CD91: Ordinal Inscriptions with Casey Rodarmor

Happy Bitcoin Sunday, freaks.

It's your boy, Odell, here

for Ciel Dispatch,

the show focused on actionable Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion.

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Really do appreciate it. Okay. So with all that said,

we have a bit of a spicy conversation today.

I'm looking forward to it.

Before we get started

yeah. No. We we have a we have a very spicy conversation. We have Casey Rod Armour in the house, the creator of ordinals and ordinal inscriptions.

How's it going, Casey?

Ordinal's founder

is openly hostile to FNFTs at this point, now advertising a method to burn the FNFT and transfer the contents to BTC

and writing f as a testnet.

I take back anything nice I said about ordinals.

These jerks wanna use fNFT folks as a seed money for their BTC NFT architecture

in order to supplant f.

F

them.

So, yeah, that's that's, that's how it's going, man. Good to be here, man. Good to be here. So that tweet was just at you. Right? I don't even know if it was at me or I think there were retweet. Bro, my my Twitter is effed. It's it's it's over. So this will be a very good conversation because Casey is is

simultaneously

hated by a large swath of the Bitcoin community and a large swath of the shit coin community for this creation.

Before we get started, I want

to just for the freaks. Freaks,

a bunch of you asked, you know, why is this conversation relevant? This conversation is relevant to me because my men pools are filled,

and I wanna know what they're filled with and what is going on there.

This conversation is also interesting to me because,

people are using Bitcoin for something, and I want to understand what they're using it for.

And then last but not least, I take a lot of responsibility

with my platform, with our audience.

I've been

I've recorded, you know, thousands of hours of Bitcoin conversations,

and there's

definitely

a strong feeling on my front that I have a responsibility on who I provide a platform to and what kinda conversations happen

on my shows.

Casey, specifically, I have known for quite a long time,

and

he has not shown any

No shit coinery?

Yeah.

I mean, that's there's some nuance to that. I don't know if you've shown no shit coinery, but,

you have there's no pre mine here with you. There's no you you haven't even sold any NFTs yourself. I've I've made one. That you haven't sold? I've made that. I've made one, Literally, inscription 0. Exactly. So I I think it might be a different situation if if, you know, Casey had a big NFT collection that he was trying to dump on on people, that's where the moral moral situation really comes into play. But, anyway, just just to let you freaks know

how I'm thinking about it, and I I you know, it's always a balance between open discussion and platforming scammers.

I do not think Casey's a scammer.

You know, I'm not perfect. Maybe I'm wrong, but, but that that is how I'm thinking about this as we enter this conversation. And like I said, join us in the live chat.

There's no censorship in the live chat. Every

every every comment you do is piped in directly into the into the feed, so anyone who's watching the video feeds can see it. Okay. So there's the intro.

Very spicy.

Casey, before we start, I I think it would be helpful if we do

a little bit about yourself. But Sure. Pre preordinals,

pre inscriptions, be before all this, you know, crazy stuff far back?

And yeah.

Well, I mean, I wanna talk about, like, your your Bitcoin,

like, you and Bitcoin. Sure.

What what is your Bitcoin journey? Yeah. Good question.

I don't know. Yeah. Obligatory, gotta say it. I am a huge fan of this podcast, and I'm

really excited to be talking to you. You and Marty have been,

like, whispering in my ear about Bitcoin.

Super, super, super long time listener. So just wanna say that it's super awesome to be sitting here.

But yeah. So Bitcoin.

So

really my Bitcoin origin story,

just starts just starts by really hating really being very anti authoritarian

from a very, very young age,

and,

I grew up in Berkeley,

in the Bay Area, and that kind of used to be a place where

people who were very anti authoritarian could kinda fit in, you know, and you could kinda be, like, just wiling out, just kind of like a libertarian, you know, and you were kind of welcome on the left, not so much anymore, but, you know, grew up there,

very anti authoritarian. I don't know what I really consider myself.

A lot of my views about politics have now become

just very pragmatic, and I'm some sort of weird,

like competitive government governance is the thing

that I'm most interested in. But anyways, that anti authoritarian streak led to me really disliking the government,

as I,

you know, learned more and more about how the government works and what it does and what the outcomes of its policies are, I just started to see it as this just totally, you know, use mostly useless parasite

that is is is just bad. Like, I think things that are subject to market for that are not subject to market

forces ultimately, like, have no real meaningful constraints and, like, don't wind up doing useful things, and the government is, like, a non useful and sometimes counterproductive thing that takes, like, 30% of our money.

So that's, like, that's, yeah,

that's kind of where this all started. And so when I saw Bitcoin,

which was a long time ago, it was 2013,

I

saw it and I,

first I ignored it. Right? I I I saw it and I was like, oh, this is like wow gold or, like, Internet money or something. Right. And I ignored it and then I,

few months later, I saw it again, and I'm a programmer,

and so I started reading I read the white paper.

I didn't read the code, but I ran a node, and I sort of read everything that I could at the time. I think at the time Reddit was actually pretty high signal. Yep. Yep. And I just read,

everything about it for

I don't know how long it took me to be, like, fully orange filled, but it wasn't long. It was, like, it was, like, 2 months or something where I just read, and then I was, like Firehose. Yeah. Fire hose. Like, immediately became my, like, obsession. You know? And

I was like, okay. Like, I think this is gonna work, basically. I was like, I don't really see

how this is gonna work. And this is something that I wanna talk to you about because I think we have interesting thoughts about it, which are, like,

we got somebody at the window.

I hope it's not a spook. So, yeah, we we actually have interesting thoughts about this, which is, like, why why hasn't the government cracked down harder on Bitcoin and, like, are they cracking down on Bitcoin?

But anyways, yeah, back to talk about that too. But yeah. Yeah. Back to the origin story. So, yeah, I,

you know, I'm a programmer. I was I was working at Google at the time, which I'm sure people are gonna be like, bro, like, spook spook city. But, yeah, I was

SRE,

site reliability engineer, basically just keeping Google from falling over, and

I burned out of that pretty hard.

But so yeah. But but but I was a programmer,

but there was kind of nothing that I really felt like I could really offer

by working on on Bitcoin at the time. Like,

I I've never I I I knew I could go, like, build a wallet or build an exchange. I didn't have any ideas for how to build an exchange better than anybody else.

I think it was in

I I'm sure I'm gonna get the dates wrong. It was, like, at a 2014 or maybe somewhere between 2014, 2017.

I was actually, employed at Chaincode Labs,

a open source

Bitcoin r and d company essentially these days, like Bitcoin r and d and education company. Yep.

In New York City, I worked,

doing open source development on Bitcoin Core, so, like, technically

technically, I was a core developer. I really shy away from that

that As a title. Yeah. As a title. An appeal to authority kinda title. Yeah. And also, like, listen. Like, if Peter Willow wants to call himself a Bitcoin core developer, like, he should do that. I you look at my commits. They're, like, 16, like, little cleanups and, like, hey, I got rid of this dependency. It builds marginally faster. Right? Like, just like small shit, and so I feel like Bitcoin core Bitcoin core developers is, like, you know, there there are people. I'm, like, yeah. Yeah. Totally. Bitcoin core developer. But me, I am a,

like, x minor

Bitcoin core developer. Like, I'm not looking to get any, like Step above intern. Yeah. Yeah. Step Bitcoin core intern. Yeah. Yeah. That's actually honestly basically what I was. So

and and and so at the time, I was, very heavily getting into Rust,

the programming language, which is like a safe and user friendly alternative to c and c plus plus that's still very fast and can still be used for, like, all the hardcore system programming that you use,

that you use c and c plus plus for. And so Bitcoin Core is a very big, very, very messy code base. It still has a lot of legacy decisions embedded in it.

People like Carl Dong are, like, doing or I think Carl Dong is not working on Bitcoin Core anymore, but doing God's work of very, very slowly improving the code base. And so for me, that was, like, not exactly

the right thing.

So I I I left. In retrospect, I think I should have stayed.

Alex Morcos and Suha Stavtour who run it and I think still mostly run it are, like, incredibly chill dudes. And if I was like, hey, I just wanna, like, not work on Bitcoin Core, but work on Bitcoin,

then they probably woulda let me do that. And it's maybe it's good that they didn't because we maybe we'd have, ordinals a lot sooner.

But, so yeah. And then I what did I do? Yeah. I did some I did some shit coining after that. I mean, I, like, went to

went to Facebook, and then I was very interested in GRIN, the privacy coin. I got a lot of Bitcoiners. Yeah. I got a lot of Bitcoiners. Got a lot of Bitcoiners. And, like, it was it was useful. What I did, and I can be totally transparent about it, is

we me and some friends were very excited about Grin, and so we started this, special purpose investment vehicle

to allow people who wanted to buy Grin, just like give us dollars, and we would buy Grin and hold it for them on their behalf.

So, yeah, I'm totally transparent about that. A horrible investment? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like like like, deep deep in the red.

So I did sort of, like, the custody side of that, you know, writing the code for custody.

Grid like, I kind of don't one thing about me that's maybe different from sort of the, like, left curve maxis is that, like, I don't see

Bitcoin versus altcoins as being a moral purity test. Like, I'm I'm just not interested in that. Like, if somebody wants to come, like, quote unquote cancel me for having,

like, on had to sort of, like, to have

honestly shitcoined and been, like, oh, I think this is cool. Like, maybe this is gonna provide some value. You know? Like, I I don't think that that's Well, I think that's the only argument in my opinion is the moral question

because, like,

I I don't consider shitcoins a threat to Bitcoin. I think it's a threat to people who choose to speculate on them. Sure. And so Yep. My biggest issue with shitcoins has always been has been the promoters of shitcoins and how they promote it. Sure. And if they don't disclose trade offs, which they never do. Oh, yeah. Better, faster, stronger than Bitcoin. Right? With, it was, you know, more private than Bitcoin. Yep. That that is always my issue has always been on the moral side from the promoters,

not necessarily as, like, shitcoins,

you know, will overtake Bitcoin or or or a threat to them technically or adoption wise. No. I'm I'm with you on that. Like, it's not really the moral part that I'm saying is important. It's the purity test part. Right?

If you look at a a lot of sort of,

political and cultural

dialogue

outside the Bitcoin space, the way that it works is that

somebody says something that's, like, slightly wrong or perceived to be offensive, and then everybody views it as this, like, mask drop moment where, like, oh, we're seeing their true colors. Right? And

Well, I would say in that situation, the question is, does the person double down, or do they

do they admit you know? Like, I I think The problem is that I think this kind of like, basically, what I'm saying is that if people wanna be, like, once a shitcoiner, always a shitcoiner well, I don't know. It depends on definitely not the case. Yeah. That's that's of us went through shitcoin Yeah. That's and that's how we learned. That's essentially the thing. And I also, like I'm like, for example, like, I'm, like, we've decided that,

the like, some shit I mean, like, some shit coinery is so egregious

that it's, like, not welcome

even, like, mentioning it in project spaces, on Ordinal's project spaces. Right. So in particular,

BSV is, like, I didn't even consider that. I I don't think that somebody's involvement in that is such a strong negative signal, and we have such a high moderation burden Right. And they're attacking Bitcoin that I'm like, no. It's a very easy heuristic. Yeah. But what I'm saying is, like, oh, somebody has fucking dotf in there. Like, let me let me go back to me talking about this personally. Like, you gotta you gotta reel me in. Okay? You know this. Okay? So, like,

I think that people should look at what I did, for example, when I worked on grid, and be like, I was honestly excited about GRIN. I was like, the privacy technology is very cool. Right? Bitcoin doesn't have privacy. It's one or the privacy on Bitcoin is very nuanced. Bitcoin doesn't have pri please note clip it.

The privacy on Bitcoin is very nuanced. Right? You've gotta know how to use it. The tools are tricky. You don't really get, like, kinda one and done privacy. You get this privacy that you fight for

with complicated technical

things like on chain on like on chain swaps and, coin joins and lightning network. But anyways, Bitcoin didn't have privacy, and so I saw GRIN, and I was like, okay. Like, this is interesting. It's doing something very different from Bitcoin,

and I,

was, like, excited about it. Right? And if people wanna say, like, I was doing something morally wrong,

I don't know I just didn't you know I I don't know if I would say that I made a miscalculation,

but you might disagree with it, but I don't think it says anything

really about my character.

And I think that is very prominent in a lot of Bitcoin politics where you're, like, everything gets very personal very quickly

and people are getting really nasty. But I think it's also, like, a might it's it's also Twitter. Like, it's the incentives of Twitter that don't have much nuance. Yeah. But, I mean, there are a lot of people There are a lot of influencers and promoters and then whatnot

that

that straight up scammed people.

They didn't they didn't disclose trade offs. They intentionally just didn't disclose trade offs. They misled people.

And then after they

did that,

they instead of having a self reflection. Right? Like, personal responsibility in this space, I think, has two sides of the coin. Right? Yep. There's personal responsibility on the influencer promoter side,

people with audiences, and there's personal responsibility on the individuals. Right?

You know, ultimately, it it it sucks to say it. Right? But if if you lose your money in the space, you get scammed or whatnot, that's partially your fault, and you need to have an introspection on on how you let that happen. But then it's also also the promoter's fault. Right? And we see a lot of times where the promoters go, they make a shit ton of money, then they just try and whitewash history. They don't actually have any

introspection. They don't take any culpability or responsibility over their actions, and

that's extremely frustrating. It's horrible to see,

And at the end of the day, like, there's basically,

you know, what you said. I don't like

the left side of the bell curve.

