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Gas Wars with @jackbutcher
Recorded: Sept. 16, 2025 Duration: 0:41:39Space Recording
Short Summary
The upcoming Gas Wars release from Artblocks marks a pivotal moment in generative art, featuring a unique pricing structure and a collaboration with Jack Butcher of Visualize Value. This project not only signifies the end of the Kitted series but also explores themes of survivorship bias and community engagement in the NFT space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hi Jack, just checking in if you can hear me, are you okay?
I hear you great, how's mine pretty good pretty good good excellent I'm just gonna give
people a little bit of time to join in sounds good excellent see a lot of familiar faces in
the audience which is always fantastic Jordan from Artblocks,
Buna from Schiller, FDOT.
Okay great I think we have a pretty nice set of guests joining in. So whilst people do that,
I'm just going to welcome you all. Thank you so much for joining us today. And thank you, Jack,
also for joining us today. It's a real pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
We're so excited. So I'm just going to give everyone a little bit of context. So
Gas Wars is going to be the penultimate release in the Artblocks curated series.
For those who don't know, Kitted has been the Artblocks flagship program since 2020.
And it's introduced huge projects like Chromie Squiggle, Fidenza, Ringo.
So a lot of generative art names that are so familiar to all of us and that we all hold so
daily. And now with Gas Wars, we're not just releasing a new project. It's also marking this
last chapter of that archive. So this is the penultimate release, the second to the last.
And this is a chapter that kind of speaks to both the history of art blocks and then the cultural
weight of bringing the one and only Jack Butcher onto Curated. So this is not just a drop and we
call them releases. It's an experiment about survivorship bias and collective behavior.
So Jack, the founder of Visualize Value, whose work explores CAST-EVALUE and systems, is on stage with us.
And we're just so excited to have you here.
We're just so excited to have you here.
Would you mind giving us a quick introduction, Jack, of how you got to the space and who you are in case some people in the audience don't know you?
Sure. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Quick intro. So I studied graphic design originally.
And when I graduated, got into all kinds of different applications of commercial
design so I worked in in advertising world in New York for about 10 years bounced around all
different types of creative agencies and through that process kind of got the itch to start my own
thing eventually and then about eight nine years into that started scratching away at my own thing eventually and then about eight nine years into that started scratching
away at my own agency business and the many iterations that took eventually arrived at this
idea called uh is now referred to as visualized value which is basically this process of taking
complexity and trying to distill it into these simple images and that started as a kind of a
service business or an agency business where I would post these pieces to Twitter and Instagram
and then essentially try and find clients to work with via that process and through a couple years of practicing that in public got a request i think in um early
early 2020 maybe late 2020 someone reached out to me and asked if they could collect
some of my work and at the time i was like very perplexed by that request and i'd run a few
experiments trying to get this stuff onto paper that in the months
before that and decided not to pursue that and then got introduced to ethereum nfts uh more
more specifically got shown uh openc back in late 2020 and i really didn't know what i was looking
at at the time unfortunately took me about another six months to come around
when I got invited to Foundation,
the one-of-one auction house platform.
It all clicked for me when I saw that UI.
And yeah, I've just essentially been completely absorbed
by this ecosystem since then, since early 2021, and went from this very, the very sort of basic practice of making these images collectible to now trying to experiment more deeply with the medium and kind of discovered a
lot of a lot more beauty and interaction that lies in these bigger networked collections that allow
you to do much more interesting things and obviously have more people participate in them so
that's the that's the TLDR of how I got into this world.
And what a fantastic history you have. It's really incredible how you managed to make your
visual identity so clear and all of a sudden it makes so much sense considering your background
and that all makes a lot of sense but I'm very curious what drew you to the concept of
world war ii oh yeah survivor bias so the the really early um visualized value stuff was all
like this feedback loop of me reading things uh discovering these ideas that were actually helping me
uh helping me build this independent creative practice so i obviously spent a long long time in the agency world which is time and materials and pitch this job manually and hopefully someone
will give you a chance and then you uh you know work for them and build by the hour or things of that nature and i discovered this like little pocket of twitter this was in 2019 ish where a lot of people who had spent their
careers in technology were writing these really succinct uh lessons i suppose that they'd learned
from operating in this space and it was a mix was a mix of people writing stuff in the present
and a lot of old writing that I'd started to spend my time reading
based on trying to make this personal transition.
