A Real-Time Fight Over Shitty Art Is Becoming a Big Deal for Bitcoin

Created by a developer who goes by the handle "Lightning K0ala," the project is inspired by Reddit's massive multiplayer art experiment, "Place," a three-day effort in collaborative drawing that garnered hype in 2017.

While participants on Reddit's r/place had a time constraint - users had to wait between five and 20 minutes before submitting a new pixel to the board - at Satoshi's Place, the limit is only how much bitcoin users are willing to fork over.

For 0.01 bitcoin, around $65 at current prices, users can take over the entire board, all by using a newly live payments technology for bitcoin called the lightning network.

"Satoshi's Place has been the first app that has gained wider attention from the community," said Elizabeth Stark, the CEO of Lightning Labs, a startup building a user implementation of lightning.

As users compete for art real estate with their wallets, according to advocates, the quickly shifting cultural depiction of cryptocurrency enthusiasts demonstrates not only how Lightning can free the bitcoin blockchain from its scalability constraints, but also how technologies like these could eventually outpace traditional financial systems.

Citing the use of microtransactions within the game, Jeff Gallas, an early participant of the artboard and founder of lightning startup Fulmo, emphasized how such an application is currently unique to the lightning network.

As bitcoin developer David A. Harding pointed out, while both of these examples led to near-crippling blockchain congestion, Satoshi's Place has been imperceptible on the bitcoin blockchain itself.

As the lightning network was formulated in response to bitcoin's scalability concerns, many of the drawings have depicted leading figures in the bitcoin scaling debate - Roger Ver for instance.

As bitcoin cash, the rival cryptocurrency that split from bitcoin this past August, logos appeared to take over the site, the word "Cash" was changed to "Trash," then finally "Bitmain trash".

Ver, a bitcoin cash enthusiast, even took a jab at the project on Reddit, sarcastically calling it a "Great example of the maturity level of many lightning network users." The comment was met with surprising feedback, as bitcoin cash users suggested creating another rivaling graffiti app with one user claiming that the bitcoin cash version would be "a bit nicer with a canvas than drawing penises and denigrating another coin."