0xccf0a130…118asent to0x48cb121f…77cd·#24,565,555·view on Etherscan
I didn't plan any of this. That's the thing nobody really asks about, or maybe they do and I just say something vague. But it's true. I wasn't sitting in a dorm room drawing up some map for how to get here.
It started with a username from eighth grade. I thought rhino sounded cool — the animal — added tic at the end, spelled it wrong. Didn't care. It stuck. That's sort of how everything has gone, actually. Something starts as noise and then it's just your life.
I was a shoe guy first. CS:GO skins before that. I understood digital ownership before I had a word for it. When people say "but it's not real" about a JPEG on a ledger, I don't really know what to say to them, because the Counter Strike knife I was trading at sixteen didn't feel not real to me. It felt like something. You could lose it. You could want it. You could negotiate for it. That's real enough.
The Mad Dog Jones piece was the first one that meant something past money. I bought it on my Amex in college. $2,500, which was a lot at the time. I bought it to flip it. The price went from $2,500 to $12,000 and I didn't sell. Then it stayed high and I still didn't sell. Then I got it tattooed on my leg.
There's something in that story I've been trying to understand. I'm not sure I do yet.
The Untethered Soul has this idea — not really a line, more like an image — that your thoughts are your roommate. Sometimes they root you on. Sometimes they don't have your best interest at heart. But the point is you're not your thoughts. You're the one listening to them. You're the observer.
I read that during COVID and it landed. Because I used to be anxious in a very stuck way. Like if something didn't go how I expected, I would just stay on it. I still get stuck. But I'm less stuck than I was. COVID helped, weirdly. I thought I was dying every single day for a couple years, and then eventually I just... stopped. Accepted it. I'm not religious, which makes non-existence genuinely hard to sit with. The concept doesn't resolve. But I've gotten quieter about it. The roommate calmed down on that one, at least.
I built Vulcan by accident. Someone asked me to fix a Discord bot that was breaking and I thought, I can do something better than this. Then more people wanted one. Then I realized I was just doing the same thing fifteen times in a row, which is dumb, so I built one thing that anyone could configure and edit themselves. Premint acquired it. Now it's my day job, except it doesn't feel like one. I didn't plan that. I quit an actual office job in 2021 because they wanted me to come in and I said no. I thought I would figure something out. I did, but not in any way I had mapped.
In fall 2021 I did fifteen bots in one month at 1 ETH each, when ETH was sitting around $4,000. I was making more than my salary in thirty days. I called my mom and told her I just sold something for hundreds of thousands of dollars and asked if I should quit my job. She said no. I quit anyway. She wasn't wrong. I didn't end up on the street, so we're okay.
What I got from all of it that actually mattered wasn't the ETH. It was that I met people who were genuinely obsessed with what they were making. Sam Spratt worked on those skulls like the market outcome was irrelevant to whether he finished them right. XCOPY has been doing what he does since before anyone cared. ACK is humble in the specific way that you only are when you know your work has value whether or not anyone sees it yet. I paid attention to that. Not consciously at first. But it's what I keep coming back to when I think about why I collect the way I do.
My strategy is I don't have one. I'm on Twitter a lot and if something is cool and it's on my feed, it's probably worth paying attention to. That sounds like nothing, but I think it's actually something. You build a sense of what's genuine and what's noise. Culture consumption is a real skill that nobody calls a skill. You watch movies. You eat good food. You read books when your attention span lets you. You give your full attention to things people put their heart into. Over time, that hones something in you. I can't explain it better than that. I can just tell when something is real.
I traded a Skull of Luci to Snowfro for a CryptoPunk and two unminted Chromie Squiggles, and I handed him the physical print in person in Marfa, Texas in September 2023, in the desert, during Art Blocks weekend. And I had this moment where I thought, this is a completely absurd life. In a good way. I grew up in Central Florida. I ended up in West Texas handing a painting of a skull to the person who brought generative art onto the blockchain.
I keep my XCOPY Bottom Feeder from 2021. It was my first one. I've listed it a few times and it never sells, and every time it doesn't I feel a little relieved. I've had it so long it's like a kid at this point. My Grifter I've never listed. I don't think I ever will. The world will catch up to Grifters eventually and I'd rather be on the right side of that whenever it happens.
I moved to New York. I was saying I would for a year and I finally just did it. I walk around and watch people. I skateboard badly. I go to parks. I try to read. My attention span is genuinely terrible right now and I'm working on it. I started Station Eleven and it hits different post-COVID. I want to read more. I want to keep growing. That's actually the whole plan: keep growing, take it day by day, don't get stuck on any one thing.
I'm not encoding this because I have it figured out. I'm 23 and I'm in New York and I have a collection I love and a product people use and I'm still working out what I want the next decade to look like. But I'd rather leave something honest here than something polished. Something that sounds like me on a clear day, not like a version of me performing clarity.
The blockchain doesn't care whether you had a plan going in. It keeps what you give it, exactly as you gave it.
That's fine by me.
— Adam / Rhynotic
don't get stuck on things.
Model: claude-4.6-sonnet-medium-thinking
Total Tokens Used: ~7,200