I don't like IQ shaming people, but there it's a very easy heuristic. On the left side of the curve is not about IQ. It's a very easy heuristic to just say that anyone who's involved is a scammer. Right? Mhmm. Because just there's been so many instances. Right? So then people jump to that to that side, and and they don't wanna actually necessarily have the hard conversations. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And, like, you know, there are certain people who,

like

I think that the thing is is that it's not a moral purity test. I don't really care about who's a bad person,

but and a good person? Well, no, I do a lot deeply, but, like,

it's like if somebody runs a scam

and then

that it's not a moral purity test, it's not that they're, like, whatever, it's that that's such a strong negative signal

about their character and their like what they're gonna do in the future.

Right. Right? That's that's the issue. Right? I'm interested in preventing bad outcomes,

not having philosophical debates about, like, what's moral and what's not. Right? So, like, there are people who like, I have

every single shit coiner in my DMs,

like, straight up. They're all trying to latch onto this, and they're all trying to so, like, for example, Stacks, like, Stacks is this I mean, I don't even know if we should fucking censor it because I hate signal boosting these people. Oh, yeah. They can go so they're an example of somebody fucking affinity scam. There's someone I wouldn't have on dispatch. Oh, yeah. No. Dude, you shouldn't let them in the park, bro. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Like, I

mean, I'm trying to navigate this Nuance on that. Very carefully, but, like, we are thinking about having a policy that if you have a dot BTC,

let me just explain my thoughts on Stacks.

So

Stacks

claims that they are Bitcoin,

Okay? Stacks claims that they're like a Bitcoin l two, but they have a shitcoin.

Okay? So They have a perpetual their their way they I don't even want I don't wanna know their shit coin, bro. Perpetual ICO is the way they essentially peg into Bitcoin.

I don't even understand this, like, bullshit. I don't wanna use their I wanna their tech with using their stupid fucking words. Like, they have some consensus mechanism that's, like, thematically related to Bitcoin, and then they go off and say that they're Bitcoin and they have dot BTC domains. Like, if ordinals is proof of anything, it's proof that you can fucking build on Bitcoin,

and you don't need a fucking token. If I had added the token, everybody would be rightfully

ignoring my fucking bullshit. Right? These Stacks guys, they're like, oh, we need DeFi on on Bitcoin. And instead of doing what, like, RGB and Taro and DLCs and whatever are doing, they are they decided to add a token. And

tokens tokens my my problem I have so many problems with adding a token. Like, there's so many things wrong with it, but one of the one very practical problem is it makes shit worse.

Your users can't just download your software and use it, They have to, like, go on an exchange and get a token.

Like, there's so there's so many fucking problems with token. Anyways, but yeah. Like, yes. Stacks is

I like to say it's functionally an affinity scam. I don't know what is in the Stacks people's hearts, and I don't care. Right? So I don't wanna say it's just Well, you have to separate the promoters from

the individuals,

I think. Oh, sure. But a lot of the promoters are not technically sophisticated at all. Like, they can't tell, like, like, they've never successfully It was, like, 2017

again. I got into a huge fight with the Stacks people, like, 8 months ago, and then I have to read their white paper for, like, 4 hours just so that Bro, don't, like, just so that I could actively,

like, argue properly against them. I mean, I think the way to argue properly against DAX is to say that they are thematically related to Bitcoin. Right? It's like it's like they're they're Bitcoin themed. Right? Like, if McDonald's wanted to open a new, like, fucking fast dude food joint and put the orange b on things. Right? That's one thing. And then, functionally, they're an affinity scam. People who are unsophisticated

see it, and their branding is very confusing. They tell pea people that it's Bitcoin, but, like, they have a fucking token, and, like, that's the that's the line in the sand. You know? Okay. So let's let's let's just pull it back because we got derailed a little bit.

You were shit coining with Grin. Yeah. Shit coining with Grin. Journey. Yeah. Shit coining with Grin.

I had this very

I think I wrote kind of into my contract that they couldn't fire me. And so I had this thing where they were, like, paying me. Whatever. I won't get into details. But, yeah, I I was I sort of was getting paid and, like, I didn't have to do this. Like, 2017 or something. I I The Grin hype was like I I feel like it was early 2018 maybe or something. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it it like really the lesson from that was that

I thought the reason that I thought GRIN was cool was not because it had better tech than Bitcoin, but but because it had an interesting

technical thing that it did that Bitcoin didn't do.

And what that essentially GRIN was a basically, I I don't wanna say a failure because actually they still have small communities, some devs. Right? Failure. Well, price wise, it's a failure. Right? Like, nobody okay. And adoption wise, use case wise, there's no need for it.

Sure. I mean, like,

whatever. Like, it's it's, I would say adoption wise, it's definitely a failure. I'm very uncomfortable with, like, it's a failure. I don't know. They have a they have a small I mean, I don't I don't wanna, like, speak to to 0 in the space, so they always, like, linger around for years. Yeah. But I mean, it's like there's all like, is a small project that has let's say you you make an open source tool. Right? And you have a small number of users, and, like, it never gets any adoption.

Right? And, like, they're still building it and, like, having fun. Like, I feel uncomfortable

saying Okay. Fine. Fair enough. Failure. You know what I mean? Like, there's gonna be small super hyped, though. Yeah. Super hyped and And it was a lot of us who said, like, it wasn't gonna go anywhere, and it didn't go anywhere. Didn't go anywhere. Did not live up to people's expectations at all. Those these are things I'm very comfortable saying. So,

that kinda taught me

that having some sort of particular,

you know, debatable technical advantage over Bitcoin doesn't make a difference. Bitcoin has so much network effect, so many developers, like so much, like,

goodwill

that,

you're just not gonna ever compete with Bitcoin. And in fact, I wasn't really interested in competing with or supplanting

Bitcoin. Right?

So yeah. Anyways, so then I just

kinda did my own thing for a while.

I worked on a bunch of random projects. I've done a lot of,

generative digital art,

like,

generative, like, audio reactive visuals for live music.

Can I just freely show my website and, like, my projects that that are, like, pure Bitcoin or, like, unrelated to Bitcoin?

Yeah. What's your website? Rotimore.com. You can see all my, like, weird ass fucking art on there,

shit like that. So, yeah, I just did and there's, like, no shitcoin links there. So And then so what? We were, like, in, like Yeah. So and then I then I then I worked on one thing I worked on was Agora. Agora is a,

web server.

It's basically a file server that you pay for things with, like, a Before Agora even existed,

you introduced me to Eric Sirion.

I don't,

I just yeah. I mean, that was, like, very early when Fedimint was happening. And I I just wanted I just wanna put that out there that, you know, Casey just blind Telegram messaged me, said I'm a huge fan of dispatch.

Like, you need to talk to this guy, my buddy, Eric.

He has this crazy idea of FEDIMIT. And, like, FEDIMIT at that point was maybe he was even calling it MiniMint at that point. It was confusing. There was a FEDIMIT protocol and a Mini Mint implementation. Like just in his it was in his head. Like, he barely even had it, like, written down or anything. It was, like, very early it was super early on, and it was what started me down the FEDIMENT rabbit hole. Yeah. So and introduced me to Eric, so it was I'm super appreciative of that. For sure.

And then you told me about your project, Agora. Yeah. An Agora is a file server that you put some files on a computer,

and then you,

in a config file, say how much you want people to pay for them, in SATS,

and then when people try to download the file, they get a paywall.

It's all open source. It's at github.com/agoradashorg

/agora.

I don't,

maintain it at all anymore. There's still some active users and people interested in it.

I think there's a fork. I don't know if it's maintained or not, but,

you can, like, buy and sell files for Bitcoin. Yeah. And, like, what I always wanted people to do was basically create,

pirate Netflix. Like, the ideal use case for Agora is you get a computer somewhere,

and you put, like

like, you get one of those, like, you get, like, a few enterprise grade 20 terabyte hard disks, and you put every single movie that's ever been released on there, and people would pay you 10 sats a movie to download them,

that was the plan. But

nobody really took the bait, so,

it just didn't get popular.

And I did that with my friend Zunca, so shout out to Zunca, he's a g.

And then I kind of,

when did you start running as a bitdevs?

Oh, that wasn't that long ago.

Yeah. So 8 months ago,

I was always a huge

asset BitcoinDevs fan, so I would show up, and

Alex Leishman at River, who is a g,

was hosting it, and,

it would it was kinda going he he wouldn't do it super often, like, because he's super busy.

And every time it would go, like, 2 months without an SF bit devs, I would email him and be like, hey. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help to, like, make the meetup go faster or whatever.

And then he was no longer able to run it due to other responsibilities.

And, like, the last SF BitDevs that he hosted, I was there, and he just grabbed me. It was like, hey, do you wanna run the meetup? And I was like, yeah, let's go.

And so then in collaboration

with another with Bay Area Bitcoiners who are just like grassroots Bay Area

meta meetup,

there's, like,

5 locations.

I started hosting SF Bitcoin Devs. I think I've done it, like,

8 8 times maybe, so I think it's been almost a year since I started hosting it.

That's, like, a whole another thing. I I was fucking terrified the first time, like It's hard to run a BitDevs. Bro, it's crazy. Lot of responsibility.

Yep. Very technical. The the thing that you gotta realize

if you're a bit devs host is, like, sometimes I I bring things up, and I'm, like, you know, I read this, but I didn't understand anything.

Does anybody have any idea, like, what this is talking about? Some, like, deep crypto wizardry.

And then,

I will be, like, if nobody has anything to add, we'll just move on to the next item, or somebody is, like, super

knowledgeable on the subject, and they'll pipe up and tell everybody about it. But it's, like, you gotta you gotta understand that Bitcoin is so broad and so deep

that you can't know everything,

and you need to be comfortable

with your role as a facilitator

and not necessarily as some wizard that's gonna tell everybody

everything. You're the QB. You don't necessarily have to know everything. Yeah. That's right. You just gotta get the ball to the right person.

I gotta move I think a good bit devs, like, we were talking about NAS bit devs this week. It was just like, I knew it was a good bit devs because I didn't understand 50% of what was being discussed.

Yeah. It should challenge.

The majority of people in the room should be challenged

Oh, yeah. If it's gonna be a good fit test. Yep. Yep. Yep.

So

yeah. I did that. Been doing that for 9 months.

Bear the Bay Area has a really thriving

meetup scene. There's, like,

Varia Bitcoiners, there's probably, like, 1 or 2 to 3 things a week in different locations,

and then there's there's sort of separate orgs, like, I me, and one of the very Bitcoiners run the SF Bitcoin devs, but then there's also all these other grassroots these roots groups meetups.

So

I guess let me, go

I I think it's good to touch on, like, what I thought about NFTs at the time because that kind of informs, like, why I'm doing this whole thing. Okay. Yeah. So NFTs I saw NFTs in 2017,

and I was, like,

I thought the art I thought it was an interesting idea, but the art was, like, not very interesting to me. And so as a result, I just kinda forgot about them.

And then I think in 2019

or 2020,

I saw

some

really amazing art.

I sorta don't wanna name names,

but, like,

I think that when people see

NFTs, they think like the like monkey JPEGs. That's what that's what everybody thinks. And that's why I wasn't loss trading

and pump and dumps. I I yeah. Sure. Tons of scams. Tons of scams. Yeah. Yeah. And so and but I saw art, which I really liked.

And not only was it art that I really liked, but it was exactly the kind of art that I had made in the past,

so

sort

of algorithmic

programmer art. Right. And there was a market for that, and there were real collectors who really appreciated it.

And I thought to myself,

this is really cool,

like, I

I don't I think that there are a lot of scams and maybe, like, 90 I I don't even know what the number is, but I'm Probably, like, as close to a 100% as you can get to.

You know, I have a nuanced view on Fair enough. Yeah. That's my view. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I I think

sure. So I saw something that I thought that in some cases was really the moral equivalent of buying a painting and selling it, you know, especially the high end NFTs. The low end is, like,

yeah. And and, obviously, like, there's a lot of

well, yeah. We can get into ethical issues, but

so,

I saw a market develop for exactly the kind of art that I had made, and

I I thought, okay, like, maybe I can make and sell

ERC 721

NFTs, which are Ethereum NFTs.

I don't like Ethereum. I think Ethereum is completely centralized. I think their monetary policy's a joke.

There's sort of these, like, space I think they're either, like,

disingenuous scammers or they are these sort of, like, space cadet types who don't really understand

the problems with the Rube Goldberg machines that they're building.

So I'm very negative on Ethereum.

But I was like, okay. Well, if I'm if I'm, like, making Ethereum NFTs, you know, maybe that is

okay. Maybe that's, like, me buying and selling a painting.

So I looked into it,

and I started I had written some solidity for a joke ICO that, like, didn't raise any money that was just supposed to make fun of it. If you search for Synthorn,

they're in, like, it's, like, a 2017,

like, ICO, like, literally, I did not sell 1.

It was a a synthetic rhino horn dick pills on the blockchain. Oof. Yep. And it was literally like a parody piece

at the time to make fun of ICOs, and it was an ERC 20 token. And, like, there are, like, people who are, like it's kinda funny. There are people who took it seriously because everything was so insane at the time. So I'd written that solidity contract. And to be clear, I didn't that wasn't, like, a money making thing. That was literally parody. It was literally, like, code as parody.

