Is it Copernicus: birth of the MVP
A yellow and red glass ball is the first MVP in a sequence of physical artworks containing a cryptographic key with a treasury accumulating value. Owners of the shares collectively own and take care of the artwork as a both physical and digital commons. Let me unpack this description.
What is in the name?
The project’s name comes from Nicolaus Copernicus, the sixteenth century scientist who introduced humanity to a new understanding of our place in the universe. The sun does not revolve around us. Our planet revolves around the sun. His discovery and those of his Renaissance contemporaries fundamentally changed the understanding we have of ourselves as human beings. From a religious world, we moved into a scientific world. No longer solely the tools of God, we also became independent actors amidst a constellation of physical laws.
The team behind this project believes that current technological developments are causing a new shift in consciousness, possibly comparable in magnitude to the Renaissance. By answering the question ‘Is it Copernicus’ we want you to imagine how blockchain technology may alter our patterns of behaviour, social norms and what it means be human.
Our times
With the internet 1.0 us humans created a linked library of global dimensions, making access to information near ubiquitous to a large part of humanity. The internet 2.0 enabled us to create digital social networks, greatly expanding the the number of people we interact with, causing many misunderstandings in the process. It also enabled a significantly larger group of people to voice their opinions, making opposition to social norms or political values much more visible then they had been before. It seems we have have never disagreed as much as we do now. This is the confusion we live in today.
Technology can have divisive effects, but it can also help us find new ways to reach consensus again. While old bastions of truth crumble, we build new ones. Bitcoin for example is immutable in nature, meaning that as of its conception its laws could not be changed. It is an autonomous piece of code that has been alive for 12 years, resistent to attacks, accumulating in value, currently holding $180B in value. Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet is worth $130B.
Bitcoin and other blockchains are a distributed ledger, basically a financial accounting book with instances over millions of computers, syncing every ten minutes, checking each other for potential mistakes. It’s a revolutionary new source of truth. Not a truth for physical laws or human emotions, but a single truth for a specific problem with laws and variables we decide on at its inception.
We can use this ledger to establish the price of a bitcoin. We can use it to write a contract between to people without a notary present. We can use it to write a contract between a thousand people, without a notary, without lawyers, without the need for an institution like a bank. We can use it to design and deploy a governance system, only needing code and voters. This is technology that will change how we organise ourselves.
Like the internet freed the means of information and conversation, these new public blockchains and its offsprings: decentralised finance and decentralised autonomous organisations will free the means of organisation and finance. With technical knowledge available on the internet, everybody can now issue a coin, create a financial instrument or start a foundation.
The object
The most interesting attribute of ‘Is it Copernicus’ is that it combines the physical and cryptographic worlds. There is a cryptographic key on the blockchain with a digital wallet containing digital money, invisible as such, located on a Raspberry Pi, inside a closed, but semi-opaque glass ball. It is on the invisible blockchain, but you can also look at it, point at it or destroy it. If you break the ball, you can connect the Pi to a source of electricity, retrieve the private key and collect all the funds accumulated on that address.
The physical object was made at the ‘van Tetterode’ hotspot in Amsterdam. It’s a glass ball of approximately 30 centimetres wide blown with streaks of yellow, orange and red colour. Some of the streaks are transparent, so you can look inside the ball.
The bottom of ball was left open to insert the Raspberry Pi. It is closed by gluing a glass disk over the hole. Both the glass ball and the glass disk are heated during the gluing. They cannot be separated without breaking the object. Before closing the ball, a small stand with three arms and clasps is glued on the disk lid, so it may hold the Pi and its battery in the center of the ball.
After the Raspberry Pi is inserted and the ball is closed, we connect to the Pi over WIFI and make a small transaction to its ‘open’ wallet. By open we mean that it exists before the ball is closed. Its private key is known to the programmer. Inside the closed ball the open wallet starts a smart contract that creates a new ‘closed’ wallet, which private key will not be known outside the ball, unless broken. As it is only the ball that contains the private key, it can be argued that the ball owns the wallet. The physical object has been given an existence on the blockchain.
The ball then issues 21 shares, so called non-fungible tokens. These 21 tokens are listed on Open Sea, a decentralised marketplace for Non Fungible Tokens.
After about an hour the battery dies, the Pi turns off. Its mind, the smart contract, now lives on the blockchain.
While talking about this process and explaining the project to others, we have already seen that this tangible application of blockchain technology helps people to open up to and understand the potential of this new technology.
Distribution
NFT’s use a protocol that can be implemented in a wide range of other applications, like games, virtual worlds and marketplaces, making these digital assets transferable across platforms. To understand what a game changer this is, imagine how much money as been spent over past decades on products inside games, while these digital assets would only exist inside that specific game and were not (easily) tradable om marketplaces outside that game.
Listing the shares on the Open Sea marketplace was a very good solution. We did not need to build a UI to purchase shares and the option to resell on the secondary market, is also available.
Moreover the tokens are not only visible on the blockchain as a combination of cryptographic addresses, it is also visible on the internet, with an image and textual description, making it — as strange as that would have been twenty years ago — more real for people who are familiar with the web, but not as much with blockchain.
Proof of concept
With this first MVP we have given a cryptographic life to an object and successfully enacted a fundamental part of the idea. Effectively, we have now learned how to launch a smart contract from within a closed object. In the coming time we will sell the remaining shares and bring the ball with us when talking about the potential of blockchains, facilitating conversations with a tangible application present. These conversations will give us further ideas for the next object.
Very likely we will use the next objects to improve on governance and token-economics. We also envision future artworks to travel and being exhibited in return for a fee paid to the ball, thereby contributing to the value locked inside. Do contact us when you are interested.
A new commons
So let us end this post by rethinking one more time what this both physical and cryptographic object is.
Anyone with access to it can break the ball and with some technical skills recover the funds inside the ball. Will the ball survive when the value inside rises? It is an age old question of collective interest versus individual gain. Will we be responsible stewards or squander it?
Why don’t we see this object as a new type of commons, a collectively owned resource with a real world value and secured by blockchain technology.