And I would just put these ideas through this feedback loop
in order for me to kind of internalize them and memorize them
at a higher fidelity.
And survivorship bias, there's a lot of these different mental models
where there's some historic story that maps to a concept,
and survivorship bias is a pretty famous one of those.
But what really sort of over time embedded the importance of it is if you do
anything on the internet you kind of see this uh this phenomenon in action all the time the idea
of these like unbelievable power laws and uh the the kind of surviving example or the you know the the outlier is the is the thing that people try
and extract the lesson from so whether that's somebody who in the context of art blocks even
like an artist that has taken a certain approach to their career you know maybe they've only ever
released one collection or one collection and a handful of other pieces and people extrapolate
from that,
that that's what they should do.
Or that's like,
that is the thing that made that person successful or made their career notable, blah, blah, blah.
And what's,
there's way more information in the thousands of attempts
that didn't make it.
And these,
this idea of the outlier being studied
has always been fascinating to me.
And it's kind of non-obvious
until you either are participating in something that works that way or you just kind of discover
the idea and then you can retrofit it into the things that you've experienced in the past so
that I didn't actually explain what it what the the famous example is so the the example is based on this um this thing that happened in
world war ii where these planes would return home with bullet holes in them and the engineers
working to improve those planes for the next run would extrapolate from where the bullets holes are
that that's where they need to reinforce the planes because that's where they, you know, that's where they were pierced or vulnerable. And there's a statistician called Abraham Wold who
sort of inverted that approach entirely and said, you know, the planes that we actually need to
study never made it back. And they received fire in the places that actually need to be reinforced.
But we don't have any physical evidence of that happening,
but we need to invert from the success stories or the survivor story
how to differently treat the next run.
So it's this complete...
That's a very, I guess, on the nose example of this phenomenon, but it applies everywhere in life to varying degrees of significance.
You just gave me a perfect segue into my next question, which is considering how this is applicable to other areas of life how did your
brain make the leap from that into the gas wars history in ethereum so actually i i had a visual
of this about six months ago so i was just sort of tinkering around with this idea. And the idea originally was like to update it.
So go from that 1940s plane to a 2020-esque fighter jet silhouette.
And the idea of gas war,
so that I think I posted that with the caption survivorship bias at the time.
And it wasn't until Eric reached out and we started talking about
potentially doing something in the curated container at the time and it wasn't until uh eric reached out and we started talking about potentially
doing something in this in the curated container where that those concepts all started to sort of
weave themselves together obviously um the connotation of gas wars works as a reference
to the idea of a plane being shot but it's also a massive part of the
history legacy memory of the early art blocks culture and the events that occurred around
those like highly contested drops and i think that um like being completely transparent about
that was also part of the, uh, when the idea clicked
or we started to feel really good about it, it's like, okay, if you're going to do something that
potentially encourages this congestion, you should be like super on the nose about it. It's
not something that you retroactively apologize for. It's like, this is how the medium works.
apologize for us, like this is how the medium works. It's designed to bring out this behavior
potentially. And I think getting to that name actually, you know, took the idea in my head
from something I was very excited and proud to release to like something I hope stands as like
a reference to the container it sits in and over time can sort of be used to explain the early days of this crypto art phenomena and the experiences people had around collecting it.
Actually, that's super interesting.
And I also wanted to dig into that a little bit.
Like, why do you think survivorship bias can be such a powerful lens for thinking about collecting?
Well, I think there's like the really, there's maybe the really like on the nose, like market or financial description for that,
right?
