Bitcoiners need to be strong now: Former Silk Road admin Ross Ulbricht is releasing an NFT collection from prison. The proceeds are to benefit prisoners and their families. But why is he using Ethereum instead of Bitcoin for this?
Tomorrow is the start. On Tuesday, the second of December, the Art Basel, an art festival, begins in Miami, and blockchain will also play a role at this festival. Maybe even the main role.
More specifically, NFTs. Non-Fungible Tokens. An artist will coin AI-generated portraits of visitors as NFTs, curators will talk about NFTs and more. The art world is obviously into tokens, maybe because they promise a new art market, maybe because they simply help bring in money.
But that’s not what this is about. This is about something that is much more “Bitcoin”: Ross Ulbricht aka Dread Pirate Roberts. Ross was the admin of Silk Road, the first modern darknet drug bazaar. Meanwhile, Ross has been in prison for more than eight years. But that doesn’t stop him from auctioning off a collection of his artworks as NFT at the start of Art Basel in Miami.
Ross Ulbricht Genesis Collection NFT launching next week at Art Basel!FreeRoss pic.twitter.com/VaG3bDprVa
– Free_Ross (@Free_Ross) November 28, 2021
The “Ross Ulbricht Genesis Collection” is, explains the website freeross.org, “a unique collection of texts and ten artworks by Ross Ulbricht, from his early childhood to his youth to his time in prison.”
The collection will be announced at Art Basel and released through the SuperRare marketplace. It consists of several paintings, usually drawn with charcoal pencils, but occasionally painted with coloured pencils or oil paint. Some of these artworks are linked to texts Ross wrote in his cell.
The proceeds are to be used for charitable purposes to support other prisoners and their families.
“It’s like a death sentence. It just takes longer. “
Ross Ulbricht was sentenced by the US judiciary to double life plus 40 years. There is no doubt that he broke laws many times. Nevertheless, he will always be a hero in Bitcoin history. At least he is still revered among Bitcoiners today.
Now 38, he was convicted by the FBI in 2013 of developing and running Silk Road. The first “Amazon of the black market” allowed trading drugs for Bitcoin from the beginning of 2011. Silk Road gave Bitcoin unique purchasing power for the first time. It and subsequent marketplaces on the darknet were essential to a particular phase of Bitcoin’s history.
Ross Ulbricht had to pay a high price for this: “My future died the day I was sentenced to life in prison without parole … There is no parole in the federal system, so life means all of life. It’s like a death sentence. It just lasts longer,” Ross said in a moving text that is also part of an NFT. “Prison is like life after death. My life before – my life of freedom – feels like a distant dream. My memories from before prison don’t feel like they belong to me.”
It’s hard to imagine what Ross is suffering. “It’s slowly dawning on me that I’m going to be in federal prison for a while. My ninth year without parole has begun. Decades of incarceration still lie ahead of me,” he writes on his blog. “As I face this future – as I grow old and die in this cage – I ask for meaning and purpose. Why am I here? What good can I do with the time I have left? “
“My story is not over yet. I am still alive. “
From this question came the idea to publish NFTs. Ross comes from a family of artists and has been drawing since he was a child. “I drew characters from comic books for many years. As a teenager, I developed a surreal, psychedelic style that broke the boundaries of my art.” In his 20s, he stopped drawing because he didn’t have the time. Then, when he was moved to prison at 29, he “reconnected with my artistic side and produced illustrations that tell the story I’m going through.”
One illustration, for instance, shows the trial from an artistic perspective. Another his prison cell, and another abstractly expresses his suffering from imprisonment. Around the time of the Corona Lockdown, where prisoners were locked in their cells 22 hours a day.
Meanwhile, despite all the hopelessness, pain and depression, Ross has realised one thing: “My story is not over. I am still alive. I’m still here. I can still make a difference.”
With the NFT sale, he is now trying to help the many prison inmates in the United States as well as their families. “There’s a lot we can do with the proceeds, but I especially want to help the children visit their mothers and fathers in prison.” Alongside this, the aim is to help prisoners in other ways and some will be invested in legal aid for Ross.
“A fucking blockchain money pit “
For Bitcoiners, the news of Ross Ulbricht’s NFTs is not easy to digest. They need to be strong right now.
On one hand, Ross is a hero. Bitcoiners love digital privacy, they champion freedom of trade, and they know and appreciate what a great contribution Silk Road made to Bitcoin’s history. The scene has never forgotten Ross, and while it has never forgiven other early Bitcoiners – Mark Karpeless, for example – for their failures, Ross enjoys almost saintly status.
On the other hand – an NFT? Seriously? And then on SuperRare, too? So presumably on Ethereum? How can he? How can he stab the scene in the back like that? He, one of the last heroes who didn’t get filthy rich and fall, but paid the price of eternal imprisonment and still stood?