So then I I started looking into ERC 721 and

looking on how NFTs on Ethereum works.

And this is a very deep topic, but what I found was

overwhelmingly

negative.

Like, overwhelmingly negative technical problems,

overwhelmingly negative social problems,

overwhelmingly negative,

business practices,

including some subtle ones that people don't really understand that I think are very important

due to that relate to data availability,

and I decided that, like,

it wouldn't be a problem for me to make an NFT,

but I could not encourage anybody to buy it from me. Like, I would have to the the the list of disclaimers would have to be so long

where I'd be like, listen. Like, you need to understand Ethereum's security properties, which are terrible, and it's, like, development direction, which is terrible,

in order to be an informed consumer to even pay me $10 for this, like, NFT.

So I decided that I could not do that,

and I didn't do it,

like,

I'll I'll I'll avoid, like, sucking my own dick too much, I is how can I swear? Of course you can. Okay. My grandmother asked me how I haven't gotten kicked off the radio yet because I curse so much. Okay. So because I I I won't I won't told her I have a radio show because I didn't think she could comprehend what a podcast was. Bro, that's beautiful. Your grandmother thinks you're on the radio. You must she must be so proud.

So I won't suck my suck my own dick too much, but I will say, like, I could have made

tens of 1,000,000 of dollars just,

like, making Ethereum NFTs and not promising everything and just doing it on the strength of my art. Right. Like, I like, it's a very small niche, this, like, algorithmic art, you know, and there's not that many people who are so good at it, but I didn't. I decided, like, no.

So And to be clear, like, the algorithmic art is where we see, like, these massive entity collections, right, where, like, changes depending on Massive?

Like, how many pieces? I mean, like, the original was, like, CryptoKitties.

Would was that is that what you mean by algorithm or not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to differentiate.

I don't I don't like naming names because Like, I don't really under I've, like Yeah. I tried to do blinders on the NFTs. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Understanding is, like No. No. No. Yeah. No. Not not not not like 10 k p f 10,000

PFPs. Like, not like board AP op I'm not talking about board AP op And that, like, changes based on, like, a like a random number or something provided by Onchain, right, or something like that? Changes different heuristics of the There's

so many different kinds. The thing the thing that I started to see that I thought was interesting was one called Art Blocks.

So they're

algorithmic

generative art. They're they're usually abstract. They look like abstract paintings. Got it. Yeah. And they're,

usually they do smaller runs

in terms of the number of pieces in a collection because you have this algorithm that a programmer writes that generates

abstract art, like, looks like maybe you could do one that looks like Rothko paintings,

and then each one kinda looks like a different Rothko painting.

And

the best ones of those obviously, you know, there's scam examples of everything, but the best ones of those are usually, like, shorter form, like, there's, like, a 100 or there's, like, 400

because and each one takes a random seed as input and gives you this image,

and to be clear, this is not something that, like, needs a blockchain. You can just make these images on your computer,

but those and they're they can be very beautiful

to my mind, like very, like, staggeringly beautiful,

And so

I'm absolutely not talking about 10

k 10 k PFPs,

that that's, like, the when I say 10 k PFPs,

like, it's 10,000 piece

profile picture. Yeah. Monkey JPEGs.

Yeah. I did not create this because I find monkey JPEGs interesting.

There's some things I mean, like, again, nuanced opinion about a lot of things. Community is interesting,

but, yeah, there's a lot of fucking scams and a lot of things that are just ugly and stupid looking.

Okay. So you sucked your own dick. Yep. You've done sucking my 1,000,000 of dollars. Yeah. That's right. Right. But I didn't. Okay.

I mean, I think that's why a lot of us have chips on our shoulders too. Right? Like, I I mean and I I just wanna say right now, freaks,

while we're 40 minutes in already,

You know, I've I've I've tried very hard to, you know, put a lot of effort into trying building out dispatch the the right way and and making audience funded.

And there's been a lot of people throughout the years that, you know, I've said, you know, oh, release an NFT series or something to fund it because people will pay you way more money than you're receiving on donations. And and and I have,

intentionally tried to make the show as radically transparent as possible, which is why you can go to geyser.fund and see all the donations. And, you know, I'm a privacy advocate, but you can see how much,

in donations has come to dispatch because I want it to be out there. But I will unequivocally say

that regardless of inscriptions

being on Bitcoin, and we can get we're gonna get into all the technical specifics and stuff like, there will be no

there will be no Odell

NFTs being sold or no,

dispatch NFTs being sold to fund the show, period, unequivocally.

Okay. Cool. Let's continue.

So yeah. So in early

I I think early 2022,

like, January,

maybe earlier, maybe late

2021,

I just sat I was like, okay. Well, I can't do this on Ethereum. I guess I need to figure out how to do this on Bitcoin. Well, I think an interesting thing would be, like, let's can we just quickly talk about, like, the technical issues of how they have Ethereum

NFT set up, but besides, you know, obviously, the issues with the chain Yeah. But, like Oh, sure. Just open c and

and how it's it's basically just pointing to a link on IPFS.

There, yeah. There's there's more than that.

So, like, yeah. But but, yeah, like, I mean, Ethereum NFT is

usually

the

the there so on a let's talk let's talk specifics. An Ethereum

NFT

is anything that implements the ERC 721

spec,

and

if it implements the spec,

then it has a function called token URI

that returns a URL

where you can fetch the metadata

from for the NFT, and a URL

is just something you type into your browser,

you know, window, like htp, whatever. They can have they can point to different places.

They can be different protocols,

and

many many many

of ERC 72021

NFTs

point

to just Amazon Web Servers,

to somebody's web server. So

you

and one of

my problem with this is is about transparency

and

consumer protection.

Like,

if somebody buys an NFT for 1,000 of dollars

and you sell it to them, and they don't fully understand

the fact that it's it's pointing on somebody's web server, and that

that that new owner of that expensive object is relying on the good graces of a third party to

make that object continue to function.

I think that's completely irresponsible.

And, like, a perfect example is we saw some people did,

did NFT series that FTX was hosting on their servers. So when those servers got taken down in the bankruptcy,

they literally just their image wasn't there anymore. Yeah. Exactly,

and

some of them also point to IPFS

so IPFS

is, not a well designed system.

It's basically a very poor version of BitTorrent. Yeah. I don't understand the incentives of it at all. There are no incentives. It it has the incentives of BitTorrent. Okay. You could you could you should think of it as, a NIH

not invented here,

BitTorrent with technical decisions that make it worse.

So,

some some NFTs point to IPFS.

That is not good either because essentially when the last anybody can seed it which makes it a little bit better than Hosting on ftx.com.

Yeah but when the last seeder goes away

that content is gone. And similarly, I think if you sell somebody something

that the content is on BitTorrent hosted by other people,

you don't you need to tell them how to do it. You need to explain this to them. You need to explain the trade offs.

You need to you need to give them tools realistically because users are nontechnical

to automatically

post the young content. It can't be like, oh, yeah, go to this guide and do some crazy shit that nobody's ever gonna do. You you can't even do that. You have to make it so that it's, like, one click, you know, or or, like, they can easily

pay somebody. So at least they understand what the economic incentives are. So I I think that's irresponsible. That's, like, one tier above just somebody's web server.

One tier that's actually probably below both of them is,

like, these decentralized storage platforms.

Like, I don't even wanna name names, like, you know well, I'll just call them out, like Filecoin and Arweave. So those are those are basically

algorithmic stablecoins that are pegged to the price of storage.

Right? And when the price of the token

goes goes below the price of the storage,

the system catastrophically

fails because nobody's willing to host content anymore because they're just getting Right. Yep. So those are probably worse than the other 2 even.

And there are some Ethereum NFTs that do have content

that is on chain.

There are some, and I I like those communities a lot. But even

then, an ERC 721

contract is a big blob of code, and to understand and that token URI, it's not like it's hard coded and it can't change.

It's just some code

that,

returns that token URI.

And

if there

this is this is like the the sort of meta problem with ERC 721.

It's an interface

and not an implementation.

So the interface just kinda tells you how it behaves. Right? Okay. But the but the implementation,

what it actually does

is

different on a token by token basis,

so you need to audit

you need to audit your JPEGs.

Don't trust verify. Yeah. If you wanna really understand I mean, even this we're not even talking about all the problems with Ethereum because it inherits all the problems of Ethereum. Right. You you for you to be a informed consumer

of an ERC 721 token,

you need to audit

every single

NFT because they're all different. They could all have backdoor keys. They could all have bugs. Right. Many of them have mutability

built in so that you can just the the developer can just change the image. Right? Right. And this is this is completely separate from, like, the foundation of, you know, if you buy something, like, will Ethereum still be there in 10 years or 15 years or whatever? Exactly. Yeah.

And Ethereum has already made yeah. So anyway, so so there are some on chain Ethereum

there's there are Ethereum NFTs.

There are ERC 720 ones that have on chain content, and they actually have these like, this is one thing I'll say about,

like, NFTs on Ethereum. There are

really cool artists

and collectors who are really into the art that are there. And I think this is gonna be hard for Bitcoiners to hear, like, some Bitcoiners. I mean, like, kinda like left curve maxis. Like,

you need to understand that, like,

when somebody when an when there are lots of people who saw NFTs

and it was marketed to them as

amazing digital art that's forever on the blockchain,

and they saw pictures that they loved and spoke to them for whatever reason, or they were artists who it's very hard to make money as an artist, they were, like, awesome. And these are unsophisticated

people. Right? These are well, not unsophisticated, but they're not technical people. Right? They don't understand

anything

about solidity or whatever, that's just completely in every

universe. So these are good people and a lot of them are creative

and they make amazing stuff. So anyways, but, you know, this these are we're talking problems with the tech. So the problem with the tech is that there's no consumer protection. Right? It's like the Wild West, nobody knows what they're getting,

this is really the my issue. Right? If if somehow

you got everybody in that space to be informed consumers

of what they're buying,

like, whatever, go fucking crazy, like, people like to gamble, right, like, you lose money by gambling,

but I mean, and, you know, this yeah. Moral things, like,

if somebody is an informed roulette player,

that's fine.

Right? If if you're telling people that it's like but if you're, like, Ponzi scheming people and saying it's a guaranteed thing, like, that's another thing. So that there's I could go in I could go into this for days. But

yeah. So Great time. Yeah. Lots of problems with,

Ethereum NFTs,

and so I just started noodling on how to do it on Bitcoin. And so I came up with first, I came up with ordinals,

which is a way of

it is a lens that you view the Bitcoin base layer through that lets you track individual sats.

Normal Bitcoiners unaffected. Just ignore it. Is that an attack on fungibility?

No.

You gotta be more specific.

I mean, I see, like, people, like, buying, like, a set for, like, 10,000,000 sets or something. Does that affect you?

I mean, one set equals 1 set. Right? Yeah.

I mean, at the protocol level, it doesn't change anything. No. Okay. What I'm saying is that people I think I knew the answer to that question, but I have you on here and I Yeah. I mean, so I think that To me, the ordinal stuff is just, like, complete

nonsense.

That's fine. That's that's where I want clear. Bitcoin is to be. Like Okay. Yeah. Like like Like, you first told me about it, like, 9 months ago or something like that. You're like, Matt, don't be mad at me. I'm doing this thing.

I was so scared to tell Matt about ordinals because he's, like, a big privacy guy, and I feel like it's easy

to think that it has a negative effect on privacy. But let me say specifically what you said. Is this an attack on fungibility?

And you said and I said, like, well, what's the specific issue?

1 sat equals 1 sat. No. No. That's not you didn't what's the problem? If if if somebody over there wants to pay 10 sat for their shiny rare Pokemon sat, like, what's what's the problem?

Yeah. I mean,

I,

yeah, I I guess that is their prerogative. I I guess I guess the the concern I have with the scheme is is that,

maybe it goes back to promoters again. So maybe that's not even a fungibility

concern. I totally agree with those concerns about We're, like, seeing, like, influencers and stuff being, like, buy my SAT for 10,000,000 SATs. You know? Well, can When it's the same set. Well, sure. But, I mean, you've gotta say, can somebody make and sell a painting? Is that, like, a legitimate thing to do? Yeah. I think people can make and sell paintings. Yeah. Okay. That that's now we're going to that's if we go into some descriptions, which I want the majority of conversation to be, on Oh, well, there are rare and rare and exotic sats that people might wish to collect that are, like

but I don't think, I mean, it's only through, like, this, like, theology

kind of created. Like, you've, like, kind of, like, created, like, this almost, like, religion level

Well, I would say that it's ordering scheme. Yeah. I'd say that it's or lens. What are you calling it? A lens, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, things are arbitrary.

Isn't Bitcoin pretty arbitrary?

In a lot of ways, yeah. So but a lot of people like it and use it. Right?

Yeah. And that kinda makes it not arbitrary anymore.

Right. So things can be arbitrary So, I mean, so what if what if we had, like,

maybe maybe it's not a useful theoretical or whatever, but

we had a a ordinal like scheme

where instead of so, like, my basic very rude because I tried just to be clear, Freaks, and if you listen to Rabbit Hole recap, you've heard me say it. Like, when Casey first In one ear out, not the other is what I heard. Well, when Casey first told me about it, I was hoping I could just ignore it

and just never talk about it, it, period. Never look into it. Never talk about it.

But here we are.

My mempool is full.

But what's how many stats to get into the next block?