Where people who there's like this selection bias that occurs,
even in,
you know,
the artists that are being referenced in the context of the art blocks
curated 500,
right?
It's like,
there's the Fidenzas,
the ringers,
the squiggles,
and those occupy this massive power law
on the left-hand side of the curve.
And then there's all of these other incredible contributions
that have this...
The effort, the artistic...
The quality of the execution in a lot of those projects is incredible.
And it's like the idea that
there are these factors that exist that maybe can't even be
directly correlated or understood that lead to these outlier results.
So I feel like survivorship bias in reference to collecting work,
Like survivorship bias in reference to collecting work, there's like people get lucky picking things that happen to accrue this meaning and this value over time.
And there's also people who take a really careful, considered approach and don't get that result.
And sometimes that's just complete randomness, luck of the draw.
Sometimes that's just complete randomness, luck of the draw.
And then there's also this like compounding factor of luck
where if you are at the right place at the right time
or the composition of a crypto art portfolio is X, right?
There's consensus around punks, squiggles, Fidenza.
And then every new entrant that sort of arrives three years later is like oh we're
building a fund of crypto art and we're gonna buy a punk a squiggle and a for denzer and that just
like further compounds this advantage or this kind of uh just further entrenches that position. And again, artists that are looking to
sort of learn from those examples, you can't directly just copy the mechanics of it, right?
You can't just look at the composition of that thing and reverse engineer it. There's all of
these factors and all of this randomness and like wouldn't even be able
to begin to describe all the inputs that led to that outcome so i feel like it's uh hopefully
this lens that works on all these different levels whether it's the collector not getting
the piece or or the the value of the piece not aging in the way they thought it would or it's
the value of the piece not aging in the way they thought it would,
or it's artists approaching dropping work in different ways,
or it's even like the composition of the curated collection itself.
I think I should probably go and try and figure this out,
but even in 2021, right, a lot of people came into this space,
it was like, I'm saved, this is how my art practice is going to become this thing that I do for a living forever.
I would imagine there's probably multiple hundreds of participants that
have not released a piece of work since then.
So that's also another timing thing that is kind of trying to frame out the collection itself by,
you know, I'm grateful to be included right at the end of that idea to sort of look back on
everything that was included up to this point. And this is not me saying this collection will
age any better than any of the others. It's an attempt to comment on the dynamic that exists.
of the others. It's an attempt to comment on the dynamic that exists.
That is wonderful. And that kind of reminds me, just a very quick side note. When you audition
for a theatre role, people want to audition first or last, or be within the first few to audition,
or the last few to audition. So it feels like you're in a really good spot right now.
And with this in mind, would you mind explaining this $1 to $500 price ladder
and how this damage escalates?
Sure, yeah.
So I think that's another interesting thing that we've tried to do
at Visualize Value with the bigger collections, at least, is this interrogation of value, arbitrary sizes of collections or brackets of rarity within collections.
within collections. And instead of, you know, I'm just going to speak generally, and this may
not be completely accurate of like describing everybody's approach to this, but the idea that
you can create an algorithm that has infinite visual outputs is commonplace, right? You can
create something that looks beautiful that means
something that can be generated an infinite number of ways and then the this like component
of scarcity or value comes from the artist's decision on where to limit that so there's going
to be 10 000 of these or there's going to be a thousand of these and there's this dance between
how well it's designed and how much
variance there is in the outputs and how that resonates with people who collect it how big the
market is at the time how many uh like what the distribution of the pieces ends up being
um and and like what discussion the variance in the collection can actually create because that's
obviously a huge
part of i think the longevity of collections does come from that where like the variance can create
these relationships where you're sort of exploring the nuance of the collection but there's also this
like incredible arbitrary nature to it so what we're trying to do with the economics and the mechanics of this is like, create a very linear and obvious
relationship between the token, the artwork and the price you
pay. So the first token, or the second token, there's going to
be a token zero, which we'll do a zero reserve auction for
starting in 40 minutes.
It runs for 24 hours.
