Aryan Jabbari | Connect the World

Do you see Scarce City more as a marketplace or as an Art Gallery?

At the moment, Scarce City is an art gallery as we specialize in art. However, we’re inching away from art at the moment and broadening our scope.

I’ve got some features in the pipeline that will open it up to different types of Bitcoin goods which will make it more of a marketplace.

What is your biggest goal with Scarce City? Is that getting more adoption, your belief in NFT art or something else?

Scarce City’s goal is to be a hub of Bitcoin culture. It’s an honor for us to onboard newbies to Bitcoin through our space and that’s definitely a second goal in our mind.

At Scarce City you believe that everything needs to be sold pseudonymous, borderless, permissionless, trust minimized, and verifiable authenticity and supply. Why is this a perfect fit when thinking of Bitcoin and Lightning technology?

I have to thank my cofounder, Chris, here as he orange-pilled me and showed me the Bitcoin way.

At Scarce City, we don’t require our sellers or buyers to KYC and will continue to serve the Bitcoin community without KYC as long as legally possible. This is made possible through Bitcoin and Lightning’s borderless and permissionless properties. If we accepted fiat, we’d need all this unnecessary information on our users. With the way we’re set up, we know our users via their pseudonyms and we’re extremely happy with that.

Furthermore, we don’t care which fiat borders you’re surrounded by. In the end, we’re all Bitcoiners and if you’ve got beautiful Bitcoin art (I’d love to see more Lightning art, by the way!) to share, we’d love to to have it on our platform.

Honorary founder Chiefmonkey seeded the artist community and had the original idea for the bitcoin-based Auctions. He also built a Lightning Powered and Twitter integrated marketplace where anyone can sell anything and it’s called plebeian.market. Still a minimum viable product and proof of concept. Do you think these initiatives will be a big driver for adoption of Lightning?

Chiefmonkey, what an innovator. Initiatives like these are extremely important in building a Bitcoin economy around lightning technology. I’ve seen plenty of potential bidders and buyers that understand how to use Bitcoin but never had an excuse or need to learn how to use lightning.

With the low barrier of entry (download Wallet of Satoshi or Breez, deposit some sats, and get to zapping QR codes), it’s not too difficult to explain how to use lightning. With a piece of art that they want in their mind combined with the usually curious Bitcoiners mindset, they’re normally enthusiastic to do it and give lightning a shot.

And once you go lightning, you never go back.

What’s the biggest problem you encountered with building Scarce City?

At Scarce City, we take collateral via lightning or on-chain Bitcoin and refund the sats after an auction via lnurl-withdraw QR codes.

I read lnurl-withdraw’s spec and went on to code up an implementation. In hindsight, I could have just used something like lnbits to manage all that but I was new to all of this and didn’t realize this was a pretty much solved problem. I basically reinvented the wheel…incorrectly. My lnurl-withdraw’s implementation had a bug in it that allowed some users to double dip their withdrawal.

I went into the lnurl mafia Telegram group and asked for help. A user by the name of “fiatjaf” offered his time and walked through the code I wrote. He found the root of the bug pretty quickly and helped me patch it up. He even complimented my code and said, “that’s beautiful code you have there.”

It was a few months after that that I realized fiatjaf is actually a big deal around these parts and that he’s humble enough to help a newbie with his code. And, given that fiatjaf is a god amongst men, that compliment means a whole lot now.

It’s possible to pay for Pepes from any Lightning Wallet. The Pepes are sent to a Counterparty Wallet. Can you explain what a Counterparty Wallet is used for and how the buying and selling process works?

Counterparty is a protocol built on top of Bitcoin. It encodes data into the OP_RETURN of a Bitcoin transaction. A Counterparty node can decode this data. This data includes all Counterparty sends, dispenses (sales on Counterparty), orders, issuances, etc.

A Counterparty wallet is mostly a Bitcoin wallet with the added functionality of interacting with a Counterparty node to display assets that a specific address or set of addresses owns. It also allows the sending and issuing of Counterparty assets.

In the beginning of this year the Rare Pepe Wallet announced they were pausing all withdrawals, swap and transfers between accounts due to the extreme market conditions. What is de RPW exactly and do you know what happened?

