Origins and Echoes
Back in June 2024, Singular acted as a technical curator for All At Once, a highly conceptual Ordinals show exploring the technical and cultural underpinnings of Bitcoin. We wanted to continue exploring these concepts in a fundamentally new way while drawing inspiration from pre- and post-blockchain experiments, as well as early internet history.
bitplanet is a far-reaching, evolving system but below are such works that either influenced the starting state of bitplanet or we feel are thematically aligned.
The Million Dollar Homepage
The Million Dollar Homepage (TMDH) is a website launched in 2005 by Alex Tew. It contains a 1000x1000 pixel grid where each pixel was sold for $1 in 10x10 chunks, and the proceeds were used to help fund Alex's college studies. Given its sensational success, countless derivative sites would pop up over the years. Since the advent of blockchains, there have even been a handful of Bitcoin/crypto-native or adjacent derivatives stretching as far back as 2011.
TMDH serves as the inspiration for the starting state of bitplanet.
Within Bitcoin and crypto, some TMDH derivatives and parallels can be seen in:
- Million Bitcoin Homepage (2011): Shutdown but served as a grid where advertising space could be leased using Bitcoin.
- Thousand Ether Homepage (2017): Payments for pixels could be made in ETH. Plots are now wrapped as NFTs and available on OpenSea.
- Million Dollar Token Page (2021) and EthXY (2023): Examples of other Ethereum-based implementations.
To read more about past extensions of TMDH, see Justin Higgins' excellent thread here.
Reinscriptions
With All At Once, one thing that stood out to us was that reinscriptions were still a nascent side of the Ordinals protocol and what can be done with it. Below are some of our favorite uses of reinscriptions up to this point.
- OnChainMonkeys: One of the more well-known collectives within the Ordinals space, the OCM team pioneered the uses of several core technical aspects. OCM Dimensions utilized reinscriptions as a mechanism for the on-chain reveal.
- Game of Blocks: An on-chain game where your characters are inscriptions and in the first stages, you "played" them through reinscribing.
- Donny's Rat: A community effort led by Donny of the Fomojis team that involves a sat being sent around and participants inscribing their own interpretation or image of a rat. Current inscriptions on sat 1499676120331756: 93.
- Constant Dullaart's THE from All At Once: A retrospective on past impressions of the future in the form of a poem inscribed word-by-word from end to beginning on sat 1770046674022888 over the course of the work's auction.
Miscellaneous
- Bitmap Map: In 2023, Ordinals Wallet launched a webpage where bitmap owners could update certain (off-chain) metadata, such as color, for bitmaps they owned on a larger block grid.
- BasePaint: A collaborative drawing project where collectors draw on a grid and after 24 hours, the final drawing becomes an open edition mint.
- Reversions: 256 tiles each containing a cellular automata with rulesets defining how the cells interact and evolve.