And then tomorrow, this set of 499 becomes available for 500 seconds.
The first one is a dollar.
The second one is $2.
The third one is $3.
And there is this also interesting inversion in that
because the early tokens are very likely to survive the way
the damage works is these shots are applied randomly across this uh 500 these 500 locations
and they have varying degrees of damage as they're applied and there are also certain areas of the
plane that if they are hit with a certain amount of damage, will destroy the plane.
So it's technically possible for token 1 to have no plane, and it's very unlikely, but it's technically possible.
And then at the tail end, it's technically possible for token 499 to survive 499 hits, but very, very, very unlikely.
99 hits but very very very unlikely so there's going to be this very direct relationship to
the thing you choose to collect as this as this experience is happening and the outcome you get
and um yeah i think uh uh an attempt to create a conversation around what you're paying for and uh sort of comment on the arbitrariness of
supply supply sizes and variants in these collections but also produce these results
that are going to be statistical anomalies that would in my mind create these conversations like
what is going to be the lowest token id without a plane in it that's super interesting and the same on the other end of the scale what's the most damage a plane was able to
take without uh being destroyed so we have like run enough simulations to be very happy with how
the variance shakes out but obviously the transactions themselves will create that random data on the day in that 500 second window that's super interesting and i feel like you're adding
this extra layer because you know art blocks has always been very interactive because more often
than not collectors mint so they're kind of co-creating the artwork and then there's this layer of them potentially causing a bunch of
damage to the work so it's so so exciting and then you were talking about like how some artworks will
be more damaged than others and like one thing I'm kind of visualizing, no pun intended, I just realized what I said, from number one to number 500,
we see minimal to complete destruction,
potentially almost looking like a flip book.
Was this intentional?
Yeah, I think there is this...
there is this...
Jalil and I,
we wrote this chapter in the Punks book
about...
Free to Claim, the Punks book,
about the fractionalization of punks
and framing it as a single portrait
that happens to be
ownable by 10,000 people or entities or wallets or
however you want to think about it, where even trying to frame a collection as an
artwork as opposed to 500 artworks, obviously it is, it requires that spread for the idea to function and for it to be interesting and for it to have network effect.
But the nuance in the entire artwork being these 500 pieces, and if you own Token 250, all of the other artworks enrich the context of token 250, like the neighbors of it, for example, are like very good,
like, or kind of interesting comparisons, like how luck changes in a situation where
the variables are almost exactly the same, but the outcome could be completely different. So
it's, this is not anything revolutionary. It's just like the idea that navigating the collection by the
numbers is like this meta artwork in itself and we have uh all of these systems in place
during the mint window to record all of that activity so the we have this ability to sort of look at it from above again so you have all of these 500
scenarios but in the same grid of 500 the um the actual activity of the participants is recorded
so if you imagine when it opens on second one to 10, you see where all of these cursors are moving. I would imagine to your point about the theater audition, you're going to see like this split where people go for the beginning and the end.
will be a cool sort of like meta commentary in post.
But the original teaser video we put out too
has this like flip book quality to it.
And I feel like the Visualize Values goal
has always been to sort of communicate
and unpack these ideas.
And I think you could show that sequence
to somebody that has zero context
and you start to understand what it's trying to say.
And that's, or there's even like, if you put, if you contrast two tokens together,
there's, uh, I was trying to like, think about if this was, if you're showing this to someone
or if it's on a wall or on a phone and you're having a conversation about it how much context would you need to communicate
what it's about or how does the visual like assist you in having a conversation about the idea
and in this case i think in either case if there's a plane covered in uh these marks that gives you
the context to explain the idea likewise if there's like a plain white
field with like three marks on it and one is a red x it's like so jarring and strange that you
would consider that an artwork that that also gives you this interesting platform to start
a conversation about what this thing even is i kind of love the idea of that visual itself.
And I'm very curious also,
the choice in colors, was that from somewhere
or was there like a particular reasoning that went into it?
