Fridso.eth

Today I sold my V2 punk to purchase more V1s. It's becoming clear that the V1/V2 punk argument rests solely on the latter group's ability to brand themselves as "real" through their social network. If the story of the flawed V1 contract were to play out today, duplicating and then airdropping the new collection would be an unacceptable solution. This made all punks 1 of 2s, with V1 punks as the “first editions” of these assets. In all other collectible classes, the earlier editions of something are more sought after. This is also generally true of the scarcer misprint variants of assets - there are far fewer V1s still in circulation. The solution was accepted at the time of the V1 exploit because there were minimal options with which to view onchain assets - what Larva Labs platformed was what everyone got to interact with. With the introduction of third party marketplaces and the V1 wrapping contract, this ceased to be the case. Very few people in the community back in the day had enough foresight to realise that all LL had done was sweep the originals under the rug. The narrative that V2s are in some way superior is defended largely by the snobbish type of collector who judges art only by its price, and has an emotional attachment to the status that owning this asset gives them. They see attempts to discuss the onchain truth of the story as an attack on their gated social group and the sunk cost of their investment. This is ignorance of the provenance uniquely available through the blockchain, and an elitist rejection of another community as a way of preserving capital; they are neither ‘crypto’ nor ‘punk’. Any newcomer to onchain collecting, being exposed to the publicly verifiable and immutable information available surrounding these collections, would judge V1s - at less than 10% the price of the V2s - as the more grounded choice. There are a handful of common counterarguments. V1s are unable to use their original in-contract marketplace because of the exploit, but this experience has been abstracted into existence. The chains of ownership are different as they fork after the V2 airdrop, meaning they have different social networks, but V1s have a nascent community capturing the more historically minded. V1s do not receive the same IP rights as V2s, although onchain PfP IP has proven to be rarely utilized. There are 20,000 punks. The V1 punks are the original cryptopunks that were claimed on June 9th, 2017. The later V2 punks have the backing of their creators and are more well known, benefitting disproportionately from this publicity. This is a fascinating case of art undergoing a literal schism - one collection to serve the will of the artist, and the other becoming inseparable from its foundations, the machine it was built to showcase. This machine will outlive us, and with it, the story of how a failure of imagination led to the burying of the truth of its icons.