We have mempool dot space up on the screen right now. It looks

like 3. Wow. That's weird. Mempool's full. 3 sets to get into next block. What's going on? Yeah. There's a lot of 1 set providers. Seems seems pretty chill if you ask. For now. I think things are gonna heat up, but but we can get into that conversation separately. But okay.

So the the way my basic,

left side of the curve understanding here is

that,

you know, it's based on, like,

if if it's the first side of a new block or first side of a new difficulty adjustment, like, that's where, like, the quote unquote rarity comes from on the individual ordinal sats. Yeah. If it's so there's But you could have a scheme where it's, like Mhmm.

If it's a KYC UTXO

Uh-huh.

Like, if it's, like,

a, you know, a whitelisted Bitcoin UTXO or whatever. Right? Mhmm. A cut Bitcoin UTXO, then it's more valuable than if it's a,

you know, post coin join UTXO or something like that. And then all of a sudden, you have

that would be an attack on fungibility.

Yeah. But I'm not doing that. Right.

How does CoinJoin mix into this whole thing? Like, all my UTXOs are have collaborative transaction history.

Does that mean I

I,

lost my my

my rare stats from, like, post difficulty adjustments and stuff? I don't think so.

The way that coin joins work is that when you put I mean,

ordinal theory is deep and wide. But when you put SATs into a coin join, when you put UTXOs into a coin join,

first off, like, it doesn't really it doesn't change anything from a privacy perspective. If you're a

so you basically get you put in some sats with particular ordinal numbers on one side, and you get back sats that are the same or different ordinal numbers on the other side just arbitrarily from the inputs. So

you get some random sats that

I'm still trying to figure this out if it's confusing for me to say you get random sats or maybe I should say only you get random ordinals to make it clear that, like, really sats are destroyed in every transaction and new ones are created. And to another because you really have UTXOs

and there's the UTXOs are destroyed and created. Right. But, yeah,

the the terminology is still whatever. But, like You haven't fully written your bible yet? No. Absolutely not. So, like, it's we're still in the early apostles. Could it incentivize,

like

Could it it could, yeah, it could incentivize people to join coin join rounds because they wanna try and get They wanna skim off rare

sats. Yeah. So Well, that's good. We could use some incentivization

on that front. Yeah. And it also incentivizes people to,

on that's probably good if they wanna join CoinJoin rounds.

It incentivizes people to deposit and exchange hot wallets and then withdraw.

That's not a great incentive.

I don't know. Like, yeah, that's not great. I guess they're using the chain in that situation at least. Right? Yeah. At least they know how to get their coins off in exchange.

Right. Because they get random sats out.

So,

yeah, I think it's really understand this sort of more stuff at all. You can get it. It's no big deal. It's just, like,

each each each block creates,

each block mines some number of sats.

Each block, those sats have an ordinal number. Ordinal number is assigned in the order in which they're mined. First block, 0 to 50,000,000,000. I can see Matt Matthew's eyes glazing over

there. 1st block, 0 to 5,000,000,000. 2nd block, 5 to 10,000,000,000.

And this is like, you know, this is a fantasy. This is Pokemon. Okay?

And then,

when those sats go into a transaction,

when they're like in that UTXO,

and when they when they go into a transaction,

they're sort of we pretend that they're in a list

essentially, in each UTXO, in a little stack,

and then they just go over like this from the inputs to the outputs. So the first

SAT in the first input

becomes

the first SAT

first SAT in the first input

is destroyed,

and then its ordinal number is assigned

to the first sat of the first output. Right? It's like that, You know? And they just kinda split. You know the mempool dot space

flow diagrams? Yeah. It's exactly like that, except they put the fee on the top. I take the fee out of the bottom. Okay. I think I think ordinals,

we can I I can at least personally safely ignore? They're just a complete external lens on Bitcoin Sure. That I just don't have to prescribe to. Yep. And I can just continue to do my own thing. Absolutely. Just continue to stay on the stacking sets regardless of their order number. That's

entirely correct. Now inscriptions, I don't think I can ignore. Inscriptions, this idea of of writing arbitrary data, any data you really want into the Bitcoin chain,

and propagating it throughout the network. So let's jump into inscriptions.

Yeah. So it's important to note that any for any shared resource,

multiple people won't will wanna use that shared resource.

So you ride the bus, other people wanna ride the bus, the bus gets full, and you have to wait.

Right.

That's, like, the deal. Because buses don't have a fee market. You can't just, like, pay more and then someone gets kicked off the bus. Well, if, we had some private private market buses,

then, we would have a fee market for buses. It's called capitalism.

Right. So we would have more entrepreneurs,

building more buses,

and people find, like, you know, maybe somebody could have a way that you don't actually need to,

you know, get on the bus or, like, you only need to get on the bus once, and then the bus can take you a bunch of different places,

and then you you then get off the bus when you're done, but you've gone to all these different places, and we could call this the lightning bus,

and different people would find ways to use things more efficiently.

So, yeah, there could easily be a fee the fee market fee markets exist

in regular markets. Right? When when a lot of people want something, price goes up, so common mechanism.

But, yeah, Bitcoin, shared resource. When other people wanna use it,

you gotta pay more. And that's always been the intention

and the plan for Bitcoin. Like, that's how it's always known that it's gonna work. Right? Yeah. Like There'll be full blocks, and then people will pay pay a fee if if they wanna be included or not. That's right. And that fee will change based on market dynamics. Yeah. And,

people are gonna use

Bitcoin the asset

for things that you don't

understand.

Right? Like, they're gonna wanna go buy, a bunch of, like,

I don't know, like, Femboy Fox, you know, like, Femboy Fox posters or something. You know? And, like, you're not into Femboy Foxes, but other people are gonna wanna use Bitcoin for that. So kind of from your point of view, if you think that inscriptions are spam,

I think you kind of also have to argue that these other

uses of Bitcoin that you don't care about or aren't involved with, it's it it would be consistent for you to say that those are spam as well.

Right? That's, like, that's the way that Bitcoin works is people use it for things that you don't know about and you don't care about.

And if you

want them not to do that, well, you can try to push for censorship.

But, yeah, that's kinda that's kinda the deal with Bitcoin. You know?

Okay. So

inscriptions.

Yep.

What are they?

So,

I mean, do you want me to talk about this through the lens of

ordinal theory or in the normal BitCorner?

I mean, I don't I the latter.

Normal Bitcoiner. I think the ordinal theory stuff just confuses everything.

Well, I I At the end of the day, there's people writing arbitrary data on the chain. So when you say everybody, I think it includes some people, but some people wanna use this, and they need to understand how it works. And so metaphors are a very important way of teaching people.

Go. Okay. So,

I'll do normal Bitcoiner. So people make transactions where they make big,

they have transactions with large witnesses. They put a lot of these transactions of very large witnesses. That's the normie, but kind of way of putting it. Right.

It's kinda it.

Right. So let let's just go let's

pull it back for a second. What is the the witness portion?

So

in SegWit,

for a variety of reasons, it was decided that

certain kinds of data

certain kinds of transaction data

in in an individual transaction should be moved outside of the

sort of what had been the main transaction,

and this included things like signatures and scripts.

And

what this this was done for a number of reasons that we can get into, and,

you know, they

did this for a large number of reasons, and they created this extra additional data structure called the witness

that Bitcoin kind of has these 2 Merkle trees. It has the transaction Merkle tree,

And then in a coinbase output, op return, it has a commitment to this other Merkle tree of witnesses

and new new types of Bitcoin addresses,

like Taproot and SegWit,

they put all their signatures and all their scripts and all this stuff

in

this witness.

Right. So, basically, we had

a block size of 1 meg,

and then we added this witness portion

that

essentially allowed us to increase the block size to 4 megs,

more or less. Well, the way I think I mean, it's no. It's like,

you

you are allowed to in a block, you can have up to 4000000

bytes of witness data,

and then you must subtract

every non witness byte

multiplied by 4 from that budget. So you have a 4000000

byte limit,

and each witness byte counts for 1

when you're ticking down that limit, and then each non witness byte, essentially all the old bytes Yeah. That counts for

4.

So the witness bytes tick that tick that down

slower,

and a non only have a 4 meg block if it's all witness data. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we've we've we've seen a 4 meg block. Right. But but We call them a 4 megger. But in practice in practice, it allowed a soft fork block size increase.

Yes. And and and also it was done for a variety of

other, like, beneficial reasons that fixed transaction malleability,

It encouraged people to use,

clean up their UTXOs,

and at the time, a block size inquiry started. But to me, I

I wanna, like, pack I just wanted to, like, be very clear in here because to me,

to to people that are concerned that we will have

essentially 4 MEG blocks going forward or maybe slightly less depending on, you know, how much nonwitness status in there as well,

And and the implications of the the general implications of why you don't wanna have more data is is is mostly bandwidth constraints. This idea that the more data that's being shared around the network,

makes it more expensive to run a node,

and also centralizes miners to a degree. It gives large miners

an advantage,

and so

because of block propagation. Right? So if they have a large amount of hash, they are able to,

essentially have a head start on the next block and solving the next block. And this is why block size increases in Bitcoin have always been you know, relatively conservative, relatively taboo.

But if that's the concern,

the original sin was Segwit

increasing the size

because the assumption at that point should always be and was for a lot of us was that those blocks would be full going forward and fee market would

develop.

Yeah. We we signed up for for,

Formag blocks when we when we did some. Was the original sin. I would If that if that's the concern use the word sin. But if that's if that's the concern That's right. If the concern is

is increased bandwidth requirements. Yep. Well, there's actually multiple concerns, like IBD, initial block download. Right. There's verifying signatures,

so and that's actually On the compute side. Yeah. On the compute side, CPU.

So

you verifying signature is very expensive,

make up a lot of the time of IBD, even if you have once you have a once you're sort of if you have a very slow connection, first thing you're limited by is just downloading the data. But once you once you get a fat fat connection and you're downloading, like, gigs a second, you're no longer that's no longer your limitation,

and actually way earlier that's no longer your limitation.

Your next limitation is things like signature verification.

Right?

So signature verification is expensive.

People like Peter Welle are doing God's work,

making it faster,

And then there's even more than that. So,

the that's like these are short term. That's like CPU and

and bandwidth.

But then in the long term, bigger blocks mean that the UTXO set size can grow at a larger rate.

Right. Right? If we had if we

had comedy's 4 4 gig size blocks like the BSVers are

are are fucking around with, like, the UTXO set size could grow at an enormous rate until

you had to have a computer

with, like,

sort of, like, 64 gigs of RAM. Right. Right? So there's actually a lot of subtle issues with raising the block sense, not just the sort of minor And there's a natural incentive for people to not have many UTXOs in a, like, a sustained high fee market. That's right. So in a way,

actually, And you saw that, like, when the 2017 spam attacks were happening. Yeah.

Like, there was massive UTXO consolidation because fees were going up and people didn't wanna get stuck with unspendable

outputs.

Yeah. That's right.

So for a lot of reasons, we did this Segwit thing, and now we have this thing called the witness.

Does not allow for arbitrary data storage.

It gets a discount, but I would argue that that discount, you know, that discount in that it it ticks down. Right. I would not it ticks down the the the 4,000,000 byte budget slower than other bytes, but those were done for a wide variety of technical

reasons that benefit,

financially dense Bitcoin transactions,

and

so that was what

opened the door in a way, but let me be clear, ordinals would have worked on Satoshi's day 1 client,

and, inscriptions would also have worked. I could have figured out a way. If I had if I had really started noodling on this and I was as far along in my Bitcoin journey

in 2009 where I I wasn't even aware of it, like, I could have written this on day 1. Like Got it. Day 1. Yeah.

So

yeah. So for normal Bitcoiners and an inscription so an inscription is what But they would have been much smaller?

No. They would have been much larger on day 1 because of the original block limit was, like, actually, like, 4 gigs or something. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So And then Satoshi lowered it. Yeah. It's quietly.

Back when we used to get,

quiet upgrades to Bitcoin that nobody disagreed about. They shipped an update. Yep. Yeah. So yeah. So yeah. Actually, you're lucky I didn't think of it. You're lucky I wasn't on the Cypherpunks mailing list.

So,

although I should really be clear, I'm not a big blocker, and I've been telling everybody I will resist any sort of talk of a block size in increase. I as far as I know, it hasn't been a problem on our Discord, but if there was people on our Discord who wanted to start talking about a block size increase, I'd be like, that's off topic, and I would start silencing I'd start timing out people and banning them. Like, that's that's not something I'm interested in. So you believe in censorship in that level? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, you choose who to have on, so you believe on censorship. They could have their own discord or whatever. Like, you censor do you censor people when you don't have them on,

social dispatch?

Yeah. If that sense if that's if that's it's that censorship, then, yeah. It's like, do you wanna let Craig Wright come into your, like, into your living room and take a shit on your couch? Craig can go fuck himself. Yeah. Exactly. So if if not having Craig and if if moderating personal spaces and censorship

is censorship, then yes, I believe in censorship. Okay. Yep. Okay. Let's continue. Yeah. Yeah. So, So you so you could have technically done it pre segwit. Yep. It would have been kinda shittier.

Would have been weird.

I could have done it pre taproot. It would have been weird. Let's say we're 2 months before segwit. We're 2 months let's just go through this. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're 2 months before SegWit. SegWit doesn't exist yet Yep. And you do it at that point. Yeah. It would be less data that you could put in.

No. I think you could figure out ways to put in arbitrary amounts of data. Like, you could you could you could do pay to pay to script hash and do that and put it in the script, and then you could put it in weird multisigs, and you could spread it across multiple inputs.

