Strange Currencies
5/10 sections recovered · name · match catalog description · match catalog cover · match catalog tags · match catalog submissions · match catalog
1 fund applications (1 curated)
A dropout engineering prodigy in the Smoky Mountains falls under the sway of a radical libertarian bitcoin miner .
AI FilmmakingBitcoinDecentralized StorytellingEnergyEngineeringExtended RealityGenerative AIInteractive ArtOpen-Source decentralizedagriculture-landai-technologyarts-mediaeducationopen-infrastructurefilm-storytelling
Project details match catalog
About
A TV show made with AI about bitcoin miners in the Smoky Mountains. We hid a real bitcoin inside it: each of the 24 episodes contains one word of the wallet's 24-word secret phrase. The first viewer to find all 24 words keeps the bitcoin.
Impact
Viewers will learn seed phrases, self-custody, and how money works by hunting a real prize inside a story. And the show portrays Appalachia, long dismissed as poor, as what its cheap hydropower makes it: a frontier of decentralized finance.
Progress
The scripts are written. An AI trailer by Lauren Sieckmann (Unbanked) got us into a film festival before a single episode existed. Good Story Guild optioned the series in 2024. Terence Michael, Emmy-nominated producer and bitcoin author, is onboard.
Team
The show is set in the Smoky Mountain foothills where I grew up and that my five books of fiction portray. I'm a Whiting Award winner with a Michener MFA in fiction and screenwriting, and I founded Ordain, a commissioning platform settled in bitcoin.
Funding
No displayed figures preserved for this project.
Fund applications
| Season | Fund | Status | Applied |
|---|---|---|---|
| Season 7 | Writers Room Fund for AI Storytelling | curated | 2026-08-10 |
Season totals as displayed on the platform's public accounting — not a statement of amounts paid out. V2 = Venus sales + Venus extras. The original page also broke each season down by fund drive and showed an Available (unclaimed) balance; that level of detail survives only on the preserved snapshots.
Leaderboard page (offline): https://artizen.fyi/projects/strange-currencies
Wayback: leaderboard page ↗ · Wayback: platform page ↗
Not recovered: creator, links, funding, drives, snapshot. Sources: "snapshot" = verbatim Internet Archive page · "platform metadata" = archived artizen.fund page metadata · "leaderboard" = the artizen.fyi public accounting tables · "match catalog" = the platform's public fund-matching catalog (captured 2026-10-15, generated 2026-09-07) · "community catalog" = a June 2026 platform scrape preserved in a community repo.
Top siblings
Projects that applied to the same funds.
| Project | Shared funds | Raised | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | TUNER Tuner is a documentary-based XR experience where you have a custom alien encounter shaped… | Writers Room Fund for AI Storytelling | $87,139 |
| 2. | Baraza TV Africa's first AI-anchored broadcast network. Built in Nairobi. Revenue paid to African c… | Writers Room Fund for AI Storytelling | $7,581 |
| 3. | Manure 2 Gold Transforming manure into organic fertilizers | Writers Room Fund for AI Storytelling | $2,097 |
| 4. | Frames of Us: A Living Cinematic Archive of Everyday African Stories Everyday African life, captured one frame at a time. | Writers Room Fund for AI Storytelling | $1,685 |
| 5. | The International Artists Project Documentary First Documentary to Tell the Stories of Music Artists Born in Every Country on Earth | Writers Room Fund for AI Storytelling | $563 |
| 6. | Akuya I am an upcoming artist and this is my first track of the year, i need help for the produ… | Writers Room Fund for AI Storytelling | $234 |
| 7. | My Summer with Sam During Ulysses S. Grant's final summer, an unlikely friendship with a young boy changes th | Writers Room Fund for AI Storytelling | $0 |
| 8. | TERRESTRIAL An irresponsible astronaut, living in the shadow of his hero father, finds an orphaned al | Writers Room Fund for AI Storytelling | $0 |
Other funds of top siblings
AI Filmmaking Fund for Generative Storytellers WildSeed Creators Fund Cultural ARchive Fund for Spatial Storytellers Expanding Horizons Fund Learning Layer Fund for AI Frontiers Gonzo Sovereign Press Fund Source Fund for Regenerative Storytelling Motherland Fund for Rising Voices