Have You Ever Bought an Inscription/BRC20? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

Have You Ever Bought an Inscription/BRC20?

4392 sats \ 64 comments \ @kr 1 Jan bitcoin

I thought this post from @udiWertheimer was interesting.

Personally I haven’t spent much time (or any money) exploring Ordinals/inscriptions/BRC20s (so my opinion isn’t worth much), but I know many on here have very strong opinions about them.

What I’d love to hear is answers to the following two questions:

have you ever bought an inscription/BRC20 token?
are you optimistic or pessimistic about the effects these ideas will have on Bitcoin?

Yes, Optimistic2.9%

Yes, Pessimistic2.9%

No, Optimistic19.4%

No, Pessimistic74.8%

103 votes \ poll ended

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544 sats \ 0 replies \ @orthwyrm 2 Jan

Never purchased one nor do I plan to, but I agree with Udi that many people have been wasting oxygen complaining about the things when it's clear they've made no effort to actually understand them.

1443 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 2 Jan

I think this is indeed a great post from @udiWertheimer since he is not wrong.

Reading the comments here and here just further confirms that most can't be bothered to understand Ordinals/inscriptions/BRC20s but still have strong opinions about them and hate them, I would say. Some even mentioned that they didn't even read the tweet. That's how spot on @udiWertheimer is about some bitcoiners.

At least I must admit that I don't understand Ordinals/inscriptions/BRC20s on a technical level. So I definitely shouldn't put strong opinions of them out there (which I think I didn't).

Essentially, he explains how systems are usually exploited. Something was found that wasn't found before by a black hat and it got exploited. Now we should do the same with them and their stuff. We need to understand these people (recon) and then use this information against them (like social engineering). Same for what's happening onchain. We need more people like @supertestnet, Breaker of JPEGs. The chance that we can do something about it effectively (without digging our own grave) increases when more people understand this stuff on a technical level.

This should be obvious but unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 2 Jan

Just realized I didn't answer any of these questions, lol:

What I’d love to hear is answers to the following two questions:

have you ever bought an inscription/BRC20 token?

No, never but I might now to test things out if it doesn't cost too much.

are you optimistic or pessimistic about the effects these ideas will have on Bitcoin?

Slightly optimistic but I don't think my opinion is worth much. Need to do more own research.

However, keep in mind that "optimistic" does not mean for me that I think this @udiWertheimer stuff will survive. I am optimistic since this is another chance for bitcoin to proof its resilience. Imo, part of the game theory of bitcoin is that bitcoin must be antifragile else it will most likely fail.

898 sats \ 19 replies \ @cleaningup12 2 Jan

Yep I inscribed two bitmaps back in June for around 2 bucks

One sold last month for 80 bucks and the other is up for 500 and it will sell by march.

I think they are a pain for the mempool and purists hate it

Im no expert but experts like odell say technically these are not etched on to the blockchain as one may be led to believe, something to do with uxto but I'm no expert

I'd say they are here to stay for this bull run and then will probably tail off once the prices go to high

Will be like the eth monkey clubs

Many more chains like sol are pumping with these copycat versions will advance more marketing

111 sats \ 13 replies \ @orthwyrm 2 Jan

Im no expert but experts like odell say technically these are not etched on to the blockchain as one may be led to believe, something to do with uxto but I'm no expert

There are a couple of things: Inscriptions (a method of storing arbitrary data on-chain) and ordinals (a way of numbering sats that can then be traded around).

I'm not sure if Odell has since changed his mind, but he was previously arguing that ordinals specifically are worthless because they rely on an external protocol (or something "outside" Bitcoin) to number sats. If that protocol changes (say everyone agreed to number sats differently), the rare sats you currently hold could be worthless.

(FWIW I think Odell is wrong here.)

1907 sats \ 10 replies \ @elvismercury 3 Jan

Odell is wrong, because ordinal theory is nothing more than a convention in how to look at things. It is an agreement. CR thought of a clever way to enumerate sats, and insofar as we agree to look at things in the way he describes, we can trade them around in a non-fungible manner. If someone decided they didn't want to look at things the way CR described, they are free not to, but their non-belief needn't affect anyone else's belief. They can't stop anyone from adopting the convention that CR invented and acting on it.

