Lucho Poletti Art

THE PRINT

30x20 inches, drawn at 18,000 pixels across, which is 600 pixels per inch at this size. A picture with four hundred things happening in it is worth nothing at a resolution that hides three hundred of them, and that's the entire reason I work this big. The detail holds closer than your eye can resolve from across the room. This one has to be walked up to.

Limited edition of 10, signed and numbered, on Hahnemuehle German Etching 310gsm.

Ships rolled in a rigid tube, professionally packaged, within 5 business days.If you want a specific edition number, email me before you check out. First asked, first held.

Each includes a certificate of authenticity timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain via Verisart.

Bitcoin accepted at checkout.

THE CONCEPT

Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted Dulle Griet around 1563. A woman in armor marching into the mouth of hell to loot it, while the village behind her tears itself apart over nothing. Art historians have spent four and a half centuries arguing about whether he was mocking her.

In mine the mouth is behind her and she's walking out. Past the men crawling on a floor paved with coins, past the vault door lettered DEBT, toward the arch marked EXIT. She's carrying a blade and a bag, and she's already decided.

Fiat is Latin. It means let it be done. It isn't a kind of money, it's a grammatical mood: an order in the passive voice, so nobody has to be named as the one giving it. This is the first of ten decrees. There are over 30 words cut into objects in this picture, hidden throughout. VERIFY carved above a gate with an archer standing inside, arrow already nocked, aimed at whoever is reading it. TRU$T on a lit furnace with a dollar sign where the S should be. KNOWLEDGE on a board lying face up in the dirt beside a skull with dollar signs for eyes. Two matched towers, one lettered VERITAS and one MENDACIUM, same lattice, same platform ring, same engineering, built by the same contractor and holding the same thing up.

I'm not going to list the rest. Finding them is the work.

TEN DECREES

Ten of the most crowded and most furious paintings Bosch and Bruegel ever made, redrawn for the fiat age. One every two weeks, from August 29th to January 3rd, the Genesis Block anniversary. Nine of the titles are orders. The last one is ours. Better money, better world.

THE PRINT

30x20 inches, drawn at 18,000 pixels across, which is 600 pixels per inch at this size. A picture with four hundred things happening in it is worth nothing at a resolution that hides three hundred of them, and that's the entire reason I work this big. The detail holds closer than your eye can resolve from across the room. This one has to be walked up to.

Limited edition of 10, signed and numbered, on Hahnemuehle German Etching 310gsm.

The print isn't inside the tube. It's rolled around it and wrapped in Kraft paper and layers of bubble wrap, then boxed with foam protection. If you want a specific edition number, email me before you check out. First asked, first held.

Each includes a certificate of authenticity timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain via Verisart.

Bitcoin accepted at checkout.

 

THE CONCEPT

Fiat is Latin for let it be done. A decree, issued once, with nobody asked. Lucrum is gain, the root of lucrative, and even in Rome it carried the smell of profit taken rather than earned. Fiat Lucrum. Let there be profit. Somebody decreed a gain into existence. The gain was real. It just wasn't theirs, and it wasn't new, and the entire right half of this piece is what that costs.

It's built on Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1490 to 1510, still the best-engineered argument in Western art: paradise on the left, the party in the middle, the price on the right. Bosch made the temptation beautiful so the judgment would land. I kept his structure and made it about the money.

What Bosch never had is plumbing. Water runs this whole canvas. It starts clean in the mountains, pours out of a machine in Eden, and gathers in a basin with an inspection window cut into its wall, fish visible behind the glass. Somebody built a viewing port into the reservoir. Sound money is auditable. You don't have to trust it. You can look.

Downstream, in the middle of the lake, a glass-domed tank on a brass pedestal. Its rim reads FRESH LIQUIDITY. Its bowl reads BOTTOMLESS. Eight people inside are having the party of their lives, and the floor is leaking. Orange fluid gushes from the base, spreads across the lake, drops over the falls, and past that the water is gone and where it's gone there's fire. The valve that controls the flow is bolted to the outside of the dome. Nobody at the party can reach it. Monetary policy is set outside the tank by people who aren't wet. That's the Cantillon effect, drawn. New money isn't neutral, because it doesn't arrive everywhere at once. Whoever stands nearest the tap drinks clean.

At dead center, a ring of fire on the ground with a field of crumpled dollars inside it, and standing in the money, one animal with two heads, a bear's and a bull's, and one rider between them. Same body, same owner. Whichever way it runs, the house takes the spread. A market denominated in something that burns doesn't have an up.