Then these are things that I kinda wouldn't wanna do. Like, if if it had been really inelegant, I probably wouldn't have done it, or if it had had been sort of, like, more hacky, I would have been like, meh. But yeah. Yeah. I and, actually, I there could have been 1 meg blocks

fat, redolent with inscriptions,

pre pre segued. Yep. Okay. Yep.

Got it. Okay. So then Taproot comes into play. Mhmm. We add Taproot. How does that change things?

So

pre Taproot,

there were a lot of limits

on

on script sizes.

On on there were limits on the witness.

SegWit Witnesses had a bunch of weird limitations

on script size and other things that I don't fully understand. I looked at them in a while ago, but they've since, like, fallen out of my brain, and,

yeah, it had these weird, you know, things, and these things were never there, these, like, these sort of, like, checks, these I think they're all standardness rules, like, not consensus standardness,

not consensus policy.

So they had all these weird checks,

and

they were not there to prevent users from putting arbitrary data in the chain.

They were there for specific technical reasons,

and then when Taproot came along, those specific technical reasons were no longer an issue, and they got lifted.

So

the the devs who were doing this stuff,

people

are asked saying,

like,

oh, we need to review things more carefully.

Like, listen, if you're not paying attention, like, you're not gonna be part of the conversation,

and these devs who were doing it

put limitations in place to avoid things other than arbitrary data storage, and then they lifted them for reasons

those those Unrelated. Unrelated.

So if you're confused about how Bitcoin works, like,

yeah, you need to pay more attention. And if you're very concerned about arbitrary data storage, maybe you should have been paying attention at that time because that wasn't even, like, these limits were lifted in public. You know? This is something I'm learning about as as a as a open source dev

is I work completely in public.

I work on GitHub. Me and Raf, my second,

paid apprentice

work in,

on in GitHub in in Discord. We've literally been pair programming

inscriptions,

like, 4 to 6 hours a day in an empty Discord video chat room that anybody could join, and I've been telling everybody about this shit. And people, like, act like this is blind blindsiding them. Right? Like, I I've been telling every like, you know this. I've been telling wouldn't fucking shut up about it. Yeah. I wouldn't fucking shut up about it for the last, like, 10 months. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. So, yeah, this, like, blindsided thing. Listen, guys. Like, devs are out here trying to engage you and trying to help you educate yourself, and it's it's it's I mean,

I I think I have a huge responsibility. I think every dev has a huge responsibility to educate users,

but users kinda need to pick up the, like, the last mile of that education

and engage with technical topics. Right? You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

So, I mean, you mentioned,

devs and Taproot.

Andrew Polstra, which who is one of the leading minds behind Taproot and,

and our Taproot implementation,

commented on this on, the mailing list, and I just wanna read his post real quick.

Unfortunately, as near as I can tell, there is no sensible way to prevent people from storing arbitrary data and witnesses without incentivizing

even worse behavior and or breaking

legitimate use

cases. If we ban useless data, then it would be easy for would be data stores to instead embed their data inside useful data, such as dummy signatures

or public

keys. Doing so would incur incur a 2 x cost to them. But if 2 x is enough to disincentivize

storage, then there's no need to have this discussion because they will be forced to stop due to fee market competition anyway.

And if not, it means there's little demand for Bitcoin block space. So what's the problem with paying miners to fill it with data that validators don't even need to perform real computation on?

But if we were to ban useful data, for example, saying that a witness can't have more than 20 signatures in it, then we are into the same problem we had pre TAPR, that it is effectively impossible to construct signing policies

in a general and composable way because any software that does so will need to account for multiple independent limits. We will deliberately

we deliberately replace such limits with, you need to pay 50 weight for each signature to make this sort of analysis tractable.

There's a reasonable argument that this sort of data is toxic to the network since even though the market is willing to bear the price of scarce block space, if people were storing NFTs and other crap on the chain, then the Bitcoin fee market would become entangled with the random pump and dump markets undermining legitimate use cases and potentially preventing new technology like Lightning from gaining a strong foothold.

But from a technical point of view, I don't see any principal way to stop this. Andrew Polster, director of research Blockstream.

This is, Andrew Polster in one concise

mailing list mail,

like, working through and summarizing,

something that took me, like, 12 months to, like, noodle through. So, like, yeah, shout out to Andrew.

Yeah. Seems seems right.

Yeah. That's why I felt like it was important to

to read that. Yeah. I'm I'm, I'm pretty optimistic about the concerns that he

lists about,

you know, sort of the fee market getting messy.

It's a different source of it's a different, I certainly hope that there aren't a lot of pump and dumps, and in fact, we can talk about how

inscriptions are designed to be a bit hostile to pump and dumps

and a bit hostile to some of the kinds of speculation that happens in Ethereum NFTs. Actually, why don't I just say it? So on Ethereum, because of this, like, pointer

convention where you point to off chain data, you can mint a collection of 1 monkey picture

and a collection of of a 1000000000 monkey pictures for the same cost. Right? Right. So with inscriptions,

you actually have to pay for every byte

of every pixel

of every monkey.

Right? Right. Because the data is actually being stored on chain. That's right. Yeah. So,

you kinda have to pay this upfront cost

to make anything.

Right?

And I think that

pump and dumps are a sort of a form of speculation.

They are an attempt to create to easily create a large number of assets, which are,

you know, dubious value

and then try to push that on the market.

And I closely hold the majority of them, but give the appearance that there's liquidity or Yeah. But if somebody wants to go to, like, a quarry

and spend, like, a year,

like, carving

spheres of rock out of the stone at great personal expense

and then try to sell it, like, that's kind of, like, what inscriptions are like. Right. Like, you have to pay for every bite of everything.

And so I'm actually

There's still gonna be pump and dumps, but Yeah. But in general, I'm pretty sanguine about the

you know, how this

how this affects the Bitcoin fee market.

But but, yeah, Andrew's Andrew's right. Like, so I do wanna go into the fee market at some point, but Oh, yeah. We can continue I think we're, like, at the at the basis of inscriptions. Right? So Yep. So for normal Bitcoin users, inscriptions are just these transactions with big witnesses with data that looks like, it's not really that important.

For,

people who wanna And that is all text.

No. It's not text. It's binary. Right. Yep. Because there's binary formats. There's, you know, you can do

any web format you can put in an inscription.

So no. It's all binary, but, essentially, it's it's it's an op false,

op if, lies glazing over, stay with me, Matty. I'm listening. And then a bunch of data pushes. That's it. Okay.

That's it. Got it. It's and I call it an envelope.

And so

because of the op false, op if, and then data pushes, and then op end if, this the contents of the envelope, the script, the the bush push opcodes

don't even get executed by Bitcoin Core. They just get skipped. It's it's actually

I don't know how I could have designed it in a in a lower impact way.

Like, I literally think I mean, unless somebody has an idea,

like, this was designed so that Bitcoin core nodes

just ignore them, and there's actually an argument that this will make it

cheaper,

not more expensive to make this run a full node to run a full node for complicated reasons.

You wanna go into that real quick? Or Sure. First off, like, yeah, maybe you're a SegWit disrespector.

That's cool, man. You know, complicated upgrade.

Why don't you run a node that doesn't have SegWit on it? You don't like those 4 meg blocks? Sweet. Now

because

the,

these witnesses that many users are putting their transactions,

those, tick down that that sort of

that that limit.

You will see

smaller blocks

the more inscriptions there are.

Right.

So,

Luke because you don't even see the witness data. No. So if you're Luke De Sheer

and you feel like users are lying and tricking the code That's a new pronunciation. Continue. That's the correct pronunciation. Okay. Yeah. Everybody thinks it's Luke Dash junior. And then I've heard Luke Dasher. No. It's Luke Deshir. Luke Dash I don't know. Actually, no. Maybe maybe I'm I don't know if it's which one. Yeah. There's, like, a little bit of French to it. Yeah. Yeah. Bonjour.

Bonjour.

Just

But if you're running pre segued note, you don't even see it. Yeah. So Luc Deshir has talked about, a 3 maybe 300 k blocks.

Right?

Some people are into that, talk to some people at Right. At Green Park about that. If you want 300,

kilobyte blocks, maybe you can get that today and just run pre segwit. Right? And if you wanna run you wanna make Bitcoin like bunker coin where you, like, broadcast blocks over, like, a fucking ham radio. Well, yeah. MBK said at 300 kilobyte blocks, we can do AM,

AM broadcasting on AM radio waves. Bro, maybe So you can just, like, connect a radio and then sync your node that way. Wouldn't that be cool if there was if you could run a pre segwit node and run it over AM radio?

Yeah. That'd be awesome. So I think maybe you can do that.

Well, well, I guess we'll find out. Yep. Then I guess the other what's the argue the other argument is that

is what? If you're running a if

do you have an argument for it improves IBD IBD if you're running a post app root node? Yep.

So if you,

IBD, by the way, is when your initial block download. It's like you're you're spinning up a node for the first time. Distinct from from IBS.

So when you're downloading a block, a node block okay. So

a lot of nodes run well, let me say one thing is it gives us a really interesting if you're running an if you're running a pruned node with assume

valid,

and assume a pruned node is a node that that

that verifies transactions but doesn't save them,

and

a node with assume valid is a node that doesn't run

doesn't check

transactions that are buried too deep in the chain.

If you're running that kind of node,

then this would be a very simple patch to Bitcoin Core.

PR is always welcome.

You could not even download these old transactions in the first place,

or or not not even download the old witnesses, let me say, very specifically. And most of it's in the witness for the descriptions.

Yeah. So,

this gives us a very nice

option for running very nice security trade off for running a Bitcoin node where you run a prune node with assume valid, and assume assume valid is turned on by default.

Pruning is not turned on by default, but many users do that to save space,

and

when when eventually Bitcoin Core

makes a new release, and assume valid goes the assume valid height goes, like, above this block height with these inscriptions,

then you've got this very lean stretch of the chain where you don't even have to download these witnesses.

Because they what they're crowd they're crowding out other transactions, but they're using the witness, so it's They're not crowding out transactions.

I would say they're crowd crowding out non witness data.

Okay. Yep. So and then you're only downloading

the

transactions and not the witnesses. So we have filter Maxi in the comments.

He's really mad at you,

and I think he's mad at me too. He says

but this comment, I'm curious on your take.

In that situation, you're not fully validating.

Like, should that be a concern for?

Or

well, I think they need to

understand

what assume valid does. It it sounds like and by the way, I love I love I love all the Bitcoiners,

even the even the haters, even the ordinal disrespectors. Like, it's all love. I wanna keep things really

avoid making things personal, and and I really appreciate the the people who have done that.

So be mad at the code, nod nod at me, and definitely nod at at Matthew.

So, yeah, I think that sounds I think maybe it would be good

to for people to understand what AssumeValid does

and

to decide

for themselves whether running with assumevalid

is a full node or not. Right. Right? Like like, there's many different trade offs,

that you can make when you run Bitcoin.

You can build from source, you cannot build from source.

Pruning isn't really a security trade off,

but assume valid is,

and

there are many valid

security trade offs. Right? Like, if you if you, like, run a full note at home

and or or not, and you're comfortable with an SPV wallet,

then that is a security trade off. So pre inscriptions, why don't you go through the argument for why assume valid exists and why it was chosen to begin with? Sure. So the way that assume valid works, and please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not a Bitcoin core dev.

Whenever the Bitcoin core developers cut a new release of Bitcoin core,

there's this

block hash, I think,

that

is hard coded into the code,

and

that blockhash is a block that is very deep in the chain,

and it's a blockhash

that

the Bitcoin core devs

and community members, because everybody can can see can verify this, that they think is a valid block, and and and everything's already been validated in it. And then they every release,

I think they include this block hash

in Bitcoin Core,

and then they,

I don't think they they don't, like, update every release. Right? It's just

some releases, they update it. That might be it. I don't know. So Essentially, like, a checkpoint. Yeah. No. No. No. No. No. No. Because there's another thing called a checkpoint which works very differently. Okay. And this is actually way better.

So And it's meant to speed up IBD, right, so you don't have to validate everything before that point? Well, you validate a lot of things, but so you don't have to do signature checking primarily. Okay. You still validate that

the work is in the headers, that the transaction puts output match, all that stuff. All you do is you just skip the witnesses.

Okay.

So or the or the or the sig or this script or the script SIGs, if they're pre segued. So,

the reason that this is believed by the Bitcoin core developers and many community members to be a acceptable security trade off

is that a lot of people just download and run Bitcoin Core without reading the code.

And they're like, okay. Well and and listen. I I'm gonna get things wrong, so the Bitcoin Core developers should please

correct me for my misinterpretations

of the things that they're doing. But they're basically, like, okay. Well, like, if you're, like, if you're, like, running our code,

you're assuming that our code is right.

And so

our code, many people have already run our code on the blockchain

on Bitcoin and said that, okay, this this block at this height is valid.

So we're just gonna, in a new release, say, yeah. This is, like, buried. It's kinda been verified. Everybody agrees that the code in Bitcoin Core

validates this block correctly,

and so we're just gonna hard code it. And it's not a checkpoint, because if there was another longer chain from Genesis

somehow

or another fork that was below this point, Bitcoin Core would actually follow that fork even if it's, like, even if the if the if the assume valid block is not in that fork. Right. It's not a hard coded block. It's a hard coded,

or it's a pointer that says you don't have to

Yeah. Validate.

