POW-2: Digital Dollars Now with Expiry Feature confronts the silent encroachment of centralized digital currencies. As central banks worldwide accelerate plans for state-issued digital money, the public risks sleepwalking into a future where financial autonomy is eroded. Expiring funds, vendor blacklists, remote invalidation — tools that were once the stuff of dystopias are now viable policy levers. The European Unions’ long experiment with negative interest rates offered a glimpse of this power in action.
Currency’s original purpose as a store of value — already compromised by systemic inflation — now risks descending into a tool for behavioral manipulation. The artwork visualizes this concern through an installation of four notebooks whose 8,640 individually hand-stamped marks form a pixelated dollar coin dissolving into a cloud. In the lower left, Lady Liberty appears in disbelief and despair, her hands raised to her head, mourning the erosion of a once hard and free currency.
The Proof of Work series (POW) functions conceptually as a blockchain. Each notebook acts as a ledger, every page as a block, and each rubber stamp — marked by dust, pressure, and paper absorption — is as uniquely identifiable as a cryptographic hash.
POW-2: Digital Dollars Now with Expiry Feature is currently on display at the Bitcoin Museum in Nashville, TN.
I had the pleasure of returning for the fourth time to the Bitcoin Art Gallery, which this year was hosted in Nashville, TN.
Third Miami, FL edition of the Bitcoin Art Gallery during the Bitcoin 2023 conference.
Recently, I started a new series forming cloud mosaics using ink and rubber stamps.