Lugano, Switzerland – October 24/25 2025
‘The Whole Entire Universe (graphic version)’ – The first ever depiction of 21 million, and one of the most literal Bitcoin artworks that can be made. The first iteration of a larger series that will include oil paintings, digital prints, sculptures, and other media.
Anik wanted to make an artwork showing ’21 million of something’, and his wife, herself an artist and jeweller, suggested a cube of beads, as they were one of the first forms of currency to be used.
21 million was clearly not a number that would fit neatly into a cube, so Anik looked for a way by which they could. He found that a cube of 276x276x276 would give a number of 21,024,576 – 24,576 too many. However, this number coincidentally divided exactly by 6, allowing him to remove 4096 beads from each of the cube’s six sides to achieve the exact 21,000,000.
The number 4096 seemed familiar.
Ideally, as this was a cube, each area of removed beads would be a square for aesthetic elegance, so he checked to see whether by any chance 4096 had a square root.
Not only did it have a square root, but that square root was 64 – a power of 2, meaning he could allow those ‘removed square areas’ to simultaneously halve in size while exponentially growing in number.
To him, this conveyed an incredible hidden mathematical elegance within the number 21,000,000 and the cube image which is so ubiquitous to Bitcoin, visually portraying not only the halving process, but also the exponential growth which the halving mechanism enables.
Anik is not a mathematical philosopher, but he hopes that someone who is can extract the meaning that seems so clearly implied.
These drawings are for sale at 0.1 btc each, with free worldwide shipping. Contact anik369@mailfence.com for enquiries.
