🧠 [Long Research]
Laser-eyed people figured out how to make their own shitcoins... and they are ecstatic! Is the bull here?!
Transactions fees are booming, activity and new startups are growing in numbers, their primary market has revived a bit, and all thanks to... bitcoin shitcoins. You heard that right. Read below for a little overview of what you might be missing 🦞
So… Ordinals.
A few weeks ago, Ordinals took BTC by storm, it was January 2023 when Rodarmor released the Ordinal theory framework (docs.ordinals.com/overview.html)..) You can read some more (grayscale.com/can-ordinals-unlock-new-potential-for-bitcoin/)) here (grayscale.com/can-ordinals-unlock-new-potential-for-bitcoin/)..) Fast forward: Ordinals are data blobs inscribed on Bitcoin. Unlike 99.9% of NFTs on Ethereum and alikes, Inscriptions on BTC exist on-chain rather than being hosted on IPFS or on other solutions.
What's interesting? 🤔 The rise of Ordinals was a surprise, having given a boost to the whole Bitcoin ecosystem. Whether it was the "NFT on Bitcoin" narrative or some other flavour of the month, a fact is a fact - activity, volumes, and huge gas fees! Different wallets, interfaces, data tools, and similar projects - have popped up in the primary market trying to jump on this wave. This has a few interesting things to talk about:
1️⃣ Some core developers, as their primal instincts take over, started to say “this is not how the founding father wanted this!" Nah, for real, they view it as spam and consider making all such activity as literally spam. See here (twitter.com/ryanberckmans/status/1655938572720181253)) from Luke for a bit more info but ignore the hideous degods picture.
2️⃣ Miners, on the other hand, might not be so upset. They finally get fees, which is a super interesting topic in the security budget debate of the 21M cap. It's an old topic getting especially relevant in the recent cycle, as the current main (financial store of value) use case of Bitcoin doesn't actually entail many peer-to-peer-cash transactions, since people hodl these rocks. As such, fees only have ever come from brrr emissions. Funny ha.
But… the crowd wants more gambling!
Welcome: BRC-20 muh standard. BRC-20 standard was created around 2 months ago as an experimentation for fungible tokens on Bitcoin. Or as a grift. Fast forward: BRC-20 tokens utilize Ordinals inscriptions of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data to deploy token contracts, mint, and transfer tokens. See more (academy.binance.com/en/glossary/brc-20-tokens)) from daddy CZ.
What's interesting? 🤔 People familiar with the matter (lol) are mostly of the opinion that BRC-20 is just a dumb concept, even worse than the Colored Coins (trustmachines.co/learn/what-are-colored-coins/)) have been. You could say their downfall has been due to high gas fees, impossibility of composability, distrust of the narrative back then... well, quite a few reasons possible.
There are 14000+ BRC-20 Tokens created as we speak with a total Market Cap of $ 440 M. (source (twitter.com/thescalpingpro/status/1655295856453763072)))) - so much scam has been created 💩 trying to sell new garbage to previously unaware holders who might not want to miss the scamcoin & nft season that we had on Ethereum. But
Now, it seems that scamcoins have fallen down quickly, but activity / wallets are trying to do something. So maybe there is something?
💭 Food for Thought:
- The BRC20 Standard adds “useless” on-chain data to satoshis, there’s really not much else to say there? Bad for bitcoin?
- They add “another subset of transactions competing for precious block space and interrupting your ability to secure 1 sat/vbyte transactions to secure your cold storage funds or create a lightning channel”, effectively “polluting" Bitcoin security model?
One (twitter.com/CryptoKoryo/status/1653531662356033536)) and two (twitter.com/redphonecrypto/status/1655668531436855311)) more decent threads to recap. Again, you can discuss in kingdom or @lobsters_chat. See the conversation start with this message (t.me/lobsters_chat/416310)..)
💡 Also, keep an open mind. Perhaps the initial failure of Colored Coins was simply due to the wrong timing and not the absolutely flawed architecture & developer experience? Or maybe these BRC20 are also a fake fugazi, but overall it allows Stacks to infiltrate Bitcoiner’s mindset? Looks like Miami is ecstatic (twitter.com/Stacks/status/1658242605539381253)..) I am sorry, that hyperlink doesn't go to naked gym dudes pictures, it goes to bitcoin week.
One time I worked for a fintech company and got a tip from someone on how to get rid of my dark circles under my eyes to look less tired.
I would put cucumber slices over my eyes and meditate for 15 minutes after lunch every day, and for this I needed to store a cucumber in the fridge. Problem was there were many cucumbers in the fridge that everyone ate from (they were free ”smörgås”-cucumbers that the company offered) so I needed to make it explicitly clear that my cucumber was different and for people to leave it alone.
I took a piece of A4 paper and wrote ”Do not eat this cucumber—it is for meditational purposes only” on it and put it in the fridge and that’s where I would store the cucumber in question.
It did not take long until someone played a prank on me because one day I opened the fridge to see that someone had driven a knife into my meditational cucumber. It looked like a murder scene.
I photographed the murdered cucumber and put up 2-3 notes in the office asking for anonymous tips if anyone had any leads as to who had murdered my meditational cucumber.
As it would happen, that day a new receptionist had started working in the office and I decided to introduce her to our fun cucumber hunt shenanigans by giving her a list of my top 5 cucumber murderer suspects.
On the top of my list I wrote the name of an American woman who worked with us as a technical writer/translator (it was a Swedish company) whose name was ”Karen”. This was in a time before the meme of ”office Karens” had gone viral in the world so I knew not the mistake I was making.
The reason I selected her was because she was a bit of a goofball and would always put on shows, sing funny songs and do sketches, she seemed like an obvious person who would play along in my cucumber hunt.
The next person I put on my list was a guy from IT whose name was Max who I just sensed had a good sense of humor.
The receptionist began her cucumber murder investigation by emailing Max asking for an alibi on the specific date and time of the incident.
Max responded (either jokingly or seriously) by cc:ing a woman from HR. To Max’s disappointment, this woman from HR thought it was funny and played along with the joke. Frustrated (jokingly or not, I still don’t know), Max cc:ed *her* boss, the head of HR, who also found it funny and played along with the joke.
This led Max to share the list with Karen who was on the top of the list.
The next day, one of the ladies from HR who had played along in the cucumber hunt came over to my desk and said that we needed to talk. ”Is it about the cucumber” I asked, jokingly.
She laughed for a moment at first and then she said that it was, in fact, about the cucumber.
We went to a room and I was made aware that the previous day, Karen had cried for 1-2 hours to our Head of Sales once she heard about the cucumber list. She could not understand why she specifically had been singled out as a cucumber murderer suspect. Why her?
I was requested to apologize to Karen which I of course did, but it took a one hour long meeting of us discussing cultural differences where she let me know that this concept was complete foreign to her and not something that would fly anywhere in the US.
I had a really hard time accepting the emotional trauma I had caused Karen at first, but her pain was genuine. After this experience I decided I was not meant for the corporate life and left large companies for good, and if I ever return to one, I’ll not make any fucking jokes about anything ever, especially not cucumbers (which did nothing for my dark circles anyway).
