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181 sats \ 15 replies \ @nym 15 Apr \ on: What are Runes? bitcoin
@lloyddunne summed it up nicely in a comment to me yesterday.
I mean, people used to collect banknotes with interesting serial numbers. Isn't that essentially the same?
If so, you can't "assign" a rarity; a sat's rarity is in the eye of the beholder. Someone might look for sats whose "serial numbers" are divisible by a high power of 10, others by a high power of 2, or 42.
Under this interpretation this means that a VAST majority of ordinals are unremarkable and worthless ("not worth more than the sat they're printed on").
There is nothing rare about ordinals, they are just scams
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Ordinals themselves are not a scam. It's just a protocol of simply assigning a number to every sat ever produced. In that regard, there can only be one, for example, sat #10000000000, and that makes it "rare", within that protocol.
What is a "scam", or more accurately false advertising, is claiming that it's the ONLY "true" way of numbering sats, the only one that gives them value.
One could devise a number of variations of this protocol which would assign different numbers to the same sats, making different sats "rare" (maybe a better word is "attractive") under different systems.
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No, that's not a scam, it's entirely possible. That's why Ordinals is a protocol, a well-defined way of doing things. Just because you don't need it or like it, doesn't make it any less "meaningful".
Sats are produced in a predictable manner, you can assign a number to each sat produced. Then you need to devise rules that govern what how these assignments follow when coins are split and merged later.
What I'm pointing out that there can be many different ways of doing this, with different rules. So the question is, what (if anything) makes Ordinals the "best" way of numbering sats (other than being the first way)? The answer is, the advertising and publicity built around it.
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It's possible inasmuch as selling lunar plots is also possible. There's also many different ways of partitioning the moon and sell the plots to credulous people, yet it's clearly still a scam.
Pretending you're able to identify individual units of an integer number is not any different.
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I just take issue with calling the protocol itself a scam. It's just an algorithm/technology.
It's like calling a coordinate system of the Moon a scam. It's not, even if multiple coordinate systems can exist. Selling plots based on that coordinate system is the scam.
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Your statement is false. You can absolutely track them, if you establish a convention/algorithm for the creation, merging and splitting.
Example:
- Alice mines 50 sats. They are assigned numbers from 1 to 50. Alice owns sats 1-50.
- Alice sends 30 sats to Bob (output 1), with 20 sats change back to themselves (output 2). We establish a convention that we track splits by output number in a transaction. Alice now owns numbers from 31 to 50 (change) and Bob 1-30.
- Bob and Alice (order matters) coinjoin 10 sats each to Charlie. Alice now owns 41-50 (change), Bob owns 11-30, and Charlie owns a single UTXO of 20 sats that cointains 31-40 and 1-10 (determined by order of inputs into the coinjoin).
- Charlie sends 15 sats to Dexter. Because the order of sats in his UTXO matters, Dexter will receive sats 31-40 and 1-5 while Charlie will have a change of 6-10.
As you can see, it's perfectly fine to track these numbers around as they flow through the network. They do not exist in Bitcoin's code but rules can be established to create a layer on top of Bitcoin. Just like people just exist but are assigned social security numbers at birth according to certain rules. Just like coordinate systems are put on celestial bodies.
Bitcoin is not perfectly fungible. If it were, chainalysis would be impossible.