The thing that amuses the shit out of me is that this is nothing more, or less, than what btc itself is: a way to look at things. If a person sitting across from you thinks btc is worthless, how can you possibly disagree? What would your vectors of disagreement be? The only rebuttal you can make about the value of this abstraction is that other people do value it, as demonstrated by your ability to trade it for tangible goods or other currencies. But its value lies exclusively in this shared convention.

When I used to listen to bitcoin podcasts regularly, a bunch of bitcoiners went on a kick of trying to rebrand the "money is a shared delusion" bon motte. Even the great Lyn Alden is guilty of this sophistry. I get why they're doing it -- they're trying to rebut the idea that btc is meaningless. But denying reality is the wrong way. Money, like a lot of other important things, has meaning insofar as it is a matter of convention. Different technologies introduce different affordances to this convention, but a convention it remains. So with ordinals.

12 sats \ 9 replies \ @orthwyrm 3 Jan

Completely agree.

When I used to listen to bitcoin podcasts regularly,

Ah yeah, I am burnt out on them also. The recent drama has actually been quite useful in filtering who to pay attention to and who to ignore. I don't recall ever seeing so many bad takes in Bitcoin before.

100 sats \ 8 replies \ @carlosfandango 3 Jan

Glad I’m not the only one tired of podcasts spouting the same silliness…. I feel there are a lot of people all shouting the same noise at one another. Very little patience, barely any discussion and no nuance.

24 sats \ 7 replies \ @orthwyrm 3 Jan

Anyone you still listen to these days?

50 sats \ 6 replies \ @carlosfandango 3 Jan

I have a range (politics, economics etc) but BTC related/andjacnet its only WBD and Peter St Onge’s weekly round up.

Any recommendations beyond the mainstream usual suspects?

1243 sats \ 5 replies \ @orthwyrm 3 Jan

I guess WBD if there's a good guest on, and NVK's Bitcoin Review podcast for technical stuff.

Not so interested in the macro TBH, lots of voices over the last couple of years have been rather off-base (although probably directionally correct in the long term).

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162 sats \ 1 reply \ @SpaceHodler 2 Jan

Even if the protocol changes (which it has reasons not to, just like Bitcoin does), the old protocol will still exist. And being the first such protocol, it may become the Schelling point for storing images on Bitcoin.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @orthwyrm 2 Jan

Yes, exactly.

111 sats \ 2 replies \ @kr OP 2 Jan

interesting.

did you start looking into bitmaps with the intention of holding them or flipping them for a profit?

was there a particular person or event that compelled you to take action and buy them?

391 sats \ 1 reply \ @cleaningup12 2 Jan

Ye I was seeing a lot of talk on cripto twitter and I bought my Dob ddmmyy and my Son's Dob

Just thought it was a little momento for a couple of bucks

Then it started blowing up

So I put one in the marketplace and it sold instantly!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @itsrealfake 2 Jan

391 sats upvoted in multiple places

#373994

1 sat \ 1 reply \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 2 Jan

How can you say it will sell by March? Is that a certainty?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cleaningup12 2 Jan

Absolutely not a certainty

Could all die of death and plummet to zero tomorrow

255 sats \ 0 replies \ @mattybs 2 Jan

I've never purchased one, and right now I don't plan to. But the wannabe trader in me says that the environment is showing one thing while the narrative is largely in denial -- which usually means to buy in.

That said, I believe that if a thing can be done with Bitcoin, someone will do it. IMO this is not going away and will continue to wreck the mempool in the near term, but will drive adoption of layer 2 solutions like Lightning.

I guess I'm in the "No, Optimistic" camp, because it's not something that interests me much personally, and I'm optimistic that the Bitcoin community will solve for usability issues long-term.

110 sats \ 0 replies \ @Anonomoto 2 Jan

I discovered yesterday that I own an "uncommon" sat, which means I could sell that single sat for $200.

I don't own a Ledger to secure the Bitcoin and will never use a browser wallet extension without HWW, so as much as I'd like a free $200 to buy more Bitcoin with, it's not worth the risk to liberate that single sat out of the UTXO it's in.

I did, however, learn more about Ordinals beyond thinking it's all just jpegs, and I do like the collector element to it, but I also think it's flash-in-the-pan stuff, so I'm neutral mostly.

446 sats \ 4 replies \ @john_doe 2 Jan

I answered no, pessimistic. However I am also optimistic regarding the issue with high fees which can force people to look at it earlier than expected. For example to solve the issues regarding the force-close of channels on LND, discuss about Fedimint or Liquid, etc. I can't understand the technical advantage of using an expensive database to store images.

