Why do you think this rare pepe is now on Liquid? Didn't you just mint a new thing?

Nop! Here's why.

First, I own the specific unit of PEPETHUGLIFE which just traversed the metaverse.

The fact that I sent it from the Issuing Address of PEPTHUGLIFE NFTs, way back in the day, is just a cherry ontop.

If I didn't own the PEPETHUGLIFE I sent, despite being the artist, then this would be a fresh mint.

Instead the pepe ceased to exist in Counterparty and appeared in Liquid.

The Effegy

I signed a transaction and sent it to a unique burn address authenticating the pepe GIF file. The hash was created with Open Time Stamps, where you can verify it.

The Medium

I signed and sent a transaction to the burn address with the IPFS hash that the PEPETHUGLIFE lives in.

The Destination

I also published the Asset ID of the PEPETHUGLIFE NFT on Liquid to the Bitcoin blockchain. I did this via a transaction from the issuing address to the burn address. This is to leave no doubt as to the unique path this PEPETHUGLIFE is taking.

Other NFTs minted on Liquid will have different, unique Asset IDs.

This Liquid asset is a 1 of 1. A direct echo to the 1 PEPETHUGLIFE sent to the burn address.

The Portal

The burn address chosen as a portal to Liquid is unique and meant to be just for this pepe, as the first.

There is no private key to this public address as observable by the many x's on the address.

1stLiquidPepexxxxxxxxxxxxxxumd9b8

The odds of someone guessing the private key to this address and being able to undue this burn are as good as guessing any other Bitcoin private keys. Null.

The odds are in fact worse, given that the private key for it has never even been processed by a computer. This public address was created as is, not generated from a private key as other public keys are. The private key effectively does not exist.

So what goes there, never comes back.

I used this tool.

The Journey

Last but not least, I sent the pepe.

Valued at over 7k USD by Xchain.io, it last traded as high as 4.2 ETH on Opensea, or about 12k USD at the time.

This transaction once done can not be undone. That unit of PEPETHUGLIFE has jumped into the void.

This very brave and special PEPETHUGLIFE is now able to move and be traded on Liquid, with a direct tie to its life on the previous side chain - the Counterparty protocol (Also a Bitcoin sidechain).

I believe that makes for a successful teleportation across protocols, don't you?

Although it's probably a one way trip.

Is there better way to do this? maybe. But that's what we did.

The pepe is now on auction starting at 0.21 btc. Let's see what happens now!

(You can buy LBTC with Bitcoin using this atomc swap service)

Special thanks to all the magicians that helped make this possible.

Hash you later.

Juan Galt.

The NFT market place is nuts right now, and I made one of the first. PEPETHUGLIFE as seen above is nft number 300 or so ontop of Bitcoin, of the rare pepe collection. It came to life some time in 2016.

Since when are you into NFTs??

You might be wondering if I've become a shitcoiner all of a sudden or some such thing, but perhaps that's because you don't know me too well.

I've always traded various coins, I've earned my Bitcoin shitposting stripes the hard way, by fending off the temptations of shitcoinery first hand, and seeing the glitchy nature of low quality 'blockchains' up close and personal.

I don't pump shitcoins, not anymore anyway, but I do dump them and I do buy them if I think they are worth a bet. That makes me a trader I believe.

I also love art and was an artist in a previous life.

Here's some art I made in my early 20's.

Well somewhere around 2016 this rare pepe thing started to brew. I liked frog memes at the time, and if you were in the internet those years you know what that vive was like.

People started making these nfts and submitting them to the rare pepe directory for approval, where meme scientists would judge if the frogs were truely rare or not.

I made one, submitted it and it was approved.

Months later the scientists went on vacation and never came back. And that's the story of rare pepe NFTs in a nut shell.

All of these NFTs, in fact perhaps all NFTs were first done on Bitcoin. The rare pepes live on Bitcoin and I'm only interested in trading them for Bitcoin ontop of Bitcoin.

Here's an article I wrote about Rare Pepes back in the day which includes an interview with the late John Villar, a pepe magician who we owe a lot in this space to.

I've also become a bit of a collector of rare pepes over the years, tho I'm cheap and only buy pieces I really like at low costs.

