THE FEATURE A Real-Time Battle Over Trashy Art Is Becoming a Big Deal for Bitcoin A bird? A plane? No, that's just a giant penis spouting flaming bitcoin. Such is the canvas at Satoshi's Place, a web app that allows savvy users to create digital pictures by sending small amounts of bitcoin. In the weeks since its release, the graffiti tool has become the site of territorial battles of pixel-space. But snickering over vulgar drawings aside, Satoshi's Place isn't all crypto memes and minds in the gutter. A pixel on Satoshi's Place is priced at one satoshi, or 0.00000001 bitcoin. And for 0.01 bitcoin, around $65 at current prices, users can take over the entire board, all by using a newly live payments technology for bitcoin called the lightning network. According to data provided by the app's creators, there's been nearly 3,000 paid invoices running across the lightning network, for more than 8 million painted pixels, garnering the attention of about 10,000 unique daily visitors to the site. And as users compete for art real estate with their wallets, according to advocates, the quickly shifting cultural depiction of cryptocurrency enthusiasts demonstrates not only how lightning can free the bitcoin blockchain from its scalability constraints, but also how technologies like these could eventually outpace traditional financial systems. | 