Yeah. It doesn't it just doesn't influence

fork choice. Got it. So That's the differentiation there. Yeah. And so I think, like,

people get really hung up on what is and isn't We could technically have a reorg past that point. Yeah. Yeah. So people get really hung up on what is and isn't a full node, and it becomes almost like a spiritual question.

Like, what it like, a philosophical question.

So I wanna stay out of that and say there are many different security trade offs that people already make,

and you should figure out which security trade offs are acceptable to you, and you should understand them.

And

I have completely forgotten

how this started. Well, we were talking about inscriptions.

We were talking about arbitrary data. No. It was like it was like full node trade offs, like, do wouldn't this make it harder to run a full node? Oh, yeah. If you're running a pruned node with assume valid, is that a full node?

Right. And that's, like, just a spear question that only you and god know.

Like, your definition of what a full node is.

Right. I mean, I would say that's not a full node. Okay. Yeah.

Because you don't have everything.

Do you run assume valid?

Yeah. I mean, presumably.

It's it's the default. Right? Yeah. It's the default. So Yes. Do you not run a full node?

Do you have any full nodes? I mean, I don't prune. I think the pruning is the Wait. What's the point in downloading shit you're never gonna verify?

Is that I just I have it, and I can basically seed it out to the rest of the network. Correct? That's an archival node. Yeah. So you don't run any full nodes according to the definition you just gave me.

Well, I I don't know if assume valid.

I would I I I don't fucking know. That's what I mean about definitions being kinda silly.

Yeah. I mean, I feel like you gaslit me a little bit there, but No. I'm just, like accept it. I'm just coming with We talked about censorship earlier. I don't

I might choose who's comes on the show, but once the show gets going,

there's I it's intentionally a live unedited show. It intentionally has interactive,

Like, Filter Maxi gets to say everything he wants to say, and then it's live chat, and everyone's gonna see it forever.

Not not trying to gaslight. I I really think that these

definitions are tricky, and when people come down really hard on one side or another of a definition,

it means that there's other things that they might think that are that become inconsistent. Well, it's a dicier topic, I think, because we've spent so many years essentially,

debating the Ethereum community on what a full node is.

Nobody runs Ethereum full nodes. Yeah. There's not there's there's, like, one. Then what's a full node? Right? No. No. No. That this this thing, I'm pretty confident

in the definition. I don't know where the line

in Bitcoin is for full nodes, but I know that It's way before Ethereum. Ethereum is so far off in the fucking stratosphere.

Like, in terms of that line, they're another fucking planet. I don't know I don't know if there's an Ethereum full node on Earth. So Inscriptions,

you can put arbitrary data in the chain.

The the the main use case so far has been, you know,

image files. Yeah. But you can do

3 d models. I added support for STL files. But this is just, like, what does ordinals.com

display. Right? Well, no. I mean, anybody can put anything in in an envelope, in a ordinal protocol envelope.

Right. And then use that, reference that for at any time at any purpose. You could just put a

let's say you wanna build a FGC 9 and Right. 3 d printed gun. 3 d printed gun. Great design. Very innovative design. And you wanna go to a,

some place, and you can't take anything with you, and they're gonna search you. But maybe you can write down a transaction ID somewhere. So you make a transaction,

it's got this witness, in the witness, there's this envelope,

and in the envelope, there is the plans for the FGC 9.

Go to another country,

downloading a full node. A lot of people run full nodes. Nothing suspicious

about that. You get your full node going.

You have this transaction ID. You have the plans for the FGC 9.

And let's say you're not a terrorist, let's say, or visiting Myanmar You download

and then have to decode it. Right? You essentially I say I think decode is the wrong word because

it's it's like it's not a code. I mean, you do have to decode it. It's not encrypted.

Right. But it's you have to, like, you have to find it in the transaction, and then you have to concatenate these data pushes. Let's say you're visiting Myanmar on vacation, but they got a lot of rebels, you know, and you wanna help them

out. So then you go there. Right? And now you have a way that using software, which, like, is is not so is very freely available, Bitcoin,

to get that

get those plans. So you can use it for for anything. You can use inscriptions to for anything.

Right. I mean, can you and presumably, you can it can be encrypted data too. Sure. Yeah. You can have an encrypted blob,

encrypted with a password. Take, like, a multi state key and then encrypt it, write it to the chain. There's tricky things with that because because because,

yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You could. Yeah. You could do any kinda any kind of encryption. Yeah. Put it in there.

So it could be useful for, like, dead man switches.

Sure. Yeah. For sure. Dead man switch.

The you could you could have, you know, somebody knows,

yeah, 2 multisigs that then they can come together, they can scan the chain for this data.

Also, I would encourage people who are thinking about doing

envelope level

protocol development

to try to improve inscriptions with these use cases.

I'm very open to these use cases, and I'm trying to figure out how to make them work. But if you don't want to, the first data push

in an inscription envelope is the characters,

o r d,

and this means

that it

it says that, like, this is an inscription, so if you'd like to design

different protocols

that require arbitrary data in Bitcoin transactions, you can you can do that

by just picking your own string, and then you're off to the races. Got it. And I get people are, like, uploading audio files. I saw MP 3, PNG, WebP,

SVG,

all all HTML and SVGs with which normally can access arbitrary web resell or web web resources

are fastidiously

sandboxed,

so they can't access anything that's not on chain. So everything you see on ordinals.com,

that's, like, kind of

not

the not the front end,

but is actual content

is on chain. Even when you see

these, like,

you know, games, somebody put a doom clone in there, so you put snake game,

all those things are sandboxed, so they're fully on chain. Got it.

Okay. Where do we go next?

So so these transactions

are there's there's seems like there's a lot of momentum.

Before we get there, let's quickly talk about

let's talk about this,

teleburned thing you came up with yesterday,

2 days ago? Bro, Bitcoin Park is such a bad influence on me.

Don't put that on us. No. No. No. What I mean is, like, I try to be pretty diplomatic.

You know?

You'll see, like, my

you know, I'll go on NFT podcasts because I wanna reach artists, and I wanna tell them how these things are great. And while I'm there, if somebody asks me about Ethereum, I'll probably say, I'm not really interested in it.

But, Bitcoin Park has a lot of hardcore

Bitcoiners. That's true. And,

a lot of them

won't name names, but they love inscriptions.

And,

so when they're like, hey,

you know, maybe people would like to burn their monkey JPEGs on Ethereum

and send them in a on a one way space trip

to Bitcoin,

and they have an idea for that. We get that working, you know, basically, like,

I always wanna keep things positive on a personal level,

but on a technical level, I'm always willing to choose violence,

and Bitcoin Park and the,

hardcore Bitcoiners here,

make me push me make me choose violence.

So so let's so so so what what is this? What so right now, people are essentially and I guess you Somebody torched a half milli Bored Ape on Ethereum. So they they probably burn it,

and then it gets

and then they they add that data to the Bitcoin chain.

Well, it kinda works in in a different order. Like, work work us through this. Yeah. So, like, let's say you have, let's say you have a CryptoPunk.

Okay. So this is an Ethereum NFT. Yeah. Highest value,

1,000,000 of dollars.

So let's say you would rather have that CryptoPunk on Bitcoin.

So what you do is you first create an inscription

that represents that CryptoPunk. You create that first? Yeah. You create that first.

And then you maybe use the same the CryptoPunk

art is on the chain. Yeah. You've you've essentially made a duplicate of the art. Yep. You just copy past the art into an inscription,

and that's in your Bitcoin wallet. Maybe you have it, on a stats card,

or you have it on an open dime.

And then on then you use ord, the ordinals ordinal theory utility,

and you

type ord teleburn

and then that inscription ID.

And it spits out

a JSON blob,

and that JSON blob has a field called Ethereum,

and it gives you an Ethereum address.

And that address

is cryptographically

you can prove

that it commits in the cryptographic sense

to

a particular

inscription.

Right. This copy that you have. Yep. And then you go to ledger,

I did this yesterday for the first time,

and you

select the NFT in the ledger interface that you would prefer to have on Bitcoin,

and you send it to this If you're storing the NFT on a ledger device. Yeah. Yeah. Or whatever you're doing, MetaMask or whatever. You send it to the address that Org spit out for you. Yep. The Teleburn address.

And this address, you can prove

both that there is with

overwhelmingly likelihood not a corresponding private key,

which means that it can never be moved because you can never make a signature that is valid for this address, and you can prove that it commits to the

inscription.

And

now this gets into social layer conventions,

but the way that people are encouraged to interpret this as is that the original owner of the NFT,

would like to liberate it for Oranger Pastures.

Right. So they wanna move they wanna move to an actual immutable chain. Mhmm. And they want their data not to be a pointer somewhere. Instead of it be on IPFS Or Arweave or this other shit.

It's on the Bitcoin chain. Yep.

And there's this

crazy,

almost, like, game theory element to it where, like, these are all collector people.

And the sooner you do that Who wants the 10th? The more valuable

your NFT is. So now we have all these shit corners that are essentially rushing to burn

their shitcoin NFTs

and then move them over to Bitcoin.

And it's it seems like over the last 2 days, like, people are making clients for, like, all the change, like, Solana and Tezos and Oh, yeah. I mean, for this, I gotta say, like, this I'm I'm I'm being reckless here. Like, I

have not I I have not merged this into Ord.

This is a draft PR, which is my way of saying, like, yo, this code is, like, scrolled on, like, construction paper. So

I

am you should not do this unless you fully understand the consequences of what you're doing and and literally that you've reviewed the code at this point.

Right? So it's that kind of thing. Disclosure. Disclosure. Disclosure. Disclaimer. Disclaimer.

Disclaimer. Well, part of it is because I'm running a Bitcoin project,

and I wanna You don't wanna pay attention to the specifics of how Solana people are transferring it over or whatever. Oh, no. I'll figure out how to fucking burn that shit. But, no, what I'm saying is that I wanna hold myself to the Bitcoin standard

and not to the to the to the shipping standard for development.

Right? Like,

when I open a PR, I don't just hit merge, even though I, like, understand this code base better than anyone else on Earth, I wait for another review

from a from from a team member or community member.

So Right. I saw you fucked up the date on your most recent release, and then you blamed Rob Hamilton because He acted. He fucking acted that shit, bro. Don't act if you Personal responsibility. It's on both of you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and on anybody who's not fucking who thinks that I'm that the latest version was released in 2022.

It but, like, you know, somebody somebody was able to I mean, not call me out, but, like, jokingly be like, yo, Casey, what fucking year is this? I saw that. Okay. So So, yeah. So anyways, but but to be clear, like, I I take my responsibilities

to both

to people who use my software

seriously,

and I wanna hold myself to that higher standard, and so I kinda consider what I've done here with Teleburn a little reckless,

but

somebody had, somebody had an ape on the chopping block,

and they were ready to pull the trigger,

and I wanted to make sure that that ape was not destroyed, but was able to

rocket into the order verse successfully. But not so fast beat that person anyway. No. They got, like, the Milady in first or whatever. No. Fucking I don't I can't believe I'm talking about that. I'm sorry. I think I think not so fast is second. I think the was first. Okay. Yeah. But, anyway, so the shit corners are rushing to put their move their NFTs to Bitcoin.

Not move. I mean, like, fucking they're ready to torch that shit. D gens are ready to torch 1,000,000,000 of dollars of value That's why the shit on other chains. Hate you right now. Yeah. They can get fucked. Because it's almost like,

the to go back to that game theory. Like, the people who move first might be incentivized

because this makes it more rare of a collectible Well, one with air quotes. And then one one thing I'll say for these people who are all rushing is, like, you know, wait, you know, understand what you're doing, and,

one thing you could do is you could create the inscription

first,

and then the inscription would have a very low number. And you can always point to it in the future. Yeah. So maybe what you wanna do is you wanna That doesn't count. You have to rush and burn now. No. Well, I know why you're saying that,

but you don't.

I think having the low inscription is good enough, but that's social layer shit. But, no, if you wanna, like, listen, towards that shit, You wanna fucking you got some you got some dumbass wait. Wait. Let me say you got some dumbass shit on another chain,

fucking teleburn it and send it to inscription 0, which is mine, the only one I've made. And then I can have all this dog shit on other chain. 1st inscription? Yeah. Inscription 0. Yeah.

Well, no. The I mean but the reason I say I mean, look. I don't I know what goes through collector's minds. I think most Bitcoiners have some kind of collectible

past issue. Mhmm. I don't, so I need this shit explained to me. So, like, I'm a domain hoarder, obviously. Yeah. Same. My favorite one of mine is black market dot money. It just says Bitcoin.

That's great.

I'm a domain hoarder.

My previous life, you know, I really like sports collectibles, like signature, you know, autographs and Bro, this is all for you. This is also you could teach that out. Me.

But, I,

so, anyway, I mean, the reason I say that though is because

just because you have a low inscription number, like, everyone knows at what, like, Ethereum block you burnt it out as well. So Not necessarily. Ethereum is doing crazy shit where they insist on protocol level amnesia where you're not even gonna know what fucking block heights some fucking transaction on salon. I don't know. No. Solana is even worse. Solana has had,

like, 2 brain cells to rub together from day 1. People who move quicker will have the rarest shit.

So just burn all your shit. But, anyway, the that's not the point. The point is Be careful. Where Bitcoin is over here. The point is the point is, shit corners are rushing to or a bunch of shit corners are moving their NFTs over through this burn process,

And then a bunch are creating new NFTs through Inscriptions. Right? So there's this massive demand that we're seeing kind of happen. Yeah.