Heh, Joe Looney is going to kill me. He is the creator of Rare Pepe Wallet and a good friend of mine. I like to play occasional jokes on him and his Rare Pepe Wallet creation. When the Celsius drama happened (where they refused to allow withdrawals), I edited their email to make it look like Rare Pepe Wallet did not allow withdrawals. I guess my Photoshop skills are just that good where a lot of people actually thought it was a Rare Pepe Wallet that had that outage. Sorry Joe!

A lot of people have a strong negative opinion about NFT’s. Can you explain here why you think it also can have a positive side?

I believe the bulk of the negative opinions about NFTs come from the scams and rug pulls seen over the past few years, especially with the explosion of NFTs into mainstream culture and media. And, quite frankly, a lot of the criticism may be justified. It is a scam-heavy space but I don’t know if that means 100% of every single NFT project ever is a scam. Furthermore, a lot of the scams you’ll see is happening over in the Ethereum and whatever other shitcoin space out there.

The Counterparty community is one of the earliest “NFT” communities (though the community existed way before the buzzword NFT was a thing). It stemmed from a community that wanted to create scarce assets. They used the technology available at the time which was the Counterparty protocol. The community is quite an honest bunch and, while not entirely scam-free, has a LOT fewer scams than their Ethereum counterparts.

Anywho, with that said, NFTs can just be fun in the same way trading cards or comic books can be fun. A community is built around that for us to geek out and talk about. Not everything on Bitcoin needs to be so serious.

I believe that there are a lot of artists that want to sell digital aspects of their work, but only when this works on Lightning. How is it possible to verify authenticity with the use of Lightning for example? And is it possible to prove ownership?

I don’t think it’s currently possible but we’re a short-time away from having it available to us via Taro. Taro will allow for assets to be issued on the bitcoin blockchain and then transferred over LN. It may not be 100% LN but it’s 100% and is coming soon.

I went to art school myself and remember it being very conservative. I must admit that I understand and like the possibility to sell art with Lightning and also to create and sell digital art. But I believe that the mainstream find the work presented in the auctions on Scarce City difficult to understand or see it as art.
Do you think this is a generation problem or a problem of bad publicity of NFT’s or something else?

It’s two things: bad publicity around “NFTs” and gatekeeping by the old art world in terms of “what is art?”

I’ve explained the bad publicity around NFTs. I cringe every time I see a new NFT scam (thankfully they’re normally on Openshit, erm, I mean Opensea) because I know Bitcoin assets will be associated with these shit scams.

There’s this gatekeeping that frowns upon digital art. If they’re not frowning down on digital art, they’re frowning down on monetizing digital art. All the gatekeeping is a bit silly, really. Some of the digital art that is frowned upon is created by well-respected artists in the “contemporary art” world, sold as a physical, and then sold as an digital asset. If digital asset collectors want to collect and trade these assets and are doing so with their own free will, then what’s the problem?

Do you think that initiatives like Scarce City will have their part in changing the way existing art galleries and museums look at art?

Scarce City’s physical presence at events like Bitcoin Conference and NFT.NYC shows that these digital assets that everyone frowns upon can be impressively artistic.

We recently held a Pepe Gallery which was basically an art gallery full of Pepes in Tribeca, New York City. We had tons of traffic off the street who were genuinely impressed by the art. Some even wanted to bid on the art and take it home. They unfortunately balked when we explained that we only accepted Bitcoin.

Will Scarce City open his doors for more than only Bitcoin collectibles or is this not your goal?

I don’t think, say, a car engine is something we’ll have on Scarce City. Scarce City looks to push Bitcoin culture forward.

Because you’re working with a small team you now curate new submissions through a form on the site. What is your current growth and when can we expect more collaborations or new artists in your gallery?

We have a bit of a bottleneck in terms of submissions as we need to look through all submissions and then take those submissions and enter it into our system. I’m working on allowing submissions to create their own pages on Scarce City.

Our capabilities are growing little by little and, now without a focus on an upcoming gallery, you can expect a lot more collaborations and new artists this year.

Do you also see it as your task to convince other digital marketplaces of the Bitcoin/Lightning only possibilities?

I don’t evangelize too much but when I see a chance to convince someone to accept Bitcoin/Lightning, I usually take it. As for going Bitcoin/Lightning only, I know a lot of people are struggling to make ends meet and it may be difficult for them to pay their fiat bills by going Bitcoin-only. Soon enough the Bitcoin economy will be strong enough to allow this though!