Steven Reiss

I'm working on a book that reads Bitcoin through thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Freud, and Simmel. I decided to share the first chapter. It asks what kind of origin Bitcoin actually has. Not a creation story, I think, but a structure that repeats in every block.

stenreiss.substack.com/p/bitcoin-gene…

“Proof of Work is ugly, slow, and expensive. That is the point.”

This is my third article for Bitcoin Magazine’s print edition and I’m glad I get to publish it, because it’s also one of the chapters of my book and ties together much of what I’ve worked on over the years.

It was a real pleasure to contribute a piece to this issue of @BitcoinMagazine. The print looks absolutely fantastic.
Go grab a copy!

I noted yesterday that none of the larger Bitcoin, digital art, or crypto art accounts had posted anything about the Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery @BMAG_HQ at @TheBitcoinConf. Addition for today: Nor have any Bitcoin companies or the people running them.

In every other part of contemporary finance the gap between handling money and handling culture has been closed. UBS has been Art Basel's lead partner since 1994. Deutsche Bank operates the PalaisPopulaire in Berlin. JPMorgan's "Art at Work" started in 1959. These are the institutions that produce cultural legitimacy that money alone cannot. All of them hold tens of thousands of works, and, surprise, surprise, what they bought shaped what the market wanted. Their acquisitions raised the open-market price of those same works. Clever, right?

The Bitcoin sector has barely begun. @_btcinc alone has started, with the Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery. Strategy, Metaplanet, Marathon, CleanSpark, Block and the rest are sitting on capital at a scale that would make any contemporary art foundation viable in just a few months (I'm not exaggerating, I have the numbers!). None has followed.

A monolithic BTC position is not a treasury strategy. Roughly 2.5 trillion dollars of UHNW wealth currently sits in art and collectibles. Art has low correlation to Bitcoin and an established valuation infrastructure. For a firm that has understood the Medici reference, the diversification argument and the cultural-capital argument are the same.

I'm not calling for sponsorship, because sponsorship buys visibility, but a collection builds an institution. I'm pointing at this specific gap. Every comparable industry in finance has filled it. We haven't yet.

Interestingly, none of the larger Bitcoin, digital art, or crypto art accounts have posted anything about the gallery or the works at the Bitcoin conference. Unfortunately, that feels pretty symptomatic.