HOW IT WORKS — TANTALOS

THE MACHINE

Twenty slots, four rows of five. Every slot holds an item, or holds one jammed against the glass, or is empty with the lamp on.

BUY = PRESS A BUTTON. The size of your swap picks the row. Which of the five slots opens is decided by your transaction hash, and by nothing else.

SELL = SHAKE THE MACHINE. Every jammed item in that row gets a chance to fall. Every loaded item in that row risks jamming. Shaking can make it worse.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PULL

The slot is loaded, and it drops. You have it.
The slot is loaded, and it jams. The item hangs there, visible, and you get nothing. It stays until somebody else knocks it loose.
The slot was already jammed. The hanging item falls to you — not to whoever jammed it — and a fresh one loads behind it.
The slot is empty. Nothing happens and you still paid. That is not a bug.

THE ROWS ARE DIFFERENT, NOT BETTER

Row D does not produce more valuable items. It produces items that jam more often. Row C misprints more. Row A jams least and keeps the plainest stock. There is no best button. There is no rarity you can buy.

RESTOCK

One empty slot refills on a fixed schedule, driven by block height, whether or not anybody is playing. The machine is never permanently empty.

MARKS

Items are not graded by luck. They carry marks earned by what actually happened to them.

FREED — somebody else knocked it loose and you caught it. Takes two people.
BLEED — loaded into a slot that had just jammed.
MISPRINT — the label printed off-register. One in twenty.
BATCH — minted in the same window as its siblings. Collect them together.
EXPIRED — sat in the machine longer than a day. Made by time, not by luck.

An item can carry several at once. None of them require a one-in-five-hundred roll to exist, which is the point: on a quiet token a one-in-five-hundred drop never fires at all.

WHAT IT COSTS

There is a 1% fee on every swap, of which 0.7% goes to the creator. That is the launchpad's pool fee, not something added on top.

This page states it because burying it would be the dishonest thing to do, not because anybody asked.

SOMETHING YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE PLAYING

The machine rewards buying and selling, so it asks the same wallet to do both. That is scheduled sell pressure, and it means price is structurally suppressed. This is not an accident of the design; it is the direct consequence of a design that counts nothing but turnover. Said here rather than discovered later.

THIS SITE WILL NEVER ASK FOR YOUR WALLET.

There is no connect button. There is no code on this page that could request a signature, an approval or a permit — not disabled, not hidden, absent. The machine reads the public swap log and nothing else.

If any page claiming to be TANTALOS asks you to connect, it is not this one. Check the address bar.

No wallet addresses appear anywhere on this site. Players are shown as customer numbers, assigned in the order they first played.

THE NAME

Tantalos stood in a pool that drained away every time he bent to drink, under a branch that pulled back every time he reached.

His punishment was not thirst. It was that the water and the fruit were right there, in front of him, the whole time.

That is where the word tantalize comes from, and it is exactly what a jammed slot is: you can see it, and it does not fall.

HOW THE ITEMS ARE MADE

Every item is drawn in your browser from its transaction hash — 24×24 pixels, eight colours from one of twelve hand-picked palettes, a name from two 200-word lists. No image is stored anywhere, by us or by anyone. There is nothing to host, so there is nothing to lose.

The same hash produces the same item on every device, forever. That is why a share card matches the machine, and why two people looking at this site see the same twenty slots.

← THE MACHINE