1/1

28056 x 15348 pixels, 300 ppi, 79.8 MB

Office Void

John Thurman

1/1

digital painting with glitch

15,350 x 20,470 pixels, 300 pixels per inch, 85.0 MB, jpeg, 2024

Long Way From Home

1/1

Mixed digital: edited AI, digital painting, collage, glitch

8895 x 14835 pixels, 300 pixels per inch, 41.9 MB, jpeg, 2024

Entropy in a Pixelated System

By 2008, when Satoshi released the Bitcoin white paper, the cypherpunk and cryptographer Len Sassaman had already been mentored by David Chaum, the "father of digital currency," whose own academic work led directly to the development of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. Chaum's creation Digicash allowed electronic cash payments between pseudonymous actors, though it failed according to Satoshi because of its centralized architecture.

Satoshi had a very rare set of skills including expertise in cryptography, economics, and P2P network engineering, and was also interested in privacy and cypherpunk philosophy. These aligned with Sassaman's own areas of expertise, which are all foundational to Bitcoin. 


Specifically, Sassaman developed remailers, which are specialized servers designed to send information packets anonymously, or pseudonymously. He was the primary dev on the Mixmaster remailer protocol, which used decentralized nodes to relay "fixed-sized blocks of encypted info across a P2P network" -- a direct precursor to Bitcoin's architecture. 

Alongside remailer dev Hal Finney, Sassaman also made important advances in PGP (public key) encryption, another technology central to Bitcoin's operation. And Finney was the first person after Satoshi to receive BTC, to write code for it, and to operate a BTC node. 

Sassaman's academic work under Chaum focused on solving the Byzantine General's Problem, which would allow for the operation of a distributed network even if some nodes were faulty or unreliable. Solving the problem would allow the secure operation of a decentralized cryptocurrency without relying on trusted third parties, while also solving the so-called "double spend problem". Satoshi solved this with his triple-entry accounting, built on Chaum's blockchain.
Another remailer dev associate of Sassaman's was Adam Back, whose Hash Cash proof-of-work system was designed to impose a non-trivial cost to sending emails, thereby counteracting spam and DDOS attacks on remailers. It is the basis for BTC's mining. Back was the first person with whom Satoshi communicated, and Satoshi cites him in his white paper.

Other circumstantial evidence also suggests a connection between Satoshi and Sassaman. The time stamps of their posting activiites correspond closely. Due to his idiosyncratic coding and use of MLA citation formatting in the BTC white paper, Satoshi is thought to have been an academic. Satoshi's pattern suggests a European night owl who took breaks during the busiest times of the student academic calendar, and was most active during summer and winter breaks. This is the period when Sassaman was a PhD candidate under Chaum in Belgium.

Also, Satoshi and Sassaman both employed British usages of English. And Sassaman was known to use pseudonyms to post to the same cypherpunk board where Satoshi's white paper was published.

One of the greatest mysteries surrounding Satoshi is why his horde of Bitcoin, estimated to be now be worth approximately $37 billion, has not been touched since 2011. In May of that year, Satoshi wrote "I’ve moved on to other things and probably won’t be around in the future." Two months later, Sassaman killed himself.

Two weeks later, a tribute to Sassaman, in the form of an ASCII portrait captioned "Len was our friend.  A brilliant mind.  A kind soul, and a devious schemer" was placed on-chain in the Bitcoin transaction data, and now appears on every node.

References:


Champagne, Phil. "The Book of Satoshi: The Collected Writings of Bitcoin Creator Satashi Nakamoto." e53 Publishing. 2014


evnanhatch.eth. "Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A Cypherpunk History". Medium. February 21, 2021. <<https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c85c2b10>>

My portait is glitched and otherwise edited AI.


PS #1 Len Sassaman

1/1

digital painting that was glitched and partially repainted using AI generative infill

13,824 x 24,570 pixels (9:16), 300 pixels per inch, 97.5 MB, jpeg, 2024

Disorder

1/1

Minted on ERC-7160

AI, glitch, collage, digital painting

5,824 x 3,264 pixels, 300 pixels per inch. 41.5 MB, png, 2024

Blandscape #1

This ERC-7160 token contains at least 12 different 1/1 pieces in tribute to the film classic "Chinatown," commemorating its release 50 years ago.   

"Whores, politicians, and ugly buildings" depicts the great director John Huston as Noah Cross.  Having read several books about the making of various Huston films, and his checkered associations, let it suffice to say that I believe he was perfectly cast.

1/1

10,235 x 12,800 pixels, 300 pixels per inch,  67. 5 MB, jpeg, 2024

AI, glitch, digital painting, collage, and some polishing by selective repainting with AI generative infill.

