What’s your BTC origin story? Can’t say much about this, but I’ve been around for a while. -You started drawing Shrooms in oct’22 – why mushrooms? The starting point for this project was the 8-bit graphic style of art, the idea was to tell a bitcoin story that would also give off major 80s-90s vibes. Mushrooms are neat and easy to customize, and allow you to express bitcoin concepts as complex and diverse as sighash_noinput and separation of money and state on something as small as a 32x32px canvas. -Why a 210-piece collection? Because 21 pieces would have been too few and 21 million would have been too many. I’ll let you in on a little secret: count the introductory shrooms (#19-51 inscription range) write down the number and read it backward. How much does Stairway to Heaven pale in comparison? -Inscription 105 is a list of Shroom hashes – talk about that. It’s a list of the shrooms’ fingerprints, SHA256 hashes of the png files that were later inscribed. Back in January, I had the collection ready to be put on the blockchain and waiting on the sidelines for a provenance/authorship feature to be integrated in the ord client. In the meantime, I thought I’d at least inscribe a cryptographic digest of the art, which would prove the onchain existence of the whole collection before anyone else might come up with the idea of inscribing another one; that is, either an entirely new collection or one incorporating any of the existing standalone inscriptions, #0-104. That’s inscription 105 - for the full picture, see also the shrooms in range #19-51 I mentioned above, the collection’s intro. Eventually I realized that the provenance feature would take a while to be implemented and went on to inscribe the individual pngs. They’re quite spread out though, inscription 105 is useful because it gives a unique onchain location to the collection as a whole (with the right ordering, too). -Each piece tells a story - what went into curation -> Few distractions. -Do you intend to help use the collection to broaden people’s understanding of BTC? Orange-pilling the layman, including people from the NFT/digital art world, is indeed the not-so-surreptitious goal of this collection. Seeing people reach out to me after finding out about it, asking for advice on things like spinning up a raspiblitz or using coinjoin has been truly rewarding. Always keen to broaden people’s understanding of bitcoin, both on the theoretical and practical level. -People built identities w/ certain shrooms – will that play into distribution? While it’s been very gratifying and fun to see people use the shrooms (and their bootlegged versions) as profile pics, my advice is not to get too attached or feel entitled to owning one. But if you find a shroom you like, aesthetically or because of its meaning, you’re 100% free to grab it, use it as pfp, customize it etc. We abide by FOSS: Free and Open Source Shrooms. -Speaking of distribution… Auction? WL? Half & Half? It’s best to keep expectations low. As I said in the shroomverse discord: this is an art project about bitcoin, no more, no less. If/when the shrooms are released, I hope to reward, and not necessarily with a shroom, those who’ve been giving me concrete help, especially those who’ve been doing so without ever asking for anything in return. If/when this happens, I intend to make it private and low-key, no big “whitelist” announcements. -Which is your favorite shroom? Ideologically: https://ordinals.com/inscription/567295a1728b589ea6fad9a53377be98377984378b0f99efceaf896e0d5910c7i0 Aesthetically: https://ordinals.com/inscription/ef2f4061ff59ca1c578d211417fc9fc2764be1290588f2c8af417540e63ba35ei0 Emotionally:https://ordinals.com/inscription/595a9b6dd637514cc6ba40fd9744ece9affd165a7f7c9a72c162e58343b3c282i0 -Why should Maxis accept Ordinals? Allow me to answer with the help of a shroom: https://ordinals.com/inscription/9d898adf571cabd3797ea24b37c99b1f54bbda26bcf19043f3ab2eee05a4588fi0 -You could have launched when the market was hot. Why wait? Bitcoin is likely going to be around until the sun becomes a red giant, obliterating all life on earth; but it might survive that too. Once the shrooms are released they can’t be un-released. -Favorite book? It used to be Gravity’s Rainbow but I’ve got a new favorite since block 774671: https://ordinals.com/inscription/01824443054f35e57864354cbb7063ae976c60cc8faec09d8b1d8cf83aaf7bc8i0 -Favorite Musician? Aphex Twin. -Favorite TV show? Shroomverse TV shows are the best TV shows: https://ordinals.com/inscription/57e2f52a278868b008177d63acbb38723c2eb790741d9b8c810ccad97536d009i0 -Favorite quote? “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” by William Gibson + anything that ever came out of Yogi Berra’s mouth. -Anything else to add? Yes, I have a question for you. If the shroom you followed brought you to this, of what use was the shroom?