APPENDIX
The Cover Photo’s Secret
The photograph on the cover, awalkaday 251-2022, was shot, edited and published online before a sculpture was later installed on the same site inside a public park in Namur (Wallonia, Belgium).
awalkaday 251-2022
This black-and-white photo captured a fleeting moment. It preserves for ages a romantic outdoor scene: a couple of people sitting in the open air on the grass under a glowing tree.
Sculpted in bronze by Belgian artist Nat Neujean, The Daughters of Water (1951) depicts two intertwined nymphs, symbolizing two European rivers: Meuse and Sambre. The colorful photographs of the sculpture were taken on the 8th day of May 2024, a day that commemorates the Second World War-ending victory of democracy over fascist ideologies across Europe in the mid-20th century.
The two artworks share roots in a 19th century park named after the first Queen of the Belgians, Louise-Marie. Zoom in to notice a pair of beings, humans or deities, photographed in the shade of one slowly aging tree, observed on the linear timeline of Mother Nature. The secret is: Tree of Life.
awalkaday 251-2022 → The tree fills two-thirds of the frame, its foliage nearly white in monochrome. The couple in its shade are small enough to miss on first look. The sculpture installed here later shares the same grammar of scale: figures beneath something much larger than themselves.
Four Ethereal Domains
Beyond physical locations, digital naming also celebrated Belgian places. Four ENS domains owned by daqhris.eth since the summer of 2022, named after towns and rivers, have been decorated with awalkaday photographs. The local landscape was mapped and displayed on an Ethereum blockchain naming protocol to celebrate a rare week of international conferences: EthCC [7] & ETHGlobal Brussels in the summer of 2024.
Unbanked Ether Underfoot
Established in July 2021, and signed with a cryptographic algorithm, a personal story inspired the founding of daqhris.eth Cryptoassets Growth Fund, which later enabled all financial steps. The fund’s formal and financial structure (table of contents, definitions, disclaimers) was documented and lives online at daqhris.com/cryptoassets-growth-fund.
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The inability to settle and remain steadily in a physical location
has taught me recently that any physical asset may be seized, stolen,
damaged or devalued by an individual,
a group of persons or a larger entity like a government.
Since the summer of 2015 until now,
I live more or less with few personal belongings.
I have experienced events that forced me to stay on the move
due to safety, poverty, or weather reasons.
At least once a year, an event has occurred that led me to lose access
to banking services or university facilities, or health care systems.
I have given up on owning large or heavy items after life-altering experiences
in detention centers, refugee camps, homelessness, seasonal lodging,
couch-surfing, and lately as an undocumented immigrant.
After repeatedly going through the loss of personal properties, reputation,
material possessions, human connections, and at the end,
stumbling into a slow but steady recovery,
I have only been able to regain a few valuable assets.
Chief among them are some digital assets,
namely Bitcoin and Ether purchased in the Autumn of 2017.
I managed to recover the BTC holdings in the Summer of 2019 and ETH in the Summer of 2021.
How? Well, by regaining access to digital wallet backups!
Although I was not actively managing the crypto wallets,
they remained intact and gained much value afterward.
For a long time, I thought of them as lost property.
But later on, after the recovery of their secret keys,
I understood the high value of global decentralized blockchains
and the related digital currencies.
Thus, I decided to entirely play the long game
and set up a personal crypto growth fund
with the intent of holding long-term investments in digital assets.
In case I earn or receive more paper money than the amount
that is necessary for basic needs (i.e: food, transport, accommodation),
then I will purchase some cryptocurrencies and add them to
the self-custodial wallets of the fund.
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