The hell on the right isn't demons and pitchforks. It's the financial system. Four money presses lettered QE-1, QE-2, QE-3 and QE-∞, fed by a jerrycan stenciled DEBT and wired to three piggy banks named SAVINGS, PENSION and NEST EGG. NEST EGG is cracked open and empty. A furnace the size of a house, cast with the words VALUE INCINERATOR. A broker with a rabbit's skull and a $ on it, selling 3X CROSS LEVERAGE across a desk, and hung from the front of that desk, hand-lettered: genius, we print, you pay, have a nice day. Four lines. That's the whole fiat system, and it's the easiest thing in the piece to walk past.

Past the smoke, a cruise ship with every light on, passing a burning coast at cruising speed. It isn't evacuating anyone. It's on a cruise. Weimar had nightclubs. The people closest to the printer don't suffer a debasement. They have the best years of their lives, in sight of the fire.

More than fifty lettered objects. BATCH 13 on a skull kept alive in a jar in paradise (the Federal Reserve Act, December 23, 1913). KEEP DANCING on a music box the dollar winds (Chuck Prince, Citigroup, July 2007). HAL FINNEY on a cryonic dewar in Eden, the only grave in the piece that isn't a punishment. The Bitcoin issuance schedule, 50 BTC down to 21,000,000, laid across the sky as airships and towers. NO CRYING IN THE CASINO. You'll still be finding new sentences in this thing in year three.

The mark is on both sides. The buyer at the leverage desk wears the ₿. The woman signing the MORTGAGE wears it. The crowd cheering a $ on a stick under an ETF placard wears it. Bosch drew his own neighbors into the center panel. I drew mine. And one man walks the incinerator floor unhurried, a lit lighter in one hand and a bag of cash stenciled BURN BAG in the other. He isn't printing it and he isn't signing for it. He's burning it.

Every mask in this piece was drawn by hand, hundreds of them, and every ₿ on every brow was placed one at a time. Crafted, not generated.

The full walkthrough, object by object, is in the Fiat Lucrum essay.

Better money, better world. Stay upstream.

TEN DECREES

Ten of the most crowded and most furious paintings Bosch and Bruegel ever made, redrawn for the fiat age. One every two weeks, from August 29th to January 3rd, the Genesis Block anniversary. Nine of the titles are orders. The last one is ours. Better money, better world.

THE PRINT

30 x 20 inches, drawn at 18,000 pixels across, which is 600 pixels per inch at this size. The detail holds closer than your eye can resolve from across the room. This one has to be walked up to.

Limited edition of 10, signed and numbered, on Hahnemühle German Etching 310gsm.

It ships rolled around the outside of a rigid core, wrapped in Kraft paper and layers of bubble wrap, then boxed with foam protection. If you want a specific edition number, email me before you check out. First asked, first held.

Each includes a certificate of authenticity timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain via Verisart.

Bitcoin accepted at checkout.

THE CONCEPT

Fiat is Latin for let it be done. A decree, issued once, with nobody asked. Palea is chaff: the dry husk around a grain of wheat, the part of the harvest nobody can eat.

Separating the two has never needed an authority. You throw the threshed harvest into the wind. The grain is heavy and drops back to the floor, the chaff is light and blows off, and whatever's left gets swept up and burned. Wind, weight and fire, and nobody votes on any of them. Wheat is wheat because of what it weighs.

Fiat Palea. Let there be chaff. Skip the test, count the chaff as the harvest, then print it, heap it on a wagon and call the heap wealth.

It's built on Bosch's Haywain Triptych and the Flemish proverb behind it: the world is a haywain, and each man takes what he can. Bosch painted the whole of society scrambling over a wagon of hay while the pope and the emperor ride behind it in no hurry at all. The grain was never on that wagon. In mine, the stalks are printed.

Mine is one panel, read left to right the way his three are, following the harvest from one end of the farm to the other. The garden on the left is where the money is counted, with BITCOIN on the tower and BETTER MONEY on the dome. Up the hill, an empty vault is lettered EX NIHILO, and the plaque outside it reads GOLD WINDOW CLOSED. Above the vault, a printer with NO LIMIT down its arm fills the wagon, and the scale chained to that arm shows a heap of bills still riding high against a few gold coins. Behind the wagon, a crowned skull on horseback carries the sign himself: LET THERE BE CHAFF.

In the middle of the crowd stands a fanning mill lettered SEPARATOR. It throws the bills off into a pit and leaves real grain on the ground, and nobody's fighting over the grain. At the far end there's a furnace with two mouths. The left one holds gold behind steel bars under a sign that reads YIELD, and the right one is full of burning bills under a sign that reads CHAFF ONLY. Gold comes out of a fire as gold.

The mask is on the pile, too. The man knee-deep in the bills wears it, and so does the climber on the ladder. Knowing what the money is has never stopped anybody from reaching for it.

