A massive piece of artwork containing a portion of bitcoin’s code is being auctioned at Christie’s New York.
According to the official website, Christie’s auction house in New York is hosting a massive piece of bitcoin-themed artwork. The project, dubbed “Block 21,” is one of forty pieces of art in a series depicting the entire 12.3 million digits of bitcoin’s original code.
Block 21 contains 322,048 digits of hexadecimal code, some inscribed in gold. The art collection, which currently spans the globe, is more than 50 meters long in total, with the entirety of bitcoin’s historic v0.1.0 code hand-inscribed on its surface.
Ben Gentilli, the artist behind the project, calls the collective series “Portraits of a Mind.” He described each piece as a digital fingerprint carved out of paint and attributed the artwork as a portrait of bitcoin’s anonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto.
Gentilli told Decrypt,
Bitcoin’s original codebase is like a historical document, and I wanted to celebrate it and preserve it in the same way as a document like the Magna Carta. But I also wanted to try and answer the question of how one might make a portrait of Satoshi Nakamoto, when there is no image of him.
He continued, calling Portraits of a Mind a decentralized piece of art reflecting the underlying nature of bitcoin.
Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com