1000 sats \ 2 replies \ @dieselbaby 2 Jan

This issue is bringing to the forefront of everyone's attention, the very real problems with scaling that Bitcoin faces. I realize that this is an unpopular thing to bring up, especially around these parts, but it's an objectively true fact -- whether or not the mempool/block space is being used by actual transactions (which was supposed to be the point of Bitcoin, at least that's what I thought -- before it turned into becoming "digital gold" that no one ever does anything with, and you're just supposed to hold it and never spend any, ever), would we not still be at the same point we're currently at, inevitably, from people presumably attempting to open up lightning channels to use lightning as a layer 2?

Either way it seems that it is an inevitability that a better solution for either scaling the mainnet/layer 1 bitcoin network will need to be developed, and/or we will have to come up with an alternative, better solution for layer 2 transactions/additional layer 2s for transactions which aren't hindered by the (IMHO) broken approach lightning takes.

So, whether or not people here at SN or elsewhere in the Bitcoin community want to acknowledge this, they should be focusing on trying to fix the scaling issues with bitcoin and stop trying to act like blockchain hall monitors who keep the mempool free of monkey jpegs they dislike. This has already proven to be a fool's errand, and I'd think that anyone looking at this from a more rational perspective as you seem to be yourself, would realize that you're not going to be able to stop people from engaging in this kind of shit. That's just what happens on a permissionless, decentralized system, and the idea that anyone is going to be able enforce this or that miners will choose to forego the very lucrative additional sats they are earning in fees, is out of their mind.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 2 Jan

So, whether or not people here at SN or elsewhere in the Bitcoin community want to acknowledge this, they should be focusing on trying to fix the scaling issues with bitcoin and stop trying to act like blockchain hall monitors who keep the mempool free of monkey jpegs they dislike.

My sense is that this is the dominant view -- scaling is vital, it's now clear to everyone. People differ in how much moral thundering they're doing about Ordinals, but they don't differ in acknowledging the thing you're saying they should acknowledge. Are you claiming otherwise?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @john_doe 2 Jan

I didn't say I am optimistic about scaling Bitcoin, I said I was optimistic about smarter ways to use Bitcoin to avoid high fees, and named 3 alternative ways of using Bitcoin. I am using 2 of them and tried quickly 2 other ways. Lightning is not broken, it will work for some use cases, Liquid for some others, Fedimint for others, etc. I didn't say I am optimistic about scaling Bitcoin because Bitcoin won't scale by design. That being said I would have been in favor of fixing the code allowing BRC-20 to have happened, although now it may indeed be too late since miners are happy to get higher fees anyway.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @itsrealfake 2 Jan

I also got 391 sats upvote

#373994

391 sats \ 0 replies \ @itsrealfake 2 Jan

I came very close to buying one just "for fun"

I created a wallet & went right up to the part where the inscription is happening before dropping out of the funnel

816 sats \ 1 reply \ @humblefreak 2 Jan

Would I buy an inscription: No Would I recommend Inscriptions to a friend: No Are Inscriptions good for Bitcoin: No, they are a temporary nuisance. Can Inscriptions be a long term investment or saving strategy: No

They are a short term pump and dump scheme, making a few people rich and a lot of people a bit poorer.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Quasianon 2 Jan

Correct

76 sats \ 0 replies \ @037447d9ca 2 Jan

I bought Counterparty tokens back in 2014, which are essentially the same as BRC-20. XCP didn't get much traction, and probably BRC-20 won't neither. Anyway this is good for Bitcoin.

124 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby 2 Jan

It's kinda like this: I had a customer tell me that I should make my prints limited, like he wanted me to only print 10 or a 100 of a certain poster and then no more. As if his owning number 3 of 20 somehow made it better.

I understand the scarcity that comes from there only being one Mona Lisa, because the thing is impossible to duplicate. Even if da Vinci painted it again, it would be different. Art done by hand--like cooking or cherry blossoms--is hard to duplicate.

But the scarcity of a limited set of prints doesn't make sense to me. The technology of prints is such that I can make 100 and then 100 more and then 100 more. That's the whole point of printing. Putting a serial number on it, even if it's a txid, doesn't change the fact that it's a different kind of art form than work done by hand.