I think maybe the sort of the
the initial thought was like these are like marked with like they're marked on paper
so you're trying to reference that like workshop blueprint uh how would this be
created physically and it has that like tactile feel to it and the
texture of the marks itself and then we introduce the red the critical hits much later on and
there's a couple things that um there's a couple of uh references to vv itself in that, like the white on black, black on white, and one highlight
color to make a very specific point where it's necessary to sort of draw attention to it.
That's, it's mostly justified by minimalism, but also there's some consistency with the
VV catalog and the medium in which this stuff would be written
and a reference to that original image that's on the Wikipedia
Survivorship Bias page too.
Incredible.
And on a side note, you guys are going to love the project page
for Survivorship Bias because it's very Jack Butcher. Like it's very jack butcher like it's super
on brand and it looks very very cool and it has a lot of information on the project but well huge
shout out to the art blocks just unbelievable work on that too incredible they really are the best
they are the greatest um but let's get back on track. I have a tendency to
sometimes go on these tangents, so I'm trying to be good for the both of us. So do you expect
people to be clustering around survivors, like low price, less damage, or are you looking for
a lot of rogue moments? My instinct is that yeah i feel like that's another
interesting um revealed preference is like in our little corner of the internet the sort of
appetite for chaos and speed and um competition feels like that will drive this cluster
and just pure rational economics, right?
People trying to get a piece for the least economic outlay possible
makes the most sense.
But that obviously comes with this caveat of the congestion
at the lower end could increase the price of the transaction to exceed the price of a piece that's in the middle,
for example. So if there's 15 people trying to buy token 2, but nobody trying to buy token 20,
but nobody trying to buy token 20, then the way that shakes out is,
you know, there could be an imbalance in price paid across those two tokens
in excess in the lower token count.
But you haven't done a few of these spaces now,
I imagine that maybe people will adjust their approach.
So I have no idea, but that would be my guess.
And then there's obviously a couple meme numbers in there
that people may want to secure themselves too.
I think that's another thing that we've tried to do in a lot of the VV collections
is the non-arbitr arbitrary nature of the token ID.
So either giving people agency to move that around or to kind of, uh, uh,
what's the word I'm looking for, um, retain or sort of take a token ID from
the beginning of the process to the end.
This has a really, really, uh, tight relationship between the name of the
artwork, the token ID and the visual you see, which I think is hopefully another,
another like vector for people to explain this stuff in a way that isn't,
that doesn't just rely on some arbitrary, um,
yeah, it just doesn't rely on an arbitrary thing.
There's a connection between the price you pay, the token number, the image that's displayed.
Yes, I completely agree.
And I'm starting to feel like maybe we missed out on not having commentators on what's happening tomorrow because this we're both european jack but i feel like
this is going to be very similar to the super bowl in terms of commentary and tactics and
i was kind of curious do you think knowing the bias in advance will change people's behavior
um i think maybe slightly, yeah.
But I don't know how you would describe this concept,
but it's kind of like if everybody's going to do the opposite thing,
then the obvious thing becomes the uncommon choice.
I don't know if that's going to be the case,
but maybe we'll be surprised.
I think so. I think there's a real talent in this space for
people to be surprising to say the least yes that's fair um so moving on to like the significance
of this release yours being the penultimate curated release, what does that mean to you personally?
Sorry, repeat that last part.
What does it mean to you personally?
To be... The penultimate curated release.
Oh, it's incredible.
Yeah, I was saying this yesterday.
Got to talk to Rogerger on the damn show and i didn't think of the visualized value practice as
generative to begin with you know i started making of has been this um has represented like the best in class
contributions from generative artists in the last few years was never like it's like something that
i've participated in as a collector and admired and have like,
uh, huge respect for, but it wasn't like on the, um,
wasn't really thought of as in the realm of possibility at the beginning of this a few years ago. So, uh, yeah, incredible,
just massive honor and I'm very grateful to be included and I've gotten to know
a few of the people that have built it into what it is over the last few years.
And yeah, just can't say enough words of gratitude for being included in it.
