Bitcoin Spam (Ordinals) Red Herrings
Bitcoin Mining Around the World, The Genesis Book and Ordinals/Spam Debates
So this week the Bitcoin spam (Ordinals and Inscriptions) debate rages on. For some background, you can check out my article for Swan.com here, Are “Ordinals” Worth Worrying About?
So we’ve seen ‘Ordinals’ and ‘Inscriptions’ become popular over the last year or so. These inscriptions relate to storing arbitrary data, typically JPEGs or JSON on-chain in Bitcoin. Most sane people see Bitcoin as a monetary network, not a network for general file storage.
Red Herrings
Some of the spam apologists love a good distraction play. First let’s think about the concept of a ‘Red herring’:
Spam apologists will put up irrelevant ideas to mislead or distract from the relevant question. Here are a few examples:
“Oh wow look at all the cool technology the inscriptions people are using!”
If email spammers had come out with some new technology to trick our email clients into showing us their spam, we wouldn’t be saying “oh wow what a great innovation”. We’d just delete/ignore their emails and move on.
“But these inscriptions are monetary! It’s a circular economy where people are trading around inscriptions priced in Bitcoin”
Sure, having things priced in Bitcoin is a good thing, but in this case it is still a distraction play because the spam part is where arbitrary data is being added to the chain, JPEG, JSON etc. It is yet again a distraction play, a red herring from the issue at hand.
“Look how many non-custodial users are being onboarded by ordinals wallets!”
They’re still spamming the network. What matters is monetary adoption.
“We need to pump this ordinals narrative to ‘trojan horse’ the shitcoin VCs to invest in Bitcoin start ups again”
Nah we don’t actually. We can instead do our best to win hearts and minds to the idea that Bitcoin is a great savings technology and the best money.
And to be honest, the “shitcoins on bitcoin” inscriptions and BRC-20 is a mostly irrelevant narrative in the real world. Bitcoin being the best money ever is what will drive adoption.
As Cory points out in another post, it’s a manufactured, fake narrative that doesn’t align with the real world.
Now there was a recent episode “The Bullish Case for Ordinals” on WBD with Pete Rizzo that I responded to here. My response got some shares and discussion, so it might also be worth taking a quick look below (this is just part of it, you can click through if you care to read the whole post).
Bottom line: let’s call a spade a spade. Arbitrary data storage on Bitcoin is spamming the chain. We don’t have to play-act like it’s somehow good or must be invested in and supported.
Podcast overview for the week
Bitcoin Mining Around the World with Seb Gouspillou (SLP543)
For this one I spoke with the ‘Indiana Jones of Bitcoin Mining’, Seb Gouspillou of BBGS. Seb is very passionate about bitcoin mining around the world. A few key points I took away:
Bitcoin mining in DRC as a means of providing revenue and a business model for the Virunga National Park. Not a huge mining operation, but certainly an interesting and unusual story!
Bitcoin mining in Oman - operating as a public-private partnership. I find this interesting because as governments around the world become more involved in Bitcoin mining, it becomes harder to ban Bitcoin. As a libertarian I’m not a fan of the state, but if states end up permitting freedom technology like Bitcoin, that’s a positive in my book.
We spoke about the challenges of solar and wind mining. In some cases these miners will use solar during the day and gas at night. If a site only has solar, it is only about 40% of the day, which Seb says can work with very cheap ASICs. With wind, it seems like it really depends on being in specific locations such as a corridor of wind in Mauritania.
Where Did Bitcoin Come From? The Genesis Book with Aaron van Wirdum (SLP544)
Aaron van Wirdum of Bitcoin Magazine rejoins me on the show to talk about various schools of thought and technology that contributed to Bitcoin. A common ‘trope’ is this “blockchain, not Bitcoin” meme that we hear from corporate or financial CEOs who haven’t done their research. They sometimes don’t realise that ‘blockchain’ and timestamping actually existed for quite some time before Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a special combination of technology and ideology.
The impact of the Austrian economists - people like Mises, Hayek and others, who impacted the extropians and cypherpunks. Many, but not all cypherpunks were/are libertarians.
The free software and FOSS movement. Without free and open source software, we wouldn’t have Bitcoin and it wouldn’t be able to be externally verified.
Cryptographers who created a lot of the building blocks required for Bitcoin - whether that is merkle trees, public key cryptography, and more.
Pre cursor electronic cash projects - notably ecash, hashcash, Bitgold, b-money, and RPOW (Reuseable Proofs of Work).
Check out Aaron’s book over at TheGenesisBook.com.
Sponsors and upcoming conferences:
If you want to stack sats and learn about Bitcoin, check out Swan Bitcoin. My link here gets you $10 of free sats when you start stacking with Swan.
The best bitcoin hardware devices are available at Coinkite.com - I use the Coldcard as part of various setups I have. Get a discount on your Coldcards using code LIVERA.
Mempool.space is an invaluable tool for targeting your bitcoin transaction fees and searching things. They’ve got a transaction accelerator waitlist that you can sign up for here.
LibertyCon International Feb 2-4 2024 Washington DC - code LIVERA
BitBlockBoom April 11th-14th 2024 in Dallas, Texas - code LIVERA
BTC Prague June 13-15th 2024 in Prague, Czech Republic - code LIVERA
That’s it from me. If you like the email updates, please share it around. See you in the citadels!