Taproot didnt cause Ordinals.

Ordinals, Inscriptions, Stamps, and now BRC-100 are a symptom of decay within the Bitcoin community. A rejection of censorship resistant money, and a desire for fame and bragging rights. A desire to destroy something beautiful. A symptom that the barbarians are at the gate.

It is an affront to the cypherpunk movement -- they do not see the need peer-to-peer money. All they want is a token to brag to their friends. They want to tag their name on the cathedral walls. Privacy and Anonymity is undesirable, they want the world to know their name, and what ugly jpegs they are holding. It is the enshitification that destroys everything good we have been trying to build.

Trying to use Bitcoin for things beyond financial transactions is an attack on Bitcoin. We have more and more fools raising their stupid, uneconomical ideas, and even more fools listening.

"sats dont exist". Absolute Barbarians.

Nice article

Right on point though cause I'm seriously wondering whether this ordinals craze happening just after all the drivechains zealots crying everywhere, and covenants supporters coming back from the ashes after poor Rubin also tried to force his changes last year, is a total coincidence...

Nobody with a bit of honesty can deny that what we are living right now is extremely similar to when Jihan Wu and the big blockers were spamming the chain to push their agenda and proving the small blockers wrong...

But I agree that this episode is a good occasion to think ahead and anticipate more the future in a high fee environment. Also i still think that LN is underrated and denigrated by people frustrated (maybe rightly) that scaling was prioritized compared to on-chain privacy back in the days. I've been doing tones of LN tx this last few weeks for no fees, because rather than spitting on it, I opened channels while it was still cheap...genius lol

Yes, it did. Deal with it.

This is what most people need to hear. Taproot wasn't the change that enabled data storage. It enabled the marginal space and cost efficient storage of data per transaction by removing the MAX_SCRIPT_SIZE limit of 10000 bytes but the envelope method could still be used in witness v0. Multisigs could also be used to store data and I don't think OP_RETURN are restricted by a data size, smaller than the max script size, at the consensus level.

Nice article, thanks for writing and sharing

Thanks for the good info and clarification!

Whenever situations like this high fee environment happens, one should ask, "cui bono"? Who benefits?

Blackrock benefits. That's who.

I am skeptical that there is some sudden surge in the bullshit NFT market, but rather, I speculate that this is a deliberate attack to drive up fees across the network and shake plebs confidence in Bitcoin itself. Blackrock is a major investor in 4 of the 5 top mining companies. So increased fees directly benefit Blackrock's mining company portfolio. This means that they can at the very least partially regain their spent sats after stuffing inscriptions. With mining companies earning a windfall, the multiples of their value in Blackrock's portfolio likely offsets the initial expense of these ordinals.

And here is the bonus: plebs look at the alarming fees and dump their Bitcoin which Blackrock would then scoop up at a discount to front run their own ETF. High UTXO fees are immaterial to institutions moving multiples of whole bitcoin, but they matter greatly to the average Joe and retail. This current high fee environment does not affect the larger aspect of Bitcoin becoming the global base money, which is the end game. We should not lose sight of this and continue to HODL. Carry on and stack sats.

In my opinion the historically high fees are not caused by ordinals. Its caused by some big players mixing coins who are also in a rush.