Very cool. Huge honor.
I think a lot of people are very excited to see these two powerhouses in this space come together.
So incredible.
I've seen a lot of excitement on the timeline.
Very bullish.
So a little question about Token Zero.
How does it complete the narrative of this entire project?
So I think, well, it's the only one that's guaranteed to survive.
Because it's going to receive zero fire.
But it also represents the state of every plane or every simulation
before it receives any of the collector input.
I think the other sort of tradition in art blocks is
that this is the artist mint so the vast majority i think of participants in in curated own the the
artists themselves own token zero and i think it's just pretty interesting to make that available on the market beforehand
and um you know it representing the only guaranteed survival and it mapping to the
pricing mechanism in the same way where you uh having it in the collection experience tomorrow for zero just is nowhere near as interesting or
resonant in my mind as as having this like price discovery happen 24 hours before and another thing
that we played around with on the timing here is the auction itself will end um will end at the beginning of the larger mint unless there are
any bids in the last five minutes and if that's the case and they'll they'll run concurrently so
they'll kind of we'll see how that timing shakes out but hopefully uh hopefully that acts as well
as this like um uh because the the actual minting experience of the vast majority
of the pieces is 500 seconds long this creates this kind of billboard that exists for 24 hours
before is the is the hope to to to maybe get people curious about why is anybody interested
in this plane image of a you know wireframe plane and it's all the context that will come
after it that will make it interesting. It's really fantastic to see how much you're leaning
into the chaos mantic dynamic. I'm very excited to see what happens tomorrow and today.
excited to see what happens tomorrow and today.
Me too.
So what do you hope collectors take away beyond the mechanics?
Like what do you think would be one of the main takeaways from this project?
I think first of all, it's like maybe an understanding of this concept
or a meditation on this concept and where it might
show up elsewhere it certainly has been like a blind spot for me over the years and i think
secondly is also this like sort of celebration of the medium in a way that is typically framed
as a negative thing right where we're trying to be as transparent and upfront about the idea that this is,
has the potential to like cause congestion and spike, um, transaction fees,
who knows whether that will happen or not.
But I feel like there's an, the underlying message is like the price you pay for uh the medium is an inherent component of
the artwork itself another thing we worked on last year is a an open edition platform called
mint which is designed to reflect the economics of ethereum l1 at any given point you're collecting work and
there's obviously ways you can design mechanisms or build infrastructure that are layers and layers
out from the unlike from main net to or or kind of restrict the way people can acquire these things in advance, but it doesn't, I feel like so much of what happened in 2021 is,
is such a, uh, defining part of the medium itself and, and, uh, does communicate what's actually happening in a way that, that, um, in my mind, like validates it,
it validates the demand, the interest, the, um, the price people are willing to pay to
participate and, and own these things is, I think in some cases like should be celebrated and not,
um, you know, optimized the way to the point
where you're making these trade-offs you don't even understand. Like, if I'm, you know, paying
zero transaction fees for this thing, and it's, there's a thousand people trying to get it at the
same time as me. Why is that? It's because it exists on infrastructure that is nowhere near as
secure as Ethereum mainnet.
Incredible.
Well, Jack, thank you so much for joining.
I'm going to remind everyone that the auction happens tomorrow at 12pm ET,
and a portion of the proceeds will be donated
to the Node Foundation.
Actually, Jack, would you mind telling us why Node Foundation?
Well, I actually didn't know about that, so I'll have to inquire
with Art Blocks, but it's a good organization.
I love how...
I think that was actually a mistype or a misspeak.
That was a misspeak.
My bad.
Sorry about that, Jack.
I lied in public.
I will be embarrassed about this for the next 10 years.
Anyway, so tomorrow, 17th of September, 12 p.m. Eastern Time.
And thank you so much, Jack.
And I will see you all in the trenches tomorrow.
Thanks, everybody.
I appreciate everyone listening. Thank you.
Host
Art Blocks
from
Art Blocks
