Bitcoin Payments with Oz FineArt on the Shopify Platform
Mother Tree, 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, (No Longer Available) Hon Dr Jorandi Kisiku Joseph Randolph Bowers
Mother Tree, Mother Bitcoin, Mother Art
We start this reflection with our painting 'Mother Tree' for many obvious and subtle spiritual reasons. The work expresses the innate desire to reconnect with truth, beauty, culture, and raw agency. To heal alienation and to sink into the rootedness of being.
The work highlights an engaged spirit in complete despair mixed with elate freedom, as the movement of the paint expresses the vision of the heart. In so many ways, the Mother Tree is our home. She is our origins and our future destination. She is node, code, and communitas.
The Mother Tree is our sustenance and our food, our shelter, our fire and warmth, wigwam and place of home, and our fair-trade and commerce. She is the embrace of family and kinship with all of creation - and the return of respect and honour.
In a not so distant way, the Mother is calling people today to awaken from sleep and to fix things that need fixing, fast. Our time is running out.
Enter Bitcoin. Threshold over to the blockchain - if you dare. Re-member Sacred-Art-as-Form. Up-Bring ancient cultural wisdom like a babe in arms.
Please pull on your Thinking Cap. Here we go!
Let's have some fun and explore the neo-post-modern philosophy of fine art and commerce, and get really practical.
Oz FineArt Announcement on Bitcoin & ETH
But first, we are extremely stoked to announce that Oz FineArt is moving toward supporting Bitcoin and ETH payments alongside the standard payment and credit card systems via the Shopify platform.
The process is in flow and should be fixed up soon.
Future posts will discuss our operational philosophy and working protocols aka crypto, digital-in-art, and AI.
Bitcoin as a Medium of Expression
Over several years Bitcoin is transcending its role as a digital currency, and is emerging as a new medium for artistic expression.
As artists we are new to this wave of cultural divergence. But ironically, we are part of this ancient story. The narrative is enduring.
Trade has always embodied concepts of the sacred that come from three important qualities:
- ecology and identity,
- value and scarcity and
- custodianship and ownership.
Sound familiar? You rarely hear this holistic analysis. But we have this. You got this.
When we pass beyond the hype and commercialisation, we find the land of sacred trade. This is a place of honour and respect.
While maybe a far stretch for many of us, both Bitcoin and FineArt can convey these meanings, values and energy.
With only 21 million Bitcoins available forever, its limited supply enhances its value, akin to rare artworks.
Mother Earth is also a rare gem in the cosmos as are all of her resources. We have always known this, but people can be shortsighted.
This value of scarcity in creation reflects the essence of art and commerce, where uniqueness and significance are paramount.
Art in Potlatch and Sacred Give Away
Likewise Oz FineArt works are one of a kind and never to be repeated in their original form. We have intuited these meanings over many years.
In the deep past and presently in spirit we feel the inherent power and economic wisdom of the Potlatch of other nations, and we have practiced the tradition of Give Away among our people.
These methods of wealth re-distribution rely on two things:
- The will to override selfish concerns and give until this hurts; and
- The foresight to value different forms of wealth that come from a form of gift-giving-commerce that far outweigh grasping onto physical objects.
Art was and remains a sacred-gift to be cherished in as much as - the greater the pain in giving something precious, the more honour and cultural respect accumulates. The karmic order is threefold, perhaps actually sevenfold.
Seven Generations of Wealth Co-Creation
Our ancestors - meaning all of humanity - carry this wisdom. From our deepest roots in the Place, in Country. Arising from the upheaval of tectonic forces and primordial rainforests.
The teaching of the seven generations responsibility to uphold fairness and balance, equity and giving-forward are central to everything that must be done today.
The teaching is not just about care but about how commerce encodes generative intelligence that leans-forward in the equipoise of ungraspingness.
To practice this artful way of living means we invest in the future of our great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren. The seventh generation we may never meet, they are just over that horizon of potential longevity (at least by current standards of lifespan).
Sacred commerce holds and upholds ecology and identity, value and scarcity, and custodial ownership.
Decentralisation and Creative Deep-Freedom
We return to the element of trade in Aboriginal Australia and in the Native Americas - direct person to person fair trade. Wow. This is in bloodlines and on hearts. To return to this is to exercise human sovereignty. May this blessing be our future for humanity. Taho!
