April 20, 2024, 00:09 UTC. Full nodes validate, miners grin: block 840,000 lands. The subsidy officially drops from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC. Signature: ViaBTC.

The mempool is a rodeo. Runes goes live (by Casey Rodarmor) and people start ticker squatting like it’s domain names in ’99. Bids in sat/vB explode; the halving block’s coinbase takes in more in fees than in subsidy: ~37.6 BTC in fees. A local micro “fee flippening” that previews the future: security shifting from subsidy to the fee market.

Among the txs there’s the collectible: the epic sat, the first satoshi of the block, tagged and later auctioned. Memetic? Yes. Also a signal: block space is a perpetual auction, and on-chain culture shapes demand as much as utility.

The price? No instant miracle. The network doesn’t party: it propagates blocks ~every 10 minutes, adjusts difficulty every 2016 blocks, and keeps the world turning without permission. The halving doesn’t promise; it enforces recursive discipline: lower issuance, more competition for space, incentives realigning.

Question for the crowd Did Runes give us a glimpse of the post-subsidy era — or just mempool theater?