Cecret03

Posted on May 07, 2022Read on Mirror.xyz

5/NFT Spirit History: 15 Minutes of Heroic Dreams of Cans, Frogs and Ordinary People

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(4) Joe Rooney

Joe Rooney is a code farmer. In 2016, he was developing a digital wallet for Counterparty, a P2P website. That day, in Counterparty’s Telegram group, someone suddenly threw in a poker-like thing with a rare Pepe in the shape of Satoshi Nakamoto painted on it.

The dude said: I made a whole deck of cards, all of them are rare Pepe, I am selling them online, this deck will be worth millions in the future, right? People there started to agree: This is too awesome, I want to buy it.

Then, people started bidding: 1 bucks a piece, 5 bucks a piece, 10 bucks a piece. Then everyone went to place an order. . .

Rooney held up his phone and was stunned for a long time. “At that moment, I wanted to paint the rare Pepe by myself…” he recalled. However, he soon came up with an idea that was even more awesome than painting Pepe — to make a platform that can trade rare Pepe, and by the way, use his traditional skills to make a “wallet system” that can store rare Pepe.

However, even if these Pepe are made like playing cards, they are only pictures after all, and pictures can be copied. So how do you get everyone to agree that someone owns a picture?

He immediately thought of an ingenious method — using Bitcoin’s bookkeeping system.

One of the features of Bitcoin’s bookkeeping system is that it is a distributed ledger, and the same account is recorded by thousands of nodes around the world. That is to say, as long as you have the password of your wallet, no matter how many coins there are, it must be yours, and everyone must recognize it. In this way, it becomes impossible to “make false accounts”.

I tried it and it set up a wallet for me as soon as I entered the website. And this feature was used by Rooney to make a** “rare Pepe wallet”.** Simply put, it works like this:

A rare Pepe card is bound to a bitcoin wallet, and only its owner has the wallet’s password (that is, the private key). If you want to transfer Pepe to another person, just give him the password.

This trading model has surprisingly been established. Moreover, Rooney made an interesting setting: if a creator wants to submit a Pepe card to the website, he must send a certain amount of Bitcoin to an empty address, that is to say, it is equivalent to burning these coins — Rooney can’t take it, and no one else can get this money.

Why waste money?

This principle is like when you join a gang, you must first devote yourself with someone’s head. It doesn’t matter whether the person who was killed is lying down or not, the important thing is that it is an “entry threshold” that prevents someone from opening the drawing software and drawing a parallel Pepe in five seconds and selling it.

This setting is significant.

Soon, many creative and well-painted Pepes were put up on the platform, and at first glance, they came from people with a certain artistic accomplishment — the creators began to take this matter seriously.

This is the website for the display of works that go with the wallet, the Rare Pepe Directory.

Later, the website also developed an O2O model — you buy an electronic card, and I will send a paper card. But all buyers know: the paper card is worthless; it is the picture of the certificate on the Internet that is valuable. . .

At this point in the story, although everything seems crazy, everyone’s motives are just fun, money, and free expression, and they are generally kind.

But that’s what liberalism is, and when so many freedoms stack up, it weighs down the horizon.

(5) Hillary and Trump

Liberals are free in every way, as you can see from the 4chan messages, most of them say whatever they want, misogynistic, black, and self-centered. Some users on 4chan like to refer to themselves as “NEET”, that is, a person with no schooling, no job, and no skills.

You know, these kinds of people are the main team of “trolls”.

Life advice from “NEET”

There is a section on 4chan called “Politically Incorrect,” which is full of white supremacist rhetoric. In their eyes, black people can only rob without a father, and Asians are stingy and evil. They can’t wait to build a wall to isolate everyone else from the beautiful country.

It’s an anonymous community anyway, it won’t expose itself, and no one will get into trouble because of it.

Over time, this wet soil gave birth to a worm-like right-wing Internet trend, which is Alt-Right.

In 2016, just in time for the US election. From the alt-right, Trump’s campaign slogan is to build a wall at the border. This is his own person. Trump may still be a diving 4chan netizen!

As a result, the alt-rights made Pepe look like Trump and encouraged everyone to vote for Trump.

The innocent Pepe suddenly changed from a meme to a political symbol. . .

The climax of the story happened on August 25, 2016, at the scene of Hillary’s campaign speech. She was seriously criticizing the right-wing ideology, but a voice in the crowd shouted: Pepe!

This voice, which most people do not know, is regarded as a battle song by the alt-right.

After that, the Pepe expression pack that appeared inexplicably became more and more terrifying. Some people turned Pepe into the Ku Klux Klan, some put Nazi symbols on Pepe, and some asked Pepe to raise the flag of the Crusades.

Some people even found a frog-headed man named “Kek” from the stone paintings of ancient Egypt, and then said that this TM was the apocalypse given to us by the ancient Egyptians, and our god was Kek. Someone on 4chan immediately started booing seriously: We should consider finding a good lawyer to help us build a “free” white nation — Keckstein. . .

The nosy parker also painted a flag for Keckstein with 4chan’s logo clover on it. .

The most pissed-off in this incident is Matt, the author of Pepe.

Think about it, Pepe was originally a spiritual boy who pulled down his pants to pee, but now he has been used to becoming a madman of hatred.

One of Alt-Right’s offline leaders was beaten.

Unable to bear it, he decided to prosecute those who publicly associated Pepe with politics.

But it doesn’t help.

Later, he could only come out in person to write a sequel to Pepe’s story — Pepe died because of racial discrimination, and everyone held a funeral for him. . .

But that still doesn’t help.

Because from the day Pepe hit the Internet, it has been caught in the hands of “distributed Andy Warhol”, and no single person can even decide Pepe’s direction.

Some people think that Pepe is successful, some people think that Pepe is a failure, and its characters are painted with various colors of paint, making it extremely complicated.

But in the field of blockchain, Pepe has undoubtedly become a radiant “pioneer” who has identified the “safety zone” and “minefield” of blockchain artwork.

In fact, there are also many heartwarming creations about Pepe.

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This article is translated from《NFT精神史:罐头、青蛙和平凡人的15分钟英雄梦想》written by a Chinese tech journalist Max Shi ZHONG and published on Qianhei.net. I translated it to pay my tribute to the author, it’s a legendary piece about NFT, even could be recorded in a history book. It is quite long, but 10000% worth reading it.

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