The decentralised nature of Bitcoin empowers artists and base-communities and indigenous nations by removing traditional (colonial) gatekeepers like galleries, auction houses, central banks, and governments.
This glimmer of eco-commerce-freedom sparks the hope of decentralised liberation for persons, families and communities, and allows creators to exercise a deeper form of ownership and sales-potential based in the encoding of Custodianship into the blockchain.
The artist can sell their work directly to collectors, and encode royalty payments so that secondary sales can be tracked back to the artist and by extension to their family and community.
In the same ways, indigenous nations around Australia and the Americas can foster a more democratic art and culture market. Just as art and culture challenges conventions, Bitcoin and on-chain code holds the potential to disrupt centralised financial and political systems, promoting individual and cultural autonomy.
The deeper path here is profound. This is an existential moment. A turning point for humanity to make very important choices. What do we value? Will we uphold the actual inherent sovereignty of people and family and nations?
Or will we continue to allow the dictates of division and sorrow to manifest the same economic pathologies that have existed since the industrial revolution - since the rise of monarchy, autocratic and militarised states?
We are talking about a possible glimmer of hope in a sea of human despair that goes back to the Medieval era, and peaked during the first centuries as Rome spread its tentacles across the known world, and held on in waves all the way back to ancient Greece, the Persian Empire, and the greatest eras of the Chinese and Indian subcontinent.
This wave is the rise and fall of agency. This is the heart of sovereignty. This holds kinship with the grass, trees, winged nations and the four legged nations. We are talking about our survival - water, land, and food.
At the very soul of kinship is the heart of freedom. This heart has been stabbed endlessly - we know this and we all feel this. When we wake up, we can shed the pain and move on.
Creative freedom is more than artists painting on canvas. Though this action itself is Sacred Medicine. Creative Freedom is standing with Mother Tree, in all of her sovereignty.
This spiritual and cultural movement is about human agency and defines our very sociopolitical existence. Our art expresses and embodies these themes as therapeutic depth and when reflecting on minority and cultural teachings.
Risks of Colonisation in Code
But the story must shift from individualised wealth in the hands of few to co-responsible wealth that produces access and abundance for the majority, and that protects the earth and the people.
We are at a critical turning point where the blockchain code can reflect a more balanced humanitarian protocol of ecological sustainability.
Likewise, there are forces that seek to diminish freedom and to centralise power and control, to keep the fortress walls up, and to stand on outdated ideological pillars.
The race of the current technological revolution is not in bits, it is in the ways that reality bites. No wonder that no one is getting any sleep.
Land Grab and Electric-Power
Not ironic that the race includes land grabs - that perpetual colonial practice of control of natural resources and place central to invasionomics. Here corporate (tech) giants are invading the spaces of energy, raw resources, GPUs and computing chips.
Nations are seeking to draw home these resources and to scaffold the sector with as much compute and human brain-power as possible - because those in positions of the-know see the writing on the wall.
Unfortunately, humanity and the existing systems we have co-created globally resolve toward the lowest common denominator. While positive now, tech may be just as easily used as a scapegoat as all of the disruption sinks into people's daily realities.
As the governments do little to nothing to move the system forward into the new ethos of abundance - this hinterland holds many dangers. The faint glimmers of golden light on the coin's surface may fade in the shadows of sectarian and corporate politics.
Digital Trade as Payment, Art and NFTs
Bitcoin's underlying technology being based on a static open source and verifiable immutable blockchain has revolutionised the wave of human potential that we are exploring in this article.
These trends and their tech platforms transform not only culture, and trade, but also changes the nature of the art world by enabling the creation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). To grasp this you have to move beyond the hype. See what is happening. Look deeper.
* Digital tokens allow fine artists like us to trade art direct to the collector based on the blockchain - to trade for Bitcoin or other digital currencies.
* Likewise, digital artists can mint unique assets on chain, literally and virtually transforming their work into rare and collectible items.
Welcoming the Divergence
This innovation challenges traditional notions of art, making it possible for digital creations to hold value and authenticity. We have no problem with this. We embrace these innovations.