Some of the words read from across the room, like EX NIHILO over the vault and 6102 on the crate. Others only show up once you're close enough to fog the glass: CUSTODY on a key tag smaller than a fingernail, NO REDEMPTION on a window nobody's opened since 1971. Every one of them is a choice you can see. Crafted, not generated.

The full walkthrough, object by object, is in the Fiat Palea essay.

Throw it in the air and see what comes down.

TEN DECREES

Ten of the most crowded and most furious paintings Bosch and Bruegel ever made, redrawn for the fiat age. One every two weeks, from August 29th to January 3rd, the Genesis Block anniversary. Nine of the titles are orders. The last one is ours. Better money, better world.

Inferno is where the fiat system lives — the descending circles of debt, inflation and manufactured dependence. The opening chapter of the Cypher Deos series drags Dante's hell into the present, painted in the style of the old masters, in a dramatic tall format built for the descent.

Its circles are populated by devilish bankers and their debt slaves — “Control the money, control the people” as the mode of operation, “In Debt We Trust” as the motto — a hell built not from fire and pitchforks but from compounding interest and a printer that never stops. Every renaissance needed its reckoning first. This is ours, and Bitcoin is the way out of it.

Limited edition of 21 prints, 60x26.67cm on Hahnemuehle Photo Rag 308gsm fine art paper. Each print includes a 1cm white border (total dimensions 62x28.67cm).

Each collector's bitcoin art print is hand-signed and numbered by Lucho and includes a certificate of authenticity timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain via Verisart. The full Inferno animation with audio is viewable as an Augmented Reality layer over the physical artwork using the free Artivive app. To request a specific edition number, contact lucho@luchopoletti.com.

Read the Cypher Deos story.

Purgatorio is the climb — the long ascent out of the fiat inferno toward something better. The middle chapter of the Cypher Deos series reimagines Dante's Divine Comedy for the age of monetary collapse, rendered in the visual language of the renaissance masters.

Read the panel closely and the symbolism unfolds: the Whore of Monetary Babylon, the Fictional Reserve Circus printing without reserves, three crucified cypherpunk martyrs — Ulbricht, Assange, Snowden — and the Four Horsemen of the Financial Apocalypse riding over the end of the fiat age. This is Bitcoin renaissance art: classical composition carrying a modern argument, that the way out of a broken system is a climb anyone can begin.

Limited edition of 21 prints, 60x53.33cm on Hahnemuehle 308gsm fine art paper. Each print includes a 1cm white border (total dimensions 62x55.33cm). Museum-grade wood framing with acrylic facing available as an option.

Each collector's print is hand-signed and numbered by Lucho and includes a certificate of authenticity timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain via Verisart. The full Purgatorio animation with audio is viewable as an Augmented Reality layer over the physical artwork using the free Artivive app. To request a specific edition number, contact lucho@luchopoletti.com.

Read the Cypher Deos story.

Paradisus is the world as it could be under sound money — the left panel of Cypher Deos, Lucho's Bitcoin renaissance triptych inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

Bosch painted paradise before the fall. Lucho paints it before the debt-fueled one: the garden as it stood before the printer, one of the defining works of the collection. Rendered in the classical language the series is known for, it carries the counter-argument to everything Inferno depicts — a world priced in honest money looks different from the one we inherited. That contrast is the whole point of hanging it.

Limited edition of 21 prints, 60x26.67cm on Hahnemuehle Photo Rag 308gsm fine art paper. Each print includes a 1cm white border (total dimensions 62x28.67cm).

Each collector's edition bitcoin art print is hand-signed and numbered by Lucho and includes a certificate of authenticity timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain via Verisart. The full Cypher Deos: Paradisus animation with audio is viewable as an Augmented Reality layer over the physical artwork using the free Artivive app. To request a specific edition number, contact lucho@luchopoletti.com.

Read the Cypher Deos story.

Intervention is the first act of the Moneta Divina triptych: the hand of the central bank reaching into the machine — meddling with rates, with supply, with the price of everything you own. Nobody voted for it. Everybody pays for it.

Rendered in the series' steampunk visual language, Intervention makes the invisible visible: monetary policy as machinery, operated behind closed doors. It's the diagnosis the rest of the triptych answers — because you can't opt out of a system you can't see. Lucho crafted this piece of crypto art to make the fiat machine legible, so the alternative becomes obvious.

Limited edition of 21. 72x72cm encapsulated acrylic panel with floating frame and wood hanger, ready to hang.

Each collector's acrylic panel includes a certificate of authenticity timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain via Verisart. The full Intervention animation with audio can be viewed as an Augmented Reality layer over the physical artwork with the free Artivive app.

Read the Moneta Divina story.

