The vanity addresses
hs1qx6c9h9qpc66r4x6cung3fu5ypmks6uh3wtar0t
Used to OPEN, BID, REVEAL, REGISTER, TRANSFER, and FINALIZE all 22 names in batched transactions. The Major Arcana is a complete set! The names all stay together as a family, and remain in order in each transaction. This public-key-hash address took 20,578,625 brute-force iterations to find.
hs1ql9tv537nyqemw9sux2ksdykr26rn3x588ux4caul03jfkxdwanrsltar0t
Used to lock the name for the Shakedex auctions using HIP-0001. This script-hash address took 4,368,876 brute-force iterations to find.
The ASCII art
Each ASCII art Tarot card is stored as a series of 23 TXT records, taking up exactly 512 bytes of resource data on the Handshake blockchain, which is the maximum limit of available data space per top-level domain. The cards are 22 x 20 characters plus 2 extra characters for the artist's initials. DNS TXT records may only contain printable ASCII characters (RFC1035, RFC1464) meaning each Tarot card had to be composed exclusively from this palette of shapes:
!"#$%&'()*+-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~
Every single character in this palette was used at least once in the set. Some characters are extremely rare and only appear once or only in one card! The frequency of some of these symbols may help the reader find meaning in the details of the artwork.
The font and colors
For the website and the color prints I wanted to infuse as much extra style as possible in to the raw bytes that represent
these non-fungible tokens on the Handshake blockchain. The color palette is derived using RGB hex codes from
the Handshake genesis block
hash:
5b6ef2d3c1f3cdcadfd9a030ba1811efdd17740f14e166489760741d075992e0
I knew I wanted a dirty old typewriter look to the font, and searched for available monospace fonts with that
aesthetic. I found a few good ones but some were missing a few of the characters or had awkward styles for some
numbers or punctuation marks. I ended up using
FontForge
to combine four separate fonts I liked, in order to get every single character exactly right. All four of these
fonts have open-source licenses and are used with permission (purchase / donation) by their authors:
Luck
My first plan actually failed: I wanted to solo-mine a block directly to the hs1qx6c9h9qpc66r4x6cung3fu5ypmks6uh3wtar0t
address, to make The Handshake Tarot appear magically from the most minimal of origins. I had access to a
Goldshell HS-BOX and an HS-3 and set up a stratum server just for the tar0t vanity address. After more than 60 days
I abandoned the idea and resorted to funding the auctions personally.
I did end up with some good luck though, the thing I was actually the most worried about: winning twenty two Handshake auctions! I really didn't want to have to break up the pattern of the batched BID/REVEAL transactions and luckily, I didn't have to. There were no other bids on any of the major arcana names, and I won all twenty auctions for free.
Acknowledgements
My knowledge and interpretation of The Tarot is heavily influenced by Alejandro Jodorowsky and especially his book The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards. The artwork in The Handshake Tarot is based on a combination of The Marseilles Tarot and The Rider-Waite Tarot. More of my spiritual inspiration comes from the music, art, and lives of Star Service, Ghost of Lightning, and Cherushii.
Thanks to Buffrr for answering all my weird questions about DNS, FistFullOfAss for his excitement and advice about the auctions and donation to HNS Development Fund, and 0xStefan for giving The Handshake Tarot a special presence on Niami.
Shout out to Cryptograffiti for setting the gold standard in crypto art, and FractalEncrypt for finding spirituality in the numbers. Thank you to the Handshake Community for being awesome and tot The CEO of Handshake for not existing. ;-)
I acknowledge that this is not the first ASCII-art Tarot Deck, nor is it the first crypto-related NFT Tarot Deck.
To Daisy Bounce, my xviii, vi, iiii.