But Juan, NFTs are just a jpeg and a shitcoin

Yeah pretty much. These tokens are not an investment, at best you are "collecting digital art". They are highly iliquid, and are a terrible speculation unless you get lucky and someone else decides to pay you for it lol.

There is however something to having a token, I'm ok with the posibility that it is just a psychological illusion, some weird monkey brain magic.  

I don't know about you, but I like collecting trinkets. My hat collection is getting out of hand, and whenever I see a cool thing, like a dope LEGO or cool bitcoin stickers, or some statuette that speaks to me in some way, if I can justify it, I'll buy it. I'm no hoarder, but hoarders are probably letting this impulse run amuck.

I think this trinket collector impulse thing is why NFTs feel different.

I have a full copy of all rare pepes. I have a folder with pepes I want to own the NFTs to. I also have a folder with the NFTs I own. There is a difference I feel when I look at them, there's is a different feeling I get with the NFTs I own, and honestly that's enough.

There's also things I can do with the tokens, as you are about to see. I can destroy the tokens, I can gift them, I can sell them, I can sign messages with the addresses that hold the NFTs and thus prove ownership at a given time. Such signatures can serve as tickets to access closed environments (in theory) or can unlock 'bonus content' as the famous DJPEPE has done.

Here we can speculate about the potential real value of NFTs but, in that sense it is mostly intelectual speculation, a game, a hobby.

And what is art anyway but that. Something you do for it's own sake.

But you don't really 'OWN' the jpg, Juan

Yeah so this is an interesting question when it comes to NFTs. What does it mean to 'own' and NFT of a jpg? what do you really own?

That question, I'm afraid is a legal one, or at the very least one of mutial agreement among the artists and the buyers.

If as an artist, I'd issued the image with certain copy right licenses attached, or had a contract written specifying what rights the token controls and which it doesnt. Then that might be a very different type of ownership than if I hadn't.

Which I didn't. Most rare pepe artists simply wanted to express something, made a jpg (or gif) and shiped it.

How this plays out now, we'll see. There's a guy that's been buying the copy rights to some pepes and is not happy with people printing certain pepes and selling them as merch. Can he do anything about it with the copy rights he legally owns? who knows!

I expect the next 5-10 years we'll see this question actually enter the courts, assuming this NFT trend continues.

And what could stop it?

Any influencer and artist with a tinge of greed, hunger and vision can issue an NFT today and acccess a global market of speculators with cheap money, flowing down to them - in a round about way - from the printer at the FED.

We are in a casino gulag you see. It will take Bitcoin a couple of generations I suspect to suck all the fiat air out of the room, perhaps more.

Until then it's a shitcoin free for all! What's going to stop them! there's no natural predators! Who's gonna regulate this??

Regulate This 🐸

NFTs are a lot harder to attack with lawfare I suspect as well.

Are NFTs securities? not really, there's no company,  just a piece of art, maybe a brand.

Are NFTs stocks? oh no, they don't confer any voting rights by default and there's no company involved nessesarily, though there's no reason you can't attach art to a stock but that'd be weird. It probably doesnt make any sense. Though I wouldn't care either way.

Are people buying NFTs with an expectation that they'll make money? sure, some are no doubt, in fact most of the rare pepe market right now seems to be people buying pepes on bitcoin and re-selling them on Ethereum at 5x the price.

Does that make them a security? well, I don't see any NFT makers promising to build a product that will be profitable later or trying to save the world. If someone buys the Mona Lisa and flips it for 2x, did they just turn the Mona Lisa into a security? I don't think so.  

So now what, frog merchant

Well, that's it. that's my story with NFTs and rare pepes. I have no plans or intention to make any new NFTs any time soon, but I'll happily sell some of the ones I made back then, build and trade my collection.

I also have plans to support the ecosystem, since the rare pepe infrastructure is clearly lacking.

In fact, Eth plebs are paying stupid fees to move frogs ontop of eth with strange pseudo decentralized magic, meanwhile they could do it for nothing on Liquid, so I'd like to see that become the new frontier. I suspect it is easier than we think.

Til next time!

Juan Galt.