It seems to me that inscriptions (and art as NFTs in general) are like numbered prints. I don't get the point.

The value of digital art doesn't come from scarcity or ownership. It comes from reputation and duplication.

Digital art is memes not inscriptions.

As to the BRC20 tokens, don't have much to say on that. Probably gonna end up like all the other token shit that has gone on.

53 sats \ 0 replies \ @Eobard 2 Jan

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102 sats \ 0 replies \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 2 Jan

Out of protocol spam. Worthless and worse, actively harmful, as they skew fees, and have different incentive models with fees and value transfer. Incompatible with in protocol pure payments, it’s “let’s destroy something beautiful with ugly trash” tech. The space needs to die in a fire.

Will not be remembered fondly, along with “mastercoin” and “counterparty”, it’s just out of protocol noise made by barbarians.

101 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 2 Jan

I have zero interest in any of this, even if someone sent it to me I couldn't be arsed about it, just seems like a distraction for people who are bored and looking for short term alpha by jumping into the hottest ponzis

42 sats \ 0 replies \ @030a29f333 2 Jan

Ordinals have no value and are dumb; however, the current fee environment is pushing solutions for higher fee environments. People got way to comfortable with 1 sat/vbyte. If Bitcoin blockspace is as valuable as we think it is, fees will be MUCH higher in the future. Their persistence is a benefit in the long run for Bitcoin imo

17 sats \ 0 replies \ @eduardopro 2 Jan

SPOILER ALERT: The post by Udi is not interesting at all.

138 sats \ 0 replies \ @sagars209 2 Jan

Udi is desperate to get attention… just ignore him. Blockchains are only good for one and only one thing that is bitcoin … all use cases inscriptions and brc20 have already been tried in other blockchains and they have failed. They will eventually fail on bitcoin as well.. any application beyond bitcoin will have an oracle or centralisation problem Full Stop

27 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 2 Jan

No. Optimistic, because retards will lose all their money and won't be able to bother us after that, maybe a few will learn about money in the process.

37 sats \ 3 replies \ @fiatbad 2 Jan

No.

Fuck No, man.

I believe you get your ass kicked for buying something like that, man.

Fuckinay, man.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitcoin_rationalist 2 Jan

2 chicks at the same time, man

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @dieselbaby 2 Jan

Ah yes, advocating for violence...really love to see it!

Imbecile.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Caleb 2 Jan

It’s a modification of a quote from office space. Sounds like you had a case of the Mondays.

3 sats \ 0 replies \ @kingzing131 2 Jan

I just don't see its value. Just because it is onchain doesn't make it valuable. It doesn't store large file meaning it isn't universal as well.

2 sats \ 0 replies \ @brave 2 Jan

No I haven't and I doubt if I will

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 2 Jan

In a world without authorities, the only thing that matters is the aggregate behavior of the commons.

The commons is losing its shared delusion that they are working toward something good for everyone (like Bitcoin), -- and is aggressively exerting its individual identities, vanities and desire to disrupt the flow of capital through imaginary property constructs (shittokens and spam jpegs). Social media reinforces the echo chamber.

2023 was a very pessimistic year

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheWildHustle 2 Jan

Seems like a scam to be completely honest.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB 2 Jan

I bought a few raretoshi NFTs on liquid. I liked the art so I bought them.

I would buy an ordinal/inscription for art/stuff I like. I don’t care if the resale value goes to zero. If capcom came out with cool mega man JPEGs at my price point I would buy them!

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @BitByBit21 2 Jan

He can go fork himself

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 2 Jan

This needs to be encouraged. I would love to see ordichain and Bitcoin fork in 2024. Let the market decide if ordi-sats actually have a value when they are not 'true corn'.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @jeff 2 Jan

At some point in the future, I hope we'll have zk utxo-set checkpoints, optionally pruned to crop dust. Then we can get back to building better money.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 2 Jan

I don't think checkpoints are desirable at all -- even if they are zk encoded. I'm not sure what zk encoding actually provides here, the UTXO set is public and derivable entirely from public data.

Checkpoints are a point of centralization. Who is generating the set and proof? Under who's opinion is any transaction dust?

0 sats \ 6 replies \ @617a7a 2 Jan

Digital assets will be incredibly useful in the future, but they are more likely to be through Taproot Assets than ordinals and what not as they are incredibly inefficient and not scalable. Once fees go above $100 for a 140 byte transaction, inefficient onchain activity including ordinals will just be forced out the market by more efficient solutions.