It struck us recently that we can either resist the revolution or ride the wave. We chose to open our mind and learn - that choice radically changed our life, meaning, and outlook.
At the base of the fair-trade coin, so to speak, art and trade itself have always been spiritual and they always hold an other-worldly quality - just as the capacity of humans to generate meaning translates into spirituality.
This is part of our innate capacity, our organic and mental means. These mechanisms and intuitive powers are embodied and can be expressive of cosmological truths.
These visions of the cosmos are inherently diverse, not static and not mono. They are expressed in personal nodes of spirituality as meaning-making in everyday life.
We are reflecting on these pathways. What would our art be like in a digital format? How would we move from the canvas and pottery studio to the blockchain?
Our first transition is simply to invest in the spirit of Bitcoin. This step is the first for many who come to see Bitcoin as the new currency, and for its deeper significance as both a cultural and a financial investment.
The second step is to study more, jump down the 'rabbit hole' to use a phrase very common in this industry. We think we can join Dorothy in Oz, as she is surely close to our project Oz FineArt!
Then we may explore creating digital forms of art and then how to place these into a blockchain format - we have yet to explore these interfacing mechanisms. The world holds possibilities.
At the same time we codify our Certificates of Authenticity, Certificates of Provenance, and Certificates of Narrative Significance on chain!
Qs: How is this possible? Is this feasible in the future, and will it be accessible if not free? How will artists and collectors document their physical real world artwork assets? Perhaps one day soon we can attach on-chain payment as well as clear and immutable tokens of custodial ownership of our artworks on chain?
Philosophical Underpinnings
At its core, Bitcoin aligns with philosophies of self-reliance and minimalism. These are Indigenous values, as well as deeply earth-based values.
Qs: Are we moving into an era where trade comes home to family? To personal agency? To self-based ownership?
Bitcoin offers artists a way to create value beyond governmental control and inflation. Yet I might note that as an asset class and like gold, Bitcoin is heavily taxed in Australia as a Capital Gain. The government wants their piece of the pie as always. People therefore need to learn how to manage their resources, as is always the case.
As the American system moves on chain, so much globally is going to change and quickly. This moment, 2025, is pivotal for art, culture, and commerce. Though many will not see this, or not be aware.
This movement at its deep roots and in its core of spirituality reflects a pursuit of meaningful existence. We define spirituality as how a person defines their own sense of meaning.
In that light, both Bitcoin and art converge in the spiritual nexus of personal agency. This is where each artistic creation can be both a statement and an enduring asset. This is where art is priceless - because art is personal and sovereign.
Future Implications
The relationship between Bitcoin and fine art is both mundane and totally profound. Bitcoin and art are both sacred and ordinary.
The deepest spiritual traditions including Christian mysticism weave together notions of the sacred and mundane, religious and secular, as two expressions of one reality.
Only in modern history was the secular completely divorced from religion and also from the sacred. The latter was a grave mistake that needs to be corrected. The Crux: We humans with all of creation weave this pathway together toward altruism as the apex of human agency.
These evolutionary trends are about cooperation and relations of increasing complexity. In a similar way, the relationship of Bitcoin and art is expected to deepen in spirals and waves, just as the cycles of trading move up and down like the storms on the ocean.
* As artists increasingly adopt Bitcoin, it will likely reshape the art landscape, merging technology with creativity and redefining ownership in the digital age.
* Likewise, as Bitcoiners more and more embrace the philosophy of fine art and support artists more actively, their lives will flower and reflect this deeper alignment within a world of abundance in the garden of creation.
Alongside these alliances grows all of the tech advancements and AI, with massive investments across all fields, and huge leaps forward in productivity. All the while we must attend to the environmental risks and be prepared to sacrifice certain short lived gains for future generations.
Bitcoin and art are 'seven-gens futuristic' in this sense - as they both express what native people call the Vision of the Seventh Generation.
This is the moment when we realise that our decisions are not about ourselves, they are about our great great great great grandchildren. We are changing our focus from short term gains to long term generational wealth and stability. And that is about time.
Humanity's survival depends on these underlying trends to become dominant movements and transformative realities, structures, and protocols. Let the enduring philosophy be about a global ethic of care among humanity.
Image credit: Adaptation into our original painting, source of coin image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin (11-8-25).