In 2023, the Smashtoshi team reached out to me while working on Bit / History of Bitcoin. Bit is a long-term project that brings together artists, researchers, and early contributors to reflect on Bitcoin’s history through visual culture. I was invited to interpret the Genesis block, an event that has been discussed endlessly but remains strangely elusive, especially beyond technical explanation.
Nearly two years later, that invitation resulted in Genesis Days.
A static version of the work now appears in History of Bitcoin and its accompanying online timeline, marking the Genesis block as one of the network’s foundational moments. As seen in the book, Genesis Days plays out differently from the animated version. It becomes a pause rather than a sequence, one point in a much larger constellation of moments that together trace Bitcoin’s emergence.
What excites me most about this project is being able to visualize this moment alongside so many artists whose practices I respect. The book brings together 128 original artworks, each created specifically for this context, revisiting key moments in Bitcoin’s history without trying to fix them into a single narrative. Seeing such a wide range of visual languages applied to the same technological and cultural arc reinforces how open and still unfinished this history really is.
The History of Bitcoin was developed over four years and combines artworks with long-form research and interviews conducted with early contributors and observers of the network. Rather than feeling like documentation, the project reads as a collection of perspectives. Each work approaches its subject from a slightly different angle, leaving space for interpretation rather than closing it down.
Encountering the book as a physical object was also intriguing. In a space where Bitcoin is so often experienced through screens, charts, and rapidly circulating digital artifacts, the book feels deliberately slow. I like to see it somewhere between an art publication and an archive, less about immediacy, more about presence.
The physical book exists alongside the online archive of Bitcoin milestones: one provides access, the other presence. The team has described its first edition, especially, as a kind of time capsule. It is built from ancient materials to mirror an ambition for longevity, not for rarity’s sake. This way, it contrasts the nascent technology with materials that have already endured for millennia.
In that sense, the History of Bitcoin is not simply a record of past events. It is an attempt to give Bitcoin’s early years a durable cultural footing. Genesis Days participates in that effort by translating one of Bitcoin’s most unusual temporal moments into a form that can be revisited, reconsidered, and re-read, now, and long after the moment itself has passed.
