Thread by @trentelme

since discovering the hashmasks announcement tweet, i've done little but look at #hashmasks -- easily 20+ hours just looking through them.

a couple days ago that obsession paid off. i'm happy to introduce "The Real" and "The Unreal"

the rarest masks behind the unmasked.

https://twitter.com/TheHashmasks/status/1357280983695978498

before i extoll the secrets of these masks - for surely the lack of attention given to the above announcement reveals some secrets do exist - indulge me a brief story of their discovery

it begins with the release of the gallery -- pvp mode activated

https://twitter.com/TheHashmasks/status/1356973891172917252?s=20

prior to the gallery release, maskers were essentially forced to coordinate to attempt to identify rarities, glyphs, anomolies

with the gallery, you could individually view every single mask

and so this is what i did. I scrolled for 15 straight hours through 16,384 masks

now a lot of people were programmatically analyzing masks by this point - which might be more efficient - but by the 3rd or 4th hour, my eyes were fucking trained to detect the smallest anomaly - and i've found many of which i believe the community remains unaware

my pride and joy of course, was this vignette at mask 3550 -- a small sanskrit message i had not seen and sparked a potential for a unique glyph

6384 masks later, of course, i realized it was not unique. it had a twin.

what an brilliant easter egg!

but i looked at the interface below, oh wait, the traits listed do not match the mask.

like a total fucking nob, i messaged the hashmask team alerting them of an interface issue on this mask

this will easily be a 100+ ETH mistake

immediately after messaging them, i actually go check the provenance on #9934

ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQHKLUQJ…

yep, confirmed not an interface issue. legitimate double print.

at this point @brockjelmore steps in to assist in analysis - how is this even possible when the hashes are different?

sure enough, different images... metadata included??

nope, just saved at quality 8 and quality 7.

at this point i immediately purchase the original on @opensea for 10 eth and begin searching for the other owner - and identify them

meanwhile, @TheHashmasks team is in a "war room" trying to determine what to do about the "error"

i go to sleep on the night of 2/3 at 2am thinking myself and the team are the only ones who know the truth about these masks

i wake up at 6am and see they have made an announcement at 5:58am regarding the duplication.

what the ever living fuck.

i spend the entire day yesterday negotiating, not sure if they know what they have, because the announcement didn't gain much traction

agree on 30eth
seller gets cold feet
withdraw my bid, playing hardball
seller wants to think
seller goes cold
seller lists for 666 ETH
fuck.jpg

honestly, well done, mate. co-op mode engaged.

i convince them to name their mask "The Unreal"

why those names? well the inscription is part of a four line mantra called the Asatoma Prayer

our line translates to "Lead us from the unreal to the real"

this is where things get interesting

the other lines also exist hidden within the hashmask collection of course, meaning THIS MASK WAS ALREADY 1/4 (maybe 1/3 if the "peace" line is omitted)

in other words, not only would the only duplicate be a 1/2 in any circumstance, it also contains an extremely rare and powerful glyph...

so questions abound in my mind

@TheHashmasks clearly want to play this off as an accident... and they seemed genuinely freaked out when i told them

but never fully trust anyone, esp anon, in this space.

too strange coincidences:

the original indexes were 3691 and 13691, exactly 1000 apart

the file quality was only 1 different - enough for a diff hash, but no real sacrifice to quality

the inscription literally referencing a real and unreal

so why make the announcement and treat it like a bug? why not like a piece of the puzzle to figure out like everything else?

did the devs just want to fuck me over?

my personal theory is this was a rogue move by a single dev within the team, who implemented the duplication without the knowledge of the rest of the team

this is the only thing that explains both the panicked announcement and absurd number of coincidences

while i would have loved to acquire both, i'm happy to at least own The Real

its particularly sweet that I own it not due to luck of the draw or massive investment, but pure obsession

so that's my story and role in hashmasks history

they are in fact both currently for sale

you can purchase either for 2,222 eth on @opensea

The Real: opensea.io/assets/0xc2c74…

The Unreal: opensea.io/assets/0xc2c74…