HOW TO KILL ORDINALS
I’ve been contacted by multiple laser-eye maxis, and some bitcoin developers, who tried to understand “what’s going on” and “how can we stop this”.
Here’s my advice.
- Start using it.
The number 1 issue you guys are facing, is that you have no idea what’s even going on.
You don’t understand what type of data is being written on-chain and why. You don’t understand what causes the fee spikes on some occasions, and not on others. You don’t understand what drives ordinals users, where they’re coming from, what they’re trying to achieve, and how this affects the shared resource that is the bitcoin network.
You don’t have to agree with them, but how do you expect to deal with the situation if you don’t even understand it?
I’m not trying to convince you that inscriptions/BRC20s/stamps/etc are not spam/scam/whatever. You can call them whatever you want. But you have to understand what they are and how they work if you have any hope of doing anything about it.
Ethereum and Solana users who got their first BTC a couple of days ago, now understand what’s happening on the bitcoin chain better than you do.
I’ll try to be nicer for the rest of this post, but right now I must get this out of the way: you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Ordinals have been living rent-free in your minds for a full year, you’ve been tweeting and podcasting about it non-stop, yet you couldn’t get yourself to spend a few minutes to try it and understand it.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU???
You have to accept that your approach so far has been abysmal, otherwise there’s no way you’re going to achieve your goals.
So download an ordinals wallet, load it with ~0.005 BTC and start playing around. You’ll probably lose all of it. Your goal here isn’t to make money, it’s to understand the ecosystem and what makes it tick so that you can do something about it.
If you absolutely can’t afford to lose 0.005 BTC then maybe sit this one out, champ. You probably have more pressing issues to attend to anyway.
- Talk to devs from the ordinals ecosystem
Lots of ordinals teams have very strong devs. They can help you fill the gaps in your understanding. They can explain why things are the way they are, what technical issues exist, and how they think things might evolve over time.
I recommend putting your hubris on pause for this step. Don’t assume that just because they’re doing ordinals stuff, these devs are idiots. You’ll find that many of these guys understand bitcoin better than you do. Yeah, I can see your face turning red already, but it’s true.
Remember, the goal of this exercise is to learn. So that you can finally kill ordinals. So be open minded here.
I would’ve recommended to also talk to ordinals enjoyers who aren’t devs, but I know this is probably too much for you to handle…
- Compete When strong financial incentives are involved, it’s hard to stop people from doing things by yelling at them. After you spend time playing around with ordinals (step 1), you’re likely to agree that complaining in tweets, blogs, and podcasts is probably futile.
No amount of name calling, appeal to authority, or pseudo-moral mumbo-jumbo is going to stop people from taking advantage of what they perceive as a massive financial opportunity.
What could help, if you choose to go there, is competition.
Some of these protocols are highly inefficient. BRC20 for example blows up the UTXO set for no reason and has a lot of overhead. Degens could probably get the same benefits with a more efficient protocol, while being better stewards of the bitcoin network.
If you build alternatives that offer same or greater potential for degens while respecting their responsibility towards the network, that could improve the situation for all of us.
@rodarmor
is already doing this with “runes”, and there’s probably a lot more that could be done.
Build and support better protocols, and drive out the inefficient ones. At least consider it…
But there’s another form of competition you can do: improve the incentives and infrastructure for the transactions you DO want to see!
Personally I’m of the belief that there’s very little demand for non-speculative BTC payments right now. I say that based on 10 years of evangelizing bitcoin. I just don’t see that demand. And I believe that’s why the bitcoin mempools were empty prior to ordinals, and why lightning isn’t seeing a lot of usage. It’s not for any technical reason, it’s due to lack of demand by consumers. That’s the main reason why I believe ordinals are not a problem in the first place. It’s not like there are that many people who wanted to use BTC payments otherwise.
But if you disagree with me, prove it! Build better products and services that give people a reason to use BTC payments. Build better scaling solutions that stuff more economic value into L1 transactions. Better lightning solutions would help, better sidechains would help, covenants would help, rollups would help, a lot of other stuff would help.
If you think I’m wrong about the lack of demand for payments then you should build those layers and compete with ordinals. Scalable L2s would pack more economic value into each L1 transaction, allowing them to pay higher fees and drive ordinals out.
- Wait. “Everything is good for bitcoin”. Let the market do its thing. If you don’t want to test, learn, and compete, just wait. Eventually the market settles down and we will find out if people want to use bitcoin exclusively as the ordinals chain (unlikely) or not. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. As much as I think ordinals are important, I have no doubt that BTC as store of value is more important, and this stuff will figure itself out eventually.
While you wait, I recommend taking care of your mental health. Maybe get a job. Tweeting and yelling all day about how much you hate ordinals is unlikely to help, though. I know you don’t believe me. I know you think if you just yell a little harder, if you just convince a few more low IQ “plebs” that ordinals are a scam, then this will all immediately blow over. You’re wrong.
Yelling won’t help. Filtering is not possible. I know you don’t want to believe me but the evidence is clear: you’ve been yelling and promoting filtering for a full year and it didn’t help. In fact, as I’m writing this, ordinals are bigger than ever, and trading volumes are at all-time-highs.
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As for us, we will continue to do what we believe is the best thing we can do for bitcoin for now, which is leveraging JPEGs to accelerate bitcoin adoption and bring new capabilities and functionality to the orange chain that we love so much.
We’ve helped HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people experience the magic of bitcoin for the first time in 2023, and in 2024 we’re going to shake things up even harder.