For some, a whole world is collapsing. On Twitter, Ross is therefore earning mixed reactions:
My NFT auction will start in 2 days! https://t.co/jtOPsEH9ME
– Ross Ulbricht (@RealRossU) November 30, 2021
“I wish Ross success, but I wish it would be on bitcoin and not on a shitcoin,” one responds. Many Bitcoiners would love to support Ross, “but many aren’t willing to be part of something that looks like a shitty blockchain money pit.”
“I love Ross and I hope he gets lots of money for whatever charity,” tweeted another. But “the fact that the crazy and immoral NFT Ponzi has now become so normal is extremely worrying.”
The situation is not entirely simple. What is more important? Supporting someone convicted of a crime that violates the law but that you yourself consider morally okay, if not heroic – or not supporting a cause that is legally legal but that you consider immoral fraud?
Bitcoin maximalists don’t have it easy. But there would be a bridge: What if Ross issued NFTs not on shitcoins – but on bitcoin?
That leads us to another question: is that possible? Is there an NFT market based on bitcoin?
With Liquid and Lightning
Unisono bitcoiners suggest that Ross publishes his NFTs on Raretoshi or Scarce City. These seem to be the two main platforms for NFT art on Bitcoin.
Raretoshi runs on Blockstream’s Liquid sidechain. The NFT files – texts, videos, images, music – are stored in the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and referenced by a hash on the Liquid sidechain.
Scarce City, on the other hand, uses the Lightning network to place offchain bids for the NFTs. However, the tokens themselves are not stored on Bitcoin – nor somehow on the Lightning network – but on the Arweave blockchain. Evidence of the Bitcoin transaction that bought the NFT is also stored there.
Compared to NFTs on Ethereum, both platforms have an enormous advantage: the transaction fees are many times lower. If you accept an offer on OpenSea, you can be happy if the fees are in the double-digit dollar range. On Liquid and Lightning, they will probably also be in double digits – but in cents.
At the same time, however, the NFT marketplaces reveal a core problem that Bitcoin is currently suffering from.
Boring art, boring technology
One of the terrific achievements of NFTs on Ethereum was that they broke up the scene. Suddenly auction houses, art curators, musicians, artists, filmmakers, producers, fashion designers, magazines, football clubs and so on were releasing tokens, and suddenly stars like Snoop Dogg became crypto-investors
@SnoopDogg‘s new NFT on the SuperRareMonolith, a collab with @Coldie FlaglerAF MiamiArtWeek pic. twitter.com/2s4zecC8uo
– Urban Impact Lab (@UrbanImpactLab) December 4, 2021
NFTs have contributed to the popularisation of “crypto” more than any development before, apart from perhaps Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road.
Bitcoin NFT platforms are reversing this development. The art traded there is not bad, but thematically rather one-sided: it’s all about Bitcoin. A Bitcoin logo, a picture of the OpenDime wallet, a “whale on Bitcoin beach”. A “keep stacking” poster, a painting of a cypherpunk, the rollercoaster meme to the all-time high and so on. Yawn.
You can tell at first click that the platforms have only one purpose: They are to allow Bitcoiners to also play with NFTs without losing face.
Bitcoin is not leading the innovation here – but running after it. We already had this with tokens and ICOs, which were taboo until they appeared on the liquid sidechain – and flopped there. Bitcoin came years too late.
The situation is similar with NFTs. Technically, Bitcoin NFTs are boring, much more boring than NFTs on Ethereum, the Binance Smart Chain or Solana. This is because neither on Liquid nor on the Arweave blockchain is it possible to link the transactions through which NFTs are acquired to the NFT itself via a smart contract.
So Bitcoiners are missing out on the best part of blockchain NFTs right now. On Ethereum, auctions, transactions and transfers run onchain, connected by a smart contract, without a middleman to trust.
And while Bitcoin NFTs continue to be traded in the old way, through central middlemen, the smart contract NFT scene is constantly spitting out new innovations. Ross Ulbricht’s collection also uses one of these:
“All ten of Ross’s original artworks and texts, as well as the original animation,” explains the website Freeross.org, “are compiled into a single NFT using Kanon’s KSPEC protocol … KSPEC allows Ross Ulbricht’s NFT collection to be delivered in full quality and for the winning auctioneer to receive onchain opportunities that were previously unthinkable.”
Exactly what KSPEC enables is not entirely clear to me, and the accompanying press release doesn’t help all that much either. What is clear, however, is that it doesn’t take much imagination to imagine that the potential of “programmable art” has not yet been exhausted.
And it is also clear that Ross Ulbricht, the inventor of Silk Road, is still able to innovate from prison. Only this time no longer with Bitcoin.
