QUANTUM CATS 🐱🚀
A collection of 3333 cats, live and dead on Bitcoin 🐈
Quantum cats have taken over the god chain. But how? And why? And what are they, even? I’m more of a dog person myself—or so I thought, until these damned cats grew on me over time.
What first caught my eye was their founding team: Taproot Wizards, the og goats of Bitcoin.
But why start a new collection? I had so many questions, like…
I’m sure you do too.
Let’s dive in 🤙
QUANTUM CATS? LIKE SCHRODINGER’S CAT?
Yes, exactly. (Skip this part if you dislike physics, but not rly. Physics is cool!)
So this physicist named Schrodinger thought that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, when applied to everyday objects (like a cat), was absurd. So he devised this experiment to highlight the absurdity.
Let’s picture a box. Inside the box is a cat. The box is closed. There is a killing device in the box, which will kill the cat if activated. It’s activated if the quantum system assumes 1 of 2 of the quantum states. We do not know if the cat is alive or dead until the box is opened. In other words, until the box is open, the cat is both alive and dead: it is in a superposition of both states.
(How absurd!)
But in the quantum realm, a quantum system is in a superposition of states, at least until it’s measured, at which point the wave function and its superposition collapse into a definite state (i.e., when the box is open).
Pretty cool, right?
Anyway, that’s why half the cats in the collection are dead, and the other half are alive. In quantum mechanics, because the cat’s fate is tied to that of the quantum state, it’s said to be entangled. Therefore, if you hold both a live and a dead cat from the collection, you’ll have the purple entangled role in the Discord.
As of now, no one knows what these roles mean, but we keep doing the missions, with the hope that maybe one day, someday soon, op_cat will be enabled, and a chosen few of us may be called upon to ascend the hall of the Taproot Wizards 🧙♂️
Anyway. More on the collection.
WHY SO BULLISH ON QUANTUM CATS? 🐂
Quantum Cats are an ordinal project on a mission, a claim most ordinal projects cannot make. The mission is op_cat, which is an operation code for Bitcoin that would enable concatenation, a fancy way of saying that it allows for the combination of byte strings.
Think of lines of code as stacks of plates. The top plate must be cleared for the next plate to rise to the top. But combining the top 2 lines of code, if possible, would grant us various benefits, like improved script efficiency, introducing more smart contract use cases, and a native way to concatenate, rather than having to use workarounds with single lines of code.
That’s op_cat.
The collection, as mentioned in the Intro, is by the Taproot Wizards. I won’t get into them here, but they were early into ordinals, with the og design having originated in a subreddit. (Report on the wizards coming soon.)
THE MISSIONS
The QC community missions are fun. Every couple weeks, the team reveals a mission for the community to embark on. There are no promises of anything; only speculation by holders and others that maybe, just maybe, we might get one step closer to becoming a Taproot Wizard.
But even without the individual incentive, the community missions are appealing, partially because they’re fun, but maybe more significantly, the missions involve a grander sense of purpose and objective, that of improving Bitcoin and cementing Quantum Cats’ place in Bitcoin history.
The missions have led to some of the best community content going viral, like a song explaining op_cat and an animated vid of Avocato playing the BIP Land board game. (Yes, the project has a board game.) The project even has a children’s book out, and it’s badass:
The only other project that is comparable, at least to me, in terms of sense of mission and community impact, is OMB. (That’s Ordinal Maxi Biz for you non-Bitcoin bozos.)
One of OMB’s core missions is to Free Ross. Ross Ulbricht is the founder of Silk Road, which is where I was orange-pilled. OMB has also seen a successful auction, specifically at the first ordinal auction held by Christie’s.
Back to the cats. No mission is worthwhile without a few obstacles, right?
THE OBSTACLE
Despite what the photo above may tell you, Luke Dash JR. is a serious man. To his credit, he is an OG bitcoiner, although what he’s been up to since then has been questionable.
As a self-proclaimed protector of Bitcoin, he attempted to pass through an innocuously named improvement proposal that would it make it “effective with newer datacarrying styles”.
In actuality, this proposal would have targeted ordinals, and effectively purged them from the chain, disregarding them as spam. In other words, Luke was attempting to gaslight the entire Bitcoin community and pass this through like a sleazy politician, all in the name of defending Bitcoin’s purity 🤺
A LITTLE ABOUT THE TEAM
Investing in people is a solid investment strategy. And the Taproot Wizards team is fucking stacked.
In one corner, we’ve got “Internet Personality” Udi Wertheimer. (Udi also happens to be the cofounder of Taproot Wizards and Quantum Cats, a Bitcoin OG, and all-round nice guy.)
Eric Wall is his cofounder. He happens to auction these orbs, which are not part of Eric’s personal art project, although at first glance, you might be left wondering 🔮
The orb’s utility?
For 10 years after it’s auctioned off, you can ask it a question. And for 10 years, Eric will answer. Of course, the interactions aren’t constant; after every question, there’s a cooldown period of 7 days.
The other interesting aspect about this orb is its Harberger tax mechanism:
The keeper (i.e., holder) has to list it for sale, and every year, they are taxed 600%/year to maintain the orb, or it goes up for auction automatically. (The holder gets to keep the revenue, minus royalty.)
Interesting and fun design.
Now let’s look at a couple other members on the team.
Once Rijndael joined the Taproot Wizards as CTO, it was clear he had a pair of brains on him. You can tell by this fascinating article he wrote into the tech behind the cats, in particular how they were able to use recursion to reveal 40 layers of traits, which change over time.
What’s super cool about this is that they introduced the Gold Cape trait at one point, which gets you a Taproot Wizard. So far, only one cat got it at reveal, so I’m curious to see how this will change.
The Gold Cape announcement was made in tandem with the first Gold Cape cat reveal, which was unfortunate for the holder, who had it listed at the time. (It sold instantly, and the buyer auctioned it off and made a nice 💰.)
So who’s the artist behind these wizards and cats? FAR is his name. And he’s a “real” artist, meaning he does other cool shit like this:
He’s also kinda obsessed with animated bees, like this:
I’m sure I’m leaving out a bunch of amazing people on the team, or folks who ought to be mentioned. (Tyler Whittle aka Dr. DAO, dazza9, and himorasi come to mind.)
The Taproot Wizards and Quantum Cats lore is a long one. Oh well. Maybe we’ll dive deeper in the Taproot Wizards report 🧙♂️
NOW, ABOUT THOSE DAMNED CATS 🐱🐉
Confession time: It’s not my first attempt at writing about Quantum Cats. Many a time I’ve sat at the keyboard and begun my research in earnest, finding myself going down a never-ending rabbit hole of Schnorr signatures, blocksize wars, The BIP process, recursion, etc. etc.
But what I’ve come to realize, this time around, is that the Taproot Wizards team has done a fantastic job of building the lore around the Cats, and embedding them into Bitcoin Culture.
By using the Op_cat mission—among other things (e.g., a Quantum Cat auctioned off at Sothesby’s; image above)—the team has managed to take this set of cat jpegs from nothing to one of the top ordinal collections in the space. (Hats off.)
Where these cats go next is beyond me, but as a fellow holder, I’ll be on the train to finding out. What is certain is that the future value of cats, to an extent, lies in the hands of its holders, as we continue to complete missions and spread the gospel of opcat from the good orange book 📙