Jason Bailey: Thanks for chatting, guys. I have a bunch of questions, but I’m happy to start with the easy one. What was the impetus or inspiration behind Autoglyphs?

John Watkinson: There is a lot of talk of art on the blockchain. With the CryptoPunks, all of the ownership and the provenance is permanently and publicly available, and those rules are set and fixed. And yet there's still a bit of an imperfection there in that the art comes from outside of the blockchain and stays out there, and it's just referenced by a smart contract. We don't have any complaints about the CryptoPunks, but it felt like there was an opportunity to go further. With Autoglyphs, we asked ourselves, “Can we make the entire thing completely self-contained and completely open and operating on the blockchain?”

JB: So the decision to literally store the artwork on the blockchain comes with some pretty hardcore restrictions, right? What sort of parameters are you now boxing yourself into once you make that decision?

JW: You have to have very small and efficient code generating the work. The actual output of the work has to be a very small amount of data or text because you can't have a large amount of data on the blockchain. So a small amount of efficiently running code, and fairly small, efficient output.

Those were the constraints, and they were pretty extreme. For a while thought we couldn't do it, or couldn't do it in a way that was satisfying for us. I was sort of exploring various generators and trying to make them more efficient, just binary image generators. I got to one that I thought was pretty good and I then experimented with it, trying to turn it into a smart contract, and I just couldn't get it to work. It was just hitting limits and wasn't working at all.

Then I tried it a few months later and just pushed it a little further and just got there. Still, the transaction fee of making an Autoglyph is going to be about half of an Ethereum block. So an Ethereum block is about eight million gas, so that's how much computation can happen in one mined block of Ethereum, and this is going to be three million gas, so it's almost half a block.

That means that the transaction fees will be relatively expensive - between one and two dollars - depending on the price of gas. So it's a pretty hefty transaction. If we went much more than that, we would already be outside of feasibility. If we went over eight million, it would be completely impossible, you wouldn't be able to do it.

JB: Got it. Dumb question: Does the code for generating the image live on the blockchain? Or is there actually an image on the blockchain?

JW: The code lives on the blockchain, and in fact, when you ask the blockchain for the image, it will just generate it again for you. That part happens on a end node, so that doesn't cost any actual money or gas. But whenever you say, “Give me the image for Autoglyph five", it will just generate it again for you based on the seed information that was created in the transaction.



Matt Hall: It's probably also worth making the distinction between the image and the instructions to generate different representations of it. The actual image you see on the website is not generated on the blockchain. The art, the instructions for how to write it are on the blockchain, but we make an SVG or PNG file on the web server. If that was your question, then no, the actual image data doesn't come off the blockchain, but there's an ASCII representation of exactly what that is on there. It's an ASCII art representation of the glyph.