Whores, politicians, and ugly buildings

10752 x 5376 pxls, 300 ppi, 13.7 MB, jpeg

Fuzzy Dice (For Luck)

John Thurman's Pictures from Life's Other Side

In observance of the 15th anniversary of the October 31, 2008 publication of Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper, I have created a series of portraits of those generally considered likeliest to be or have been Satoshi.

Possible Satoshis

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digital painting with AI, collage, and glitch

13312 x 13312 pixels, 300 pixels per inch, 43.5 MB, jpeg, 2023

A Portrait of the Artist as an Ambitious Young Cow

Paintings and Suchlike

1/1

Minted on Transient ERC-7160 token

17,472 x 9,792 pixels (16:9), 300 pixels per inch, 64.7MB, jpeg, 2024

AI that has been glitched, with some collage and digital painting, and selective repainting with generative AI infill

A tribute to Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" (1872), from which the term "Impressionism" was derived.

Impression of the Red Rock Country, No. 1

Glitchscapes

0x837337F1a88FB83865f7a4c5c122Df976D278aF1crkc8bj

1/1

Minted on Transient Labs ERC 7160 Token
for CRYPTOART V9.0 as part of The White Night of The Galleries 2024, in Craiova, Romania, where the theme was "Utopia".   
The following text, "Notes on Utopianism" was included:

There is an infernal contradiction in the logic of every utopian scheme ever devised:  from Plato’s republic, to the utopian socialism of Fourier, the Jacobins, numerous “workers paradises,” Ayn Rand’s Galt’s Gulch, various utopian religious communes, up to and including the technological utopianism of today. Foundational to all is the notion that humanity is perfectible given the implementation of ideal social circumstances (in accordance with a particular ideology).  The flaw in the logic is two-fold.  First, it assumes the perfect society can be built by fallible people.  The utopia would then, in turn, be the instrument of humanity’s perfection.  Alas, the perfect human would no longer be human, as our flaws in large part define us. 

 I’ve painted with a broad brush to tar these schemes, but I think not unfairly.  In the accompanying work, I have reduced my scope to an incident relating to the ongoing technological utopianism with which we are currently confronted.  A VR user, who seeks to transcend the limitations of the everyday world, in so doing is oblivious to the distracting device being the instrument of her leaving that world in a more literal sense.  This promised new world is just another rug pull.  It is always a rug.

To that end, I have incorporated the texture of rug fibers over this glitchpainting, entitled “Rugged by Utopianism”.  The piece is an AI output that I have glitched, and then performed various other manipulations on, including collage, digital painting, and selective repainting using AI generative infill.  

5,824 x 10,384 pixels, 300 pixels per inch, jpeg, 2024

Rugged by Utopianism

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deployed on Transient ERC-7160 token

16,380 x 20,480 pixels, 300 pixels per inch, 64.6 MB, jpeg, 2024

AI, glitch, collage, digital painting, and selective repainting with AI generative infill

Cracked

Glitch Portraits

A landscape by Perry Ellis.

1/1

Minted on Transient Labs ERC-7160 token.

AI, collage, glitch

11,648 x 6,528 pixels (16:9), 300 pixels per inch, 92.6 MB, jpeg, 2024

The third piece from the collection "Glitches Get Stitches".

The Silken Mountains

1/1

Minted on Transient Labs ERC-7160 token

AI, collage, glitch

11,648 x 6,528 pixels (16:9), 300 pixels per inch, 74.4 MB, jpeg, 2024

The Visionary (Sam Who Empties the Garbage)

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The Mysteries part VI.

I always knew I'd end up this way.

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Exhibited at Art Basel Miami by A2 Accelerate Art/Scope, December 2024

Mixed digital:  AI, glitch, collage, digital painting

19,200 x 10,740 pixels (16:9), 300 pixels per inch, 64.5 MB, jpeg, 2024

VI.  Institutionalized

0x863d4f37420a96CAA4668CF8342e9d478d73acA3dw9txmt

The Mysteries part I

The observing of the observer.

Minted on Transient ERC-7160.

Featured as part of Artcrush Gallery's Artist Spotlight of the Month, June 2024.

Mixed digital: AI, glitch, collage, digital painting

8,000 x 16,000 pixels (1:2), 300 pixels per inch, 36.9 MB, JPEG, 2024

I.  The Voyeur

The Mysteries part III.

I'd made an enemy that day.

Minted on Transient ERC-7160.

Featured on the main stage of NFC Lisbon, May 2024.
Featured at Forbidden Fruit's "Not NFTNYC" at WTC's Oculus, NYC, April 2024

Mixed digital: AI, glitch, collage, digital painting

4,500 x 9,588 pixels (1:2), 300 pixels per inch, 20.1 MB, JPEG, 2024

John Thurman (john-thurman)

John Thurman (john-thurman)

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