Yeah so trying to understand and make an opinion about the current fee rate and all the ordinals and inscriptions stuff, I find it pretty obvious what the answer is.
From the beginning, my first instinct was that its a pile of scammer shit. But I wanted to do some research and try to challenge that initial gut feeling. So for several weeks I’ve been looking at the fees and looking at transactions, reading other blog posts and twitter and all that argument and haven’t really at one point come across anything to do anything other than to further convince me that its all bollocks! Yep, ordinals and inscriptions are all fucking BS!
In no order, below are the reasons it is bs.
The fee rate for the data section is discounted. It was made like that for witness data or whatever, I assume it was made like that with the sole goal of making actual transactions cheaper. It makes no sense to be able to put random data in there and get the discount. Therefore, it must be a “bug” that needs fixing.
The “inscription” is made on a transaction. The data never leaves that transaction. No person/entity “owns” a transaction and cannot prove they do. Therefore, the “ownership” of any data in a transaction is just a consensus based on an off chain (independent and centralized) group of people.
If “ownership” of data is what is “valuable” to the ordinals group, then why choose the bitcoin blockchain to store such data? They are paying excessive fees to “own” something that is tracked by an external system. If the data is the valuable thing, then just use either another blockchain for it (try BCH) or make your own blockchain for it. Or just write an app to centralize ownership.
Anytime you are paying more fees to transfer “ownership” of something than the thing being ‘transferred’ itself is worth, then its a no brainer that its a scam. I saw some arguments like transferring “value” of real world assets on the blockchain will be a thing one day blah blah – yeah maybe, dunno what examples you got? But I doubt you’re gonna pay more in btc fees than the thing is worth? Like a house? You aren’t gonna pay $800k in fees to transfer the ownership of a house worth $300k right? Dumb cunts. And back to the previous point, there is no actual “ownership” of the transaction.
And then you’ve got the garbage about “ordinals is making bitcoin more popular”… “its bringing more people into bitcoin” … false. Its bringing more gamblers with no knowledge of bitcoin with the ‘get rich quick’ mindset that ordinals grifters are selling. No one really interested in the core values of bitcoin care about ordinals. The values between the 2 are mutually exclusive. More, that these new people will get burnt because we all know jpgs of shitty monkeys aren’t worth anything, then these people will be a new round of people who get out of bitcoin and then propagate that negative sentiment about it. Thus overall, probably decreasing the rate of organic bitcoin adoption.
Further on this point, you’ve got all the legit people trying to learn and wanting out of the traditional finance system who are blocked by the premature artificial increase in fees. I know the ordinal scams will run out eventually, but they’ll always be there and will periodically come back up. Best to eliminate the possibility sooner than later. But ordinals and high fees is going to prevent the real people from coming into and discovering bitcoin. And the biggest problem is that its these people that make bitcoin and blockchain valuable in the first place. Even myself, I am not going to transfer anything during the high fees environment, thus decreasing the natural adoption of the real value of bitcoin.
Then you’ve got another subset of people who are saying its good because it will force adoption/development of L2’s. Yeah maybe true, but it would be a lot better if it happened organically. That is to say, that there is still such a small adoption overall of bitcoin, that having people ‘onboard’ at this point straight to L2 is still too soon, imo. The more people that onboard directly to L1 and become familiar with it and become experts, the better. Having people forced to L2 so that we can support some scammy jpegs on L1 is not a good trade off. I dislike that Adam Back seems to be ‘ok’ with the high fees because of this reason. But I think he is too compromised by owning the company that creates one of the only L2’s. I am not sure he profits from it, but bitcoin is here to solve the problem of centralization and people acting in their own best interests. I think if liquid was as good a sell as it is being sold during these high fee environments, then it would already have gained more traction. So yeah, of course he is pro-early high fees… and that is unfortunate. And disclaimer, I haven’t done enough study about liquid, but it does currently have centralization, which isn’t that bad, but still it would be good if it got adoption organically, not due to some scammy jpegs. And the main problem with all this, is that Adam doesn’t outright say enough that the ordinals are scammers (maybe he did, but there are also a lot of tweets ‘not saying’ it and instead propagating the liquid network as a workaround.) He should be saying both equally.
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