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 2 Jan

Be careful what you wish for. $100 in fiat per transaction makes an L2 Lightning Network less viable under this macro. Why would anyone risk capital in channels if a stray HTLC could burn $100+? Minimum channel sizes would need to increase. Suddenly, to protect nodes, the minimum HTLC size > $100.

Then we need a L3+ for coffee payments again? L1 - $100k/1M min fee L2 - $100 min fee L3 - $1? min fee? L4 - 1 sat min fee?

All so a bunch of barbarians can graffiti some ugly jpegs?

Why are we burning down everything we have built in this space for the last few years because a few hundred ignorant jpeg and shitcoin enthusiasts can rip each other off?

Priorities are way off.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @617a7a 2 Jan

Channels are going to increase in size dramatically. That’s a good thing - channels work way better and defeat LN’s disadvantages when large channels are at play.

1 LN node - even channel - per person doesn’t scale to what it needs to operate at. JPEGs are not the issue here but rather scaling. Ordinals and Taproot Assets work far differently. Even without their existence, we can’t scale to the needed capacity with only 2 layers. Relatively, the JPEGs and shitcoiners take up a very small amount of capacity. Onchain fees being forced higher is a guarantee, so things like ordinals etc just won’t work. More efficient solutions are needed. Not that they should be prioritised though

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 2 Jan

Take a look at the visor on mempool -- ordispam is currently 60% of predicted mempool next block. Agreed that JPEG is only a minor part, the biggest problem is people with an incentive to burn the entire UTXO on fees writing an out of protocol json blobs.

How can UTXO spender compete? How can the LN channel creator compete? If we want to push for more layers, we need to ensure those base layers are able to handle the metatraffic of the upper layers.

Maybe its time to modify the transaction weightings (increase the maximum possible block size). The best argument put forward by the spammers is that a fee market must exist to reward miners. I agree with this part. We can reward the miners by increasing the number of transactions included. But this calculus is contentious and difficult to nail down.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @617a7a 2 Jan

Ah, so your concern is more that spammers will have more capital available to pay fees than genuine UTXO spenders?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 2 Jan

Possibly in the short term. I think there are many magnitudes more Bitcoiners who value sats as fungible units, wish to hold UTXOs for time and savings, and benefit from the open nature of Bitcoin. "Sats aren't real" is bullshit to Bitcoiners. Sats are the only real thing in this space.

However, if the shittokeners are given an incentive to create those transactions in the first place, they can overwhelm the Bitcoiners. A 100ksat UTXO will only ever be worth <100ksats (minus fees) to spend, but if you can convince an idiot that your transaction with a 100ksat fee (handed to miners) is worth >1M sats+, and people give a marketplace and credence to such fantasies, the system cannot function to process <100k UTXOs. It barely functions to process 1M UTXOs, as this would be a 10% loss of funds to tx fees, totally unsustainable.

This kind of bullshit wall street alchemy is antithesis of Bitcoin!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @617a7a 3 Jan

Agreed. There are valid use cases, but ordinals are just ruining the chain capacity. That said, I imagine this is more of a short term concern than a long term one - bitcoin's usecase as money will push ordinals out the market at some point in the future.

There are usecases for custom fungible and non fungible assets. Those should be handled by highly efficient protocols like Taproot Assets. TA and Ordinals work in far different ways. TA can settle any number of custom asset transactions onchain in a single small Taproot transaction. One UTXO. If Ordinals move to this more efficient mechanism, either by choice or being forced to by the market, their small usecase would have a representative footprint on chain as well. But then a lot of the current users are grifters who are likely lazy and won't actually move until the fee market forces them to.

I would recommend moving smaller UTXOs to higher layers however, as fees will continue to increase and your 100ksat UTXO will become dust in that practically guaranteed future environment.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kdnolan 2 Jan

🌈

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @mattybs 2 Jan freebie

I never have. But my gut is telling me that the environment is going one way while the narrative seems to be denial -- if you're a trader that usually means to buy in. fwiw

It's wrecking the mempool but it's also driving adoption for layer 2 solutions like Lightning.

IMO if you can do something with Bitcoin, someone will do it. Better for us to be prepared for it than to hope it goes away.