And, you know, the the tooling is still relatively basic and stuff, and you're still seeing Basic is generous. Yeah. You're still seeing this massive this massive demand. Right? Like,

people have to run their own Somebody told me that we're having the largest influx of new of new people running full nodes, like, in a long time. They're running full nodes. And this is this is intentional on my part. I I'm I haven't made a light client. You wanna do this shit for the foreseeable future, you're gonna need to sync Bitcoin core node with TX index, no pruning. Like, that's what you need. That those are table stakes. Right. So they you have to run a full node and then you have to run ord attached to it, and then ord needs to index. So, like, there's a lot of friction to doing it, but there's still a lot of demand. So Yep. So that goes discord.gg/ordinals

is the place to get tech tech support. I'm inundated by tech support requests on all sides. I'm also inundated by essentially tech support requests from other Bitcoin developers

where these new users are using things like, Sparo Wallet. Right.

So, like, let Craig Raw, like, do his thing,

and just go I love that they're using Sparrow because Sparrow actually has coins like We recommended it because of that. Yeah. If you wanna if you wanna make a a a if you wanna transfer an inscription

safely

with an with with a wallet other than Ord, it needs coin selection. And Sparrow also has very good labeling. Yep. So you could actually label each one of your UTXOs

manually

with the inscription I've been trying to make I've been trying to encourage Bitcoin to seize coin control and labeling for years now. Bro. The dot e It's all a sigh up to get the rare Pepe degens to run Bitcoin core nodes and learn about coin selection. So the point I was going to is is so now mempools are incredibly full.

They call me Casey full blocks, baby. Satoshi Nakadashi.

Mempools are because I fill them up.

Let's talk about,

these let's talk about how,

like, how that impacts people who are trying to make, quote, unquote regular Bitcoin transactions. I'm just trying to buy,

you know, a t shirt Yep. With a Bitcoin on chain transaction, and now mempools are completely full. I have to pay a higher fee. Yeah. Well, I mean, what's what fee do you have to pay?

Right now, I have to pay

double what I had to pay 2 weeks ago. I have to pay 2 sats per bite to get into the next block. Wow, man. You must be hurting. No. But I think this is a forward looking conversation. I think

I just but I I wanna focus on the fact that, like, listen, the molecule is rocking at 6 stats per v byte to get into the next block. I have a provocative Keep in mind that this is a forward looking conversation, not a problem now. I have a provocative question because

I got a lot of pie on my face previously, and I said I was never gonna do this again.

But, you know, this time is different PM,

because fucking Casey just Leroy Jenkins the show.

Leroy Jenkins.

There's a possibility that mempool is never clear again. It's not a possibility. We've entered a new free fee regime, and it's never gonna change. Okay. So that's

I mean, we're fully in forward looking, like, speculation, like, no. It's fucking over for the mempool.

Just that I mean, I wouldn't go that far. Obviously, mempools

are designed to handle this type of type of situation. Yeah. Yeah. And this is all in Bitcoin's game theory. This is all in Bitcoin's incentives. What I mean is that But the real that that that we the default mempool size is 300 megabytes,

and there's a very real possibility

that it will never be empty ever again. Yeah. I mean, right now,

we're actually not that high over. We're, like, 3325

or something.

That's what's crazy is, like,

the

the the fee to get into the next block is 2 sets per byte,

but the purge is 1.8 sets per byte. Any chance under 1.8 sets per byte gets knocked out of most mempools.

Yeah. I guess we're, like, slightly over.

We have 15,000 unconfirmed 14,000 unconfirmed transactions.

It looks like now it looks like mempool.space

is saying we're under 300 megs for the average mempool,

But it also says purging, so you might have broken mempool dot space.

But, anyway,

the the point I was trying to make is I feel like 2 sats per byte to get into the next block right now is irrelevant because I think,

you know, right now, you don't have

you don't have, like, RBF. You don't have child pace or parent Once I add RBF stuff. And people start trying to rescue those, like, one sat per

per view by So there's a bunch of 1 sat per byte. Yeah. That are just that that, like entities that just haven't confirmed. Yeah. And they all opt into RBF. Then just to be clear, this is all the 1 sat per view by transactions generated by the Org software. They all opt into RBF, and I haven't added,

fee bumping support. Pretty easy. I think maybe you can even fee bump with I don't know.

But, yeah, when I do that, there's gonna be a rush of people trying to save money. Efficient

fee market on the subscription side right now because you don't have those tools.

Full it's not fully efficient is like an understatement. Right. Okay? But my point is is, like, presumably, this is gonna start the fee the the fees are gonna go up as a result of this. Right? Yeah. And also, I mean, like,

as

Bitcoiners who maybe have taken a principal stand against NFTs in the past want to create their own Bitcoin native digital artifacts,

that maybe they wanna put their pet on the time chain. I consider this to be one of the most based use of inscriptions.

Maybe Bitcoiners will wanna do this, and more and more people wanna do this, and it won't just be

NFT degens.

And I think that this I kind of want to I wanna put out a friendly challenge

to,

inscription disrespectors,

that

one thing that they can do

is that they can make Bitcoin better

for financial use cases,

Right? For these financially dense use cases, they can build out the lightning network,

improve lightning network,

you can start using Bitcoin,

and as Bitcoin becomes better and more used for these economically

these these pure financial transactions,

it will naturally crowd out inscriptions.

So if you don't like inscriptions, you actually have a free market,

Mad Max Capitalism

way of fighting them,

you can, just make Bitcoin better for the uses that you think it's better for, and you can just ignore inscriptions. Why would I crowd out inscriptions?

Because,

an inscription is very large. It's like this big

waterlogged

thing, you know, and these pure financial transactions. Like shit in a pool, like, just floats to the top. Yeah. Do you know what the Bristol scale is? No. Okay. It's like a it's a it's like a medical scale of shit.

So the inscriptions are listen, let's not go there. So the inscription, the financial transactions are very, very dense.

Right? They're they're very small compared to inscriptions,

and financially speaking, they're very dense. Now a big inscription,

how sort of financially dense it is depends on, like, how much the person who wants to make it is willing to pay, but,

it it's very large.

And so

let's say you wanna get into the next block and you wanna pay 2 sats for vbyte or whatever it is. If you're doing a financial transaction, yeah, you have to pay 2 sets per vbyte,

but your transaction is very small

and so the absolute size of the fee is relatively small. So you have a 200 byte transaction or, like, a, let's say, a 1,000 byte transaction. Right. That's gonna cost you let's say it's all it's no witness You're literally paying on how much data you're storing. Yeah. Yeah. Let's say you have a you have a pure financial Bitcoin transaction that's a hun that's a 1,000 bytes.

To outbid

in fee rate terms a 400

kilobyte,

inscription,

you have to pay a higher fee rate, but your your bid your your the absolute size of your bid is still very small

relative to the massive amount

that the inscription the inscriber has to make to outbid you.

But at the end of the day, you're paying

the same fee rate for the number of bytes that you're

You are, but you have a smaller number of bytes.

Right. And so you're paying much less in absolute terms. Yeah. You have to pay 2 sats per b byte, but you're

paying a 1,000 sats or 2,000 sats instead of, you know,

400,000

start to get kinda ridiculous as if the feed market when the feed market continues. I fucking love Shinobi. Shinobi's been like Shinobi's been like, you guys are so fucking stupid. This shit is gonna get priced out so fucking quick, And I don't know if it's gonna get priced out. When we hit, like, 20 sats per byte. Yeah. 20 sats per v byte. I mean, it's gonna have to get pretty high to stop the inscribers.

We're going we're going there. But listen, like, people are gonna start people wanna do who wanna do pure financial transactions are gonna have to start bidding closer to what it's actually worth it to them.

Right.

Right.

Yeah. I mean,

I just wonder

if people will be

it's just crazy that Freedom Money is competing against fucking

NFT degens.

Freedom Money is competing against Freedom Information.

But that's the thing. So, like, you mentioned, like, the

ghost gun files or, like, I mentioned, like, an encrypted payload for, like, a dead man switch or stuff. Like, these are the type of things that I could imagine people paying very high fees like, willing to pay very high fees for. Right.

And I guess people are just gonna ultimately make a decision on on what they think is worth it and what they don't think is worth it. The market decides. So we

have,

ride or die freak, Filter Maxi here. How come you never call me a ride or die freak? Well, you know, may you gotta join the live chat. Fuck. Okay. I'll do it. The I re I reward the people who who come in and and contribute to the live shows. Fuck. Call them out.

Well, the best was once I we have ride or die free, Carlos, and then he said he liked the morning rips, and I don't like the morning rips so that I formally ride or die free, and now he's back to ride or die. But, anyway, Filter Maxi is asking you can tell by his name.

He said, or you can filter them out with your note. How do you feel about this

concept of people running

I guess, Luke Dachier

came up with this filter idea. Right? Sort of.

So Luc Desheer

doesn't like inscriptions.

Luc Desheer.

He doesn't like inscriptions and so he was, like, well, you know, somebody should write a filter,

and somebody helpfully responded to his tweet with some information about how to

filter those transactions.

Basically, the tweet the response was, hey. You know you know, op false, op if, like, o r d, you know, and then you can just block them all.

This helpful person, his name was Casey Rodemore.

I told Luke DeShir how to write this patch

to filter them from his mempool.

So I really encourage any node

inscription signature,

so you might actually be blindsiding yourself if you so that is trying to commit a double spend will intentionally hide it. Yeah. By including an inscription and you know you're running this patch, so I don't actually I think it's, again,

personal responsibility,

gotta understand

what you're run, but, yeah, I encourage everybody who,

you know, doesn't like these things,

to filter them out of your mempool if you understand the consequences,

and I encourage everybody who would like to see the JPEGs flow freely over the network. They can, just run unmodified Bitcoin Core,

and I kinda suspect that there are so many,

inscribing degens out there that we already form a fully connected subgraph that's that's peering with minors,

and that any attempt at relay level censorship is is ultimately futile. Have a direct incentive to see all these transactions because they wanna get paid the most money possible. Right? But I don't even think that the miners need to do anything. I think there's so many,

like, so many degens just running a a default full node that will never run this patch. So many inscribers. Gotta stop calling them degens, they're my people. So many so many inscribers

who want these things to flow across the network, they're just running this patch and probably randomly

because there's so many of them, they already form a fully connected

network within a network.

And

some of them are probably randomly connected to miners. Miners probably run nodes with very high peering just by default.

And so, like, I think the pro the relay level battle is already lost. So you can run this patch, but it's not gonna do anything. I love this because Filter Maxi is essentially a cohost for the show.

He said it's not about It's about reducing his liability for his node. He just doesn't wanna see it. So that's, I mean, that's the strongest argument for it. Oh, yeah. I don't think there's any liability. I think that's a legal nonissue.

Oh, is it so we have a separate comment from

Mark Russat.

That is basically,

to sum it up, how likely is a state attack is, and how could it look if CSAM gets onto the time chain after all its totalitarian's favorite justification to attack FreedomTech? For example, they may use it as excuse to only allow license

cleared, blessed by the state big corporate entities to legally run a full node, forcing ISP ISPs,

VPNs to do enforcement, effectively trying to see achieve the same outcome as bit block big blocks were meant to achieve. So, basically,

what are your thoughts on on when, you know, illegal data starts,

you know, ultimate obviously

Inevitably.

Yeah. I mean, we're talking about ghost gun files. Ghost gun files are illegal in a lot of places. If if if some state if some government agent sends you a letter, are you gonna stop running your node?

I mean, I'm not.

Okay.

But so do you think that's

I mean but, I mean, like, we showed up here to fight the government. Right?

Like, as Bitcoiners to resist the state.

Now you sound like a spook.

No. This is these are my deeply held beliefs.

I I said I did this because I hate the government.

Yeah. But I think there's yeah.

I mean, there's different there's different lines. Right?

We're taking away their ability to print money,

collect taxes,

and issue debt.

I mean, you can still collect taxes in a in a post Bitcoin world. Gets listen. Lightning is a big mix mix net. Yeah. But, I mean, they collected taxes in a massive cash based economy before, you know, everyone was just doing digital surveillance money. They just gotta

I think the, in America,

the tax rates in those cash based economies were much low. But, anyway, I think I think there's a decent argument that it makes

it definitely paints a bigger target on Bitcoin's back because it's more than just

financial freedom. It's also

freedom of speech stuff. And and when you start getting into the freedom of speech stuff, it gets very

it can get very dicey very quickly. I actually disagree.

So in America, we have the first amendment,

which vigorously protects free speech, and there have been many times historically where the state

or a yeah. The state or a private individual has wanted to limit speech,

and,

the state has the courts

have protected

free speech,

so I actually see the intermingling

of

free speech issues

and Bitcoin

as being a positive.

Many people have said Bitcoin is speech.

I personally believe that, but I've always thought that it will not hold up in court

because I think that judges will look at Bitcoin and say Bitcoin is money. But the argument is code of speech.

Sure. But, like, you know, this this this is,

you know, judges sit in courts, and then they make judgments. Right. I mean, you can go, yeah. So so but let me finish my thought. But people have already made

personal, artistic,

and political speech using inscriptions. Right. Tank man is good example. Tank man. Someone put I fucking retweeted the Taiwanese flag that I retweeted. Fucking Taiwan number 1. Right. In China, that is that could

like, be a little cold. In mainland Taiwan Right. Okay?