Transmutation is the alchemy of our age: money conjured out of thin air. The second act of the Moneta Divina triptych shows the printing machine at work — value appearing on one side of the ledger while it silently drains from your savings on the other.

The old alchemists failed to turn lead into gold. Central banks succeeded at something stranger: turning nothing into money, and money into nothing. Rendered in the series' steampunk visual language, Transmutation freezes that conjuring act mid-motion — and points at the exit. Bitcoin ends the trick: a money no one can summon, no matter who holds the machine.

Limited edition of 21. 72x72cm encapsulated acrylic panel with floating frame and wood hanger, ready to hang.

Each collector's acrylic panel includes a certificate of authenticity timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain via Verisart. The full Transmutation animation with audio can be viewed as an Augmented Reality layer over the physical artwork with the free Artivive app.

Read the Moneta Divina story.

Transcendence is the third movement of Moneta Divina, Lucho's steampunk Bitcoin triptych about the dollar-based fiat system and the divine alternative replacing it.

Where Intervention diagnoses and Transmutation converts, Transcendence ascends — economic energy channeled through seven chakras in a meditative journey beyond the physical world. It's the destination the whole triptych argues toward: past the machinery, past the printing, into money that answers to no hand at all. Large-format bitcoin wall art — crafted, not generated.

Limited edition of 21. 72x72cm encapsulated acrylic panel with floating frame and wood hanger, ready to hang.

Each panel comes with a certificate of authenticity timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain via Verisart. The full Transcendence NFT animation with audio can be viewed as an Augmented Reality layer over the physical artwork with the free Artivive app.

Read the Moneta Divina story.

“Out of thin air” is not a metaphor. It is the literal mechanism of fiat money — and this piece from the Moneta Divina series freezes that conjuring act in a single frame, at a scale made for desks, shelves and smaller walls.

It is the printing press as sorcery: the moment nothing becomes currency, and your savings become the sacrifice. Bitcoin ends the spell — 21 million, and not one more, no matter who holds the wand. That's the argument this acrylic panel makes every time someone asks about it.

Edition of 4 plus 1 artist proof. 40x40cm encapsulated acrylic panel: digital vector art printed in ultra-high resolution on PH-neutral fine art photo film (200gsm), mounted on a 3mm aluminum composite panel and encapsulated behind 3mm premium acrylic facing. Rear-side wooden hangers make it ready to hang out of the box.

A Verisart certificate of authenticity is embedded on the rear of the panel — numbered, digitally signed, timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain, and tamper-evident behind the wall mount.

Read the Moneta Divina story.

Complement your everyday wardrobe with this pigment-dyed denim hat! Made out of 100% cotton, the 6-panel cap offers a light feel, while the adjustable strap ensures a solid and comfortable fit.

• 100% cotton
• 6-panel unstructured cap with a low profile
• Soft crown
• 6 sewn eyelets
• 4 rows of visible stitching on the visor
• Adjustable strap
• Head circumference: 21.65″–25.19″ (55 cm–64 cm)
• Blank product sourced from China

This product is made especially for you as soon as you place an order, which is why it takes us a bit longer to deliver it to you. Making products on demand instead of in bulk helps reduce overproduction, so thank you for making thoughtful purchasing decisions!

Tie-dye for the decentralized. This oversized Satoshi Sees tee mixes counterculture color with the icon of monetary counterculture. A bitcoin t-shirt with room to breathe.

• 100% US grown cotton
• Fabric weight: 7.5 oz/yd² (254 g/m²)
• Oversized fit
• Ribbed neck
• Blank product sourced from Honduras

The surveillance state watches everything. Satoshi Sees stares back. This tee carries the counter-gaze — Lucho's flip of the all-seeing eye, taken off the pyramid and handed to the individual — printed on an oversized tie-dye canvas loud enough to match the message.

Wear it and you are not just wearing Bitcoin art. You are telling every camera in the room that you noticed.

Materials & fit: 100% US-grown cotton, heavyweight 7.5 oz/yd² (254 g/m²) fabric, oversized relaxed fit with ribbed neck. Five colorways: Milky Way, Navy/White, Sherbet Rainbow, Classic Rainbow, Black/White.

Size guide (inches):

	S	M	L	XL	2XL
Length	29	30	31	31½	33
Width	19½	21½	23½	25½	27½

Printed on demand and shipped to you — no overproduction, no warehouse of dead stock.

Corduroy comeback, cypherpunk edition. The Satoshi Sees corduroy hat pairs seventies texture with the icon of the peaceful monetary revolution. Bitcoin apparel that doesn't shout — it observes.

• 100% cotton corduroy
• Soft, unstructured crown
• Cotton twill sweatband and taping
• Adjustable buckle
• Blank product sourced from China