created in Leonardo.ai by the author.
“A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he cut in Night City, and he’d still see the matrix in his dreams, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void… -William Gibson Neuromancer
When William Gibson wrote his CyberPunk classic Neuromancer in 1986 nobody could have foreseen the rise of the internet. His book was like looking through a glass, darkly. Frenzied dreams of riding through the matrix and being hyper-connected to various layers and levels of reality would not materialize till much later, but they would come.
He certainly never imagined the rise of what came to be known as the metaverse, or Bitcoin.
Bitcoin began as a cypherpunk experiment freeing money from bankers and State actors. When the very cyberpunk character Satoshi Nakamoto breathed over the waters of cyberspace 14 years ago he set into motion so much more than just a simple P2P digital money system, but something multifaceted like the bright lattices of logic unfolding from Gibson’s novel.
I don’t think he anticipated that.
The easiest way to explain the concept is that a bitmap is like a digital grid of tiny squares called pixels that make up a picture on a computer. Whenever you see pictures on your screen if it’s reduced to essentials it’s just a grid or an array of pixels of various shades. Reduced even further it’s just bits and bytes, ones and zeros, the primordial aether of cyberspace. It’s the clay we use to build our digital towers of Babel.
This past summer another very cyberpunk person Bitoshi Blockamoto rolled out a standard on Bitcoin that leveraged classic bitmap theory with Ordinal theory, bringing the bitmap idea onto the blockchain in a way that brings us closer to something like a real metaverse straight out of Neuromancer.
I want you to close your eyes and imagine each block in the chain from the moment Satoshi launched the Genesis block into the aether on into infinity as being digital real estate — like the matrix or the Sprawl from Neuromancer. Because that is what it has become — digital real estate. Digital Babylon onchain.
Let’s plug in like Case from the seminal cyberpunk classic and enter the matrix.
Now we’re riding high above a landscape made of bits and bytes, ones and zeros.
Utilizing Ordinal Theory the first person to inscribe blocknumber.bitmap onto a satoshi owns that geospatial matrix, which is called a district. So each block is called a district, and each transaction within a district is called a parcel. You can build things onto parcels, by leveraging ordinal theory, by inscribing things.
Let’s take a look at what I mean by looking at an example because at this point I bet your head is spinning.
What you see is a 2D image of a block or district. In this example, it is block 719055. That is simply a block on Bitcoin’s endless chain.
Each grid inside it represents a transaction, which is called a parcel.
Since we’re plugged in like Case let’s throw on some 3D glasses to see what our little virtual real estate looks like from a better angle.
Now it’s looking like a cyberpunk city, with tall skyscrapers reaching for skies made of bits and bytes.
Here's another view.
It looks like we just landed on Mars, but that’s just another way of rendering the geospatial tapestry of that block or district.
Can you see the possibilities with this?
screenshot from Bitmap Explorer
Not only is Bitcoin the most decentralized, hard-capped, and immutable digital money on the planet and a place to store your art, but it is digital real estate, a place where you can build worlds inside of worlds in the matrix.
I don’t know about you but my inner geek is dreaming of cyberpunk cities and digital Babylon.
Here are some links to help get you started in exploring this strange and exciting world for yourself. The console Cowboys have been building for months. Don’t be afraid to plug in and join us.
Bitmap Directory
Bitmap Theory
Thanks for reading. Drop me questions in the comments section.
Donations accepted.
BTC/CounterParty 1JjzE9THRbJ2SuofCjMMnxA1WPTAuXqgRk