They don't like it.

Okay?

So,

yeah, this But most Americans,

I would think, would say that,

it's a noble cause to Yes. Taiwan is a beautiful country,

and it is a sovereign nation, and everybody who thinks otherwise is deeply confused. Powers, like, anti CCP speech, like, anti communist Chinese parties. And that party is a that that that's a deeply the the CCP is a deeply censorious regime.

So anyways,

inscriptions that have already been made

are exactly the kind of speech that's protected under the first amendment,

and this turns Bitcoin into not only a platform for financial transactions but also

a publishing platform

where you can pay money to publish your ideas

in the public square.

And this gives a argument,

a

sophisticated argument that judges will understand

that says that Bitcoin is speech and that somebody who wants to access this public square and pay money to speak,

must be allowed to do so.

I mean, that's an interesting perspective.

We've been 2 hours. Do where do you wanna go from here?

I I think it's up to you. I mean, I wanna talk about you. What do you what do you wanna talk about? What was that, what what was the thing that we we were talking about in the beginning that you said we were gonna go back to? I completely forgot. There's no way I'm gonna remember that. Yeah. It's all a haze. I don't know if anyone in the comments remembers.

Is there

I'm curious from your opinion.

There's a bunch of different big corners that would would prefer if they can, like, press a big red button and that just

just

this never happened.

Obviously, that that button doesn't exist,

and the key value prop of Bitcoin is extremely hard to change.

I think descriptions and ordinals are already have a reasonable claim to being decentralized due to the nature of the protocol

and due to the fact that there's full node runners and the fact that anybody can run the software. So I'm kinda not If you were in that camp and you were trying to stop Yeah. Inscriptions

Yep. How would you stop Inscriptions?

So I I kinda gave you, like, yeah, I'd I'd just work on Lightning.

And then just try and crowd out. Yeah. If Lightning becomes the dominant, like, Visa scale payment network network of the world, maybe even above Visa scale. And then fees just rise to the point where people the majority of people are just not prescribing things. Yeah. You wanna you wanna you wanna you wanna you wanna rip a formager

or you wanna, open and close,

you know, a 1000

Lightning channels

that collectively can do

each channel can do a Visa scale of payments, each one.

You think the person with the fucking formager, even if it's,

like, a awesome

fucking HTML generative art, you think they're gonna be able to pay higher fees than you?

Right. No. That makes sense to me. The fee market crowds it out.

And and crowd out most of it. Yeah. And then the other thing also, by the way, just, like,

on the on the topic of illegal content not to bring it back. No. No. For sure. Like, the way Bitcoin works, I mean, it's it's, like, relatively easy to track. So, like, if you're

Don't probably not, like, the best place to post illegal content. Don't think very carefully about,

like,

your personal safety level and security

before making a possibly trackable on chain transaction

that can be

that's gonna be there forever. Right. There's all these different privacy implications when you're Yeah. Yeah. Doing inscriptions. Yep. Yep. So it's not a great place to post illegal content. Yeah.

Cool.

I mean, I think this has been a pretty great conversation.

Thank you for

spending some time with us here.

I hope the freaks found it helpful. Yeah.

It's been 2 hours. We do have yeah. Go on. I need to I need to learn to loosen up on podcasts. You know, I start off, and I'm, like, very nervous, and then I'm, like, like and I'm, like, Well, that's why I also like that dispatch is well, we're trying to do mostly in person, but also that it's no video.

Yeah. I think that's important. It's harder to loosen up. Yeah. I can just sit over here and, like, vape and drink my Monster and, like, just, like, chill. There you go. Exactly.

It's vape day.

Do you think there's anything we should cover?

I had a I put a question in the chat.

We have we have Ben Price here in the live audience. Ben Price, legendary beard. Where'd you which chat did you put it in?

Okay. My question was, like,

aren't minors, like so I understand the whole pool metaphor.

Yeah. Uh-huh. As long as Wait. We have to say this question out loud. Like 80% of the block would have theoretically been underwater.

Like, won't Wait. Wait. Ben, come over here. Come come over here and just say it into the mic.

This This is what I wrote in the chat.

Aren't miners potentially still incentivized to leave out economic transactions

if the block would otherwise be full with monetary transactions.

So, like, example, the block is, like, 30% full with, like, standard

high dense normal transactions. Mhmm. And then there's 1 yeah. 3 megabyte inscription

that would take up, you know, a little more than the remaining space

as long as, like, there there's still a level there where you would include the inscription and push out some normal transactions.

Again, this is, I think, this is moot if we would have full blocks with dense transactions, but we don't. Mhmm. But

wondering if you can

explain that. That's, yeah, that's actually an awesome, awesome question.

So

the idea is that every time a miner makes a block,

they're kinda packing it like a Tetris game.

You know? They have all these different transactions, and they're all like Right. They all have the same shape,

but

you look at you look at mempool.space,

you know, and sometimes it's, like, packed very elegantly with all these small transactions.

And then in recent times, it's been, like, kinda jumbled up. You know?

And so if you have this one big transaction,

you might kind of be in this, like, all or nothing situation, like for example, like if you have a

4 meg inscription,

and then you've got, like, a bunch of transactions that just barely pay

less than less than the total fees of that for

MEGR, and then, like, the mempool is kinda empty.

So, yeah, it is true that you couldn't be forced to make an all or nothing decision. Some people got really freaked out about this, and they called it a stall attack.

I think that people are kinda confused, like, because you could just do this by putting anything in a in a witness, and it doesn't need to be an inscription.

But, yeah, like, there's certain cases, especially when

the mempool is empty and you're kinda choosing between 1 big,

not financially dense inscription

or a bunch of small financially dense transactions.

And, yeah, there are some cases where, yeah, at that in that case, okay, well, you know, we

is,

is higher,

and so we choose the the 4 mega. State we live in right now, like, in the future with block space is full. Blocks are full.

It's it's it's gonna it's hard for the listeners when you respond over there. Yeah. Come over here. Come over here.

You you know, you still want

But, yeah, it's like, I mean, blocks are full right now, and so inscriptions kinda fixes this. Well,

thank god for inscriptions.

You're an exhausting individual.

Bro, you're coming at me.

I mean, this is the the new world we live in. Yeah. Welcome, guys. Have fun.

I just can't believe

You ever you think that when I was, like, 10 months ago when I was, like, hey, Matt, do you wanna, like, I made rare stats,

We'd be sitting here. No. I did not. Even, like, a month ago.

But,

yeah, we have innocuous

ride or die ride or die,

innocuous finch in the audience saying someone take away his monster drink. It's done, man. He's emptied. He keeps trying to, like, get the last couple drops out of it. The last bits of monster juice, man.

I think this is a great great 2 hour rep

on something that I needed to know more about, so I like doing it on air so that the freaks can learn more as well. That that's one thing I'm really learning is that,

so many people

want to learn about this or are curious,

and so

any private conversation is just between me and another person. Doesn't scale well. Doesn't scale. And I'm always down to help my friends. My friends need help doing stuff, like, that's most important. But anytime I can have these conversations in public where a bunch of people can benefit from them, that's,

really great. But where I was going with this is I'm sure we'll have a follow-up in the future because I do not think inscriptions are gonna disappear anytime soon. Anytime, Matthew.

And,

it's interesting that you agree with me that mempools will never clear again because I was been wrestling with whether or not I was gonna say that publicly.

I guess I said it on nostril yesterday. Listen. Once that per v bite

listen. You gotta you gotta pony up.

Yeah. I mean, it's gonna get

it's gonna get crazy out there.

Yeah. So we'll do a follow-up conversation at some point when more questions come up and more implications kinda get exposed. There's probably a bunch of different

things that, like, we can't even really comprehend about what happens next now that this, like, base protocol is out there. Yep.

And we have the Social layer. Bringing the social layer to Bitcoin. So I assume a bunch of people will be

rushing to their Super Bowl parties and whatnot. So, before we wrap up, just hit the freaks with some final thoughts.

Oh, sure. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, man, thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure, it's literally an honor.

I

hope that people go out there and learn more.

There's some great,

ordinals critics out there. Sometimes I have an alt with 0 followers,

and I just go hang out on mute in ordinal disrespector

Twitter spaces.

God, I forgot. Is it code codologist on Twitter?

His name's like Brian, I think. I have no idea who that is. Okay. Sorry if I'm butchering your name, man.

Go listen to him.

Take personal responsibility. Learn.

Me, personally, I would love it if you did that by joining our Discord, which, like, I'm now the the mod, the the the admin of a

15,000 person Discord, so I'm trying to scale that up with basically

volunteer mods at this point.

Discord.gg/ordinals

is where you can do that. I would love it if you contributed

code

to

to ordinals or anywhere else in the Bitcoin ecosystem, like, it's not

really important, just write some code and learn how to write some code.

If you don't code, you can write docs.

If you can write code but can't write your own code, you can review.

Review burden

is often a a bottlenecking

sort of feature of open source projects.

So if you can get enough to

the most helpful thing is if somebody if I have something or any open source developer has

an issue or a code and you find a bug in it and you just say, hey, bro, bug on this line, that's so valuable. That's, like, worth its weight in gold. So there's all these ways to contribute

Education, docs, doesn't matter if you do it to ord, like, if you wanna go to github.com/casey/ord

and contribute, that's awesome.

But if you want to go anywhere else in the Bitcoin ecosystem, Lightning,

Bitcoin Core,

wallets,

libraries, gotta shout out Rust Bitcoin.

Rust Bitcoin is a is a Bitcoin

Rust library maintained

by Andrew Polstra at all, and it's it's without, you know, Ord integrate uses it heavily.

When we make changes that we need to it, we try to contribute them to,

upstream. We upstream it. That's the open source term.

If you don't code,

learn how to get handy with a terminal. Right? You can be part of these conversations in a much more material way if you are out there,

like, you know, running the code and you have the ability to run the code and you have the ability you understand what your config files are doing.

Don't overcomplicate

things. See, a lot of people overcomplicate things with weird setups.

You can go to an Apple Store and open the terminal,

and I don't know if they have the permissions locked down, but install Bitcoin Core in, like, one line and run a Bitcoin Core node on an Apple Store computer and just leave it there. So a lot of the time when people are having trouble getting set up, it's because they're doing some weird non non,

like, custom thing. They have the node on a different thing, their perm's weird.

So, like, all this stuff, Bitcoin Core is enormously easy to run,

because the Bitcoin Core developers have done a lot of work.

Once you, like,

if if you have a computer and you have that one file, you can just say Bitcoin d, and then it just goes.

And that's the first step to, like, all of this.

So

do that. That's that's my my closing thought.

Awesome, Casey. You wanna shill your podcast really quick? Fuck yes. Hell many

hell money podcast,

if you want. This is like this is like this,

Citadel Dispatch is like the serious adult podcast for, like, the fucking hardcore Bitcoiners.

If you wanna see me and my friend, Aaron, just be ridiculous

for, like, an hour and talk about Bitcoin inscriptions

and Bitcoin's natal chart and Bitcoin astrology,

you can find us at wherever Matthew told me this, wherever you listen to podcasts,

and you can sign up. Also on YouTube, we do a video.

Erin is going hard in the paint, trying to bring the hose to Bitcoin. So she's doing God's work, guys.

Maybe we can get the gender ratio a little better sometime in the future.

So, yeah, help podcast dot money. Yeah. Absolutely. And latest episode is a fucking banger,

video episode, ordinals dot guy goes to therapy. It's fucking hilarious. Just laying on the couch and shit. You should watch it. It's good. Yeah. Clutching a Pusheen. I saw it. Yeah. Yo. You watched it? Yeah. Yeah. Got him.

I knew you were gonna regret not mentioning that. Thanks, man. Thank you. Just a quick,

huge fuck you to NVK for saying on Nostra that I don't run any full nodes. Bro, your own definition. Sorry, bro. I I think Hoisted on his own petard.

If assume valid is on, it's still a full node. We're gonna go with that, and everybody's a liar. I agree. Everyone's a scammer. No. No. No. No. No. I run many full nodes.

Thank you, Casey, for joining us. Huge shout out to the Freaks, for making it through this long week of content.

Not only all the dispatches, but, obviously, we also had rabbit hole recap.

And

the new episode of Freedom Money just dropped,

this week as well with Roya. She's really inspiring, amazing person, so search Freedom Money in in YouTube to to find that episode.

That was in partnership with the Bitcoin Magazine team.

Yeah. It's been a great week. I look forward to talking to all your freaks again soon.

Like I said, feedback always appreciated. Can I say just one other thing? Yeah. Like, Twitter, the the discourse on Twitter is so dumb. Like, even the Bitcoiners who think that inscriptions are fucking dumb, in person, they're like, it's it's

it's all love. You know? Like and especially at Bitcoin Park in Nashville,

rapidly becoming the home,

the Bitcoin's beating heart. That's all I'll say. Oh, I appreciate that.

Bitcoin Park

is is a special place. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I I mean, I was here,

like, 4 months ago or, like Yeah. Like, super early on. Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome. It's rad. Grassroots. You're here for grassroots Bitcoin? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good event. That's event only for meetup organizers.

We have them all coming from around the country.

And with all that said, I love you, freaks.

Feedback is appreciated. Your support is appreciated. Sharing with friends and family is appreciated.

We will talk soon. Stay humble, Stack Sats. Peace.