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Ordinals, Bitcoin, and Beyond!🎙#NFT #BTC
Recorded: March 22, 2023 Duration: 1:35:22Space Recording
Full Transcription
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's super cool.
And then,
I'm not publishing their source code, which is problematic.
Like, when you're, when you're managing private keys, the idea of not having like publicly
a audio code is, um, it's not great.
You know, like we, float wallet in, uh, solana was like an example of a closed source wallet
that, you know, ended in a pretty massive exfiltration attack.
I am really glad to see us moving away from like key management in the browser.
Uh, the fact of the wallet ecosystem is developing and getting better is a really,
really good sign.
There's a lot of options.
X-First is a great feature set wallet.
If you're using X-First, I would just encourage you to ask their brand management people,
like, hey, why are we not publishing source code?
What's the deal here?
But Hero and Unisat are another two that you can check out as well.
Magic Eden Marketplace is awesome.
Gamma Marketplace is awesome.
Open Ordex is awesome.
All the tools are moving really, really quickly.
It's an exciting space.
So let me ask this question.
Now that we have understood how Ordinals works, at least at a high level from the back end,
we understood how to see things on the front end.
We understood how to kind of onboard and participate in the community.
Where do you guys see this going?
How do you guys see this evolving?
Oh, this is going to be a very fast-moving space.
I would say we've got, like, two years of unpacking to do for all of the potential feature sets.
I think that people's jaws are going to drop when they see a lot of what's possible, to be quite honest with you.
There's some, I like to refer to it as, like, idiomatic design differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Like, you can very easily find yourself in a position where you might believe that there are, like, just this huge, huge list of things that just simply can't be done with Bitcoin.
And there are definitely, like, having a complete machine that you can script into, like Ethereum, definitely does make it easier to develop products.
And it does, in some ways, give product services that we have, if we can do them on Bitcoin, we haven't quite figured them out yet.
We probably will.
There's a lot of interesting work being done on stuff like that.
But in any case, I think that most of the common product services for NFTs, like token gating, lending, you know, these kind of, like, the things that people generally use NFTs for, right?
All of those can be done, and as those things unpack, I think people are going to be really shocked about how big this ecosystem can get.
So, do you anticipate us ever seeing, like, Web3 games?
Well, there already are.
I mean, there's probably more games on inscriptions than there are on NFTs right now, to be honest with you.
So, like, you can inscribe, like, just an HTML file with JavaScript in it, right?
So, if you can code it, then you can play it in the browser.
You can play Doom.
You can play Pokemon.
These are all, like, these are inscriptions that have already been made.
Yeah, what about, like, a AAA game, high-level graphics?
Sure.
Massive MMORG or something like that?
So, one of the ways that I like to tease people about, like, what the future of this looks like is, let's say you've got, like, a set of GLB files, right?
Like, 3D assets.
And, you know, you can't, like, I'm not going to fit a whole game into an inscription, clearly, right?
However, what I can do is I can inscribe sets of assets as, like, individual inscriptions.
And then the owner or the creator of them can sign a message that is provably associated with them, right?
Like, it comes from them, that provides a protocol for how to combine these assets.
And so, then anybody who can make queries to the blockchain and fetch this data can locally assemble those assets and build them into, like, we could make, like, the stuff to make, like, a, you know, a VR apartment, right?
And, like, have them all each individual assets.
And then you go and you, like, buy all these GLB files.
And then you sign a statement that says where all the GLB files go, like, the planar coordinates for them.
And then, boom, you have a VR apartment.
You're done.
So, the extensibility of that certainly exists.
The ability to add, you know, you can, you know, import these into scriptable environments.
Like, you know, combine that with this idea of having, like, a JavaScript runtime that knows where these assets are and how to pull them.
Now you have a game.
So, it's all very nascent.
But what you're saying is it's going to reach a point where a lot of the things that aren't possible today or that may be...
Oh, these things are possible today.
It's a matter of developer bandwidth right now.
You know, I think a lot of people are, like, sitting back waiting on, like, well, what's the Ordinals team going to release?
Which is, I mean, like, we're going to release shit.
You know, like, don't get it twisted.
We will.
But it's an open source project.
There is no foundation.
There's not, like, the Ordinals team isn't, like, aggregating revenue out of the market.
So, it's, you know, the official response to when will this feature ship is PRs are welcome.
You know what I mean?
Like, get your hands dirty, contribute.
By all means, let's get in there and do this.
So, maybe you should have reword for the question.
So, it is currently possible, but it's going to be some time before people are actually doing it.
And that, what you're saying is up to how many developers are actually contributing to building out the ecosystem, building out the network?
Yep, exactly.
And 100% of people that are running Ord right now have everything they need.
We shipped a copy of the Ord Explorer, like, the web client, with the Ord software.
So, like, if you're running Ord, if you just do, if you run the command Ord server, boom, you have a copy of ordinals.com running locally.
And the idea behind that really ultimately is about not centralizing the data provisioning.
Like, rather than us having, like, some ordinals equivalent of Infura, where everybody accesses the network to this one, like, choke point, we want there to be, you know, a really large distributed set of incentives.
We want there to be a lot of developers running kit, a lot of marketplaces running kit, a lot of wallets running kit, a lot of explorers running kit, all, you know, like I said, distributing the data provisioning and making sure that the network remains resilient.
And we don't run into awkward situations like, you know, the U.S. Treasury sanctions Iran and then Infura has to cut off two and a half million Iranian kids that don't get access to the network for two and a half months, right?
So, we're already staged to be a lot, a lot, a lot higher data availability, a lot higher data durability, a lot higher, a lot broader set of distributed incentives.
And I think all of that leads to just a continued rapid iteration and growth of the, you know, sum of the market.
I have some more questions, but I want to pass some of the hands.
Iko, did you figure out the mic situation?
Mic check, mic check.
Can you hear me?
Yes, yes, loud and clear.
Very sorry for before, guys.
I was not connecting the microphone.
I don't know why.
First of all, thank you for having me here, guys.
An amazing panel.
And sorry, guys, maybe I've missed something that you stated at the beginning.
But one of the things, and I'm not for sure, I'm not 100% informed about Ordinals.
That's why I'm loving this place.
But one of the things that I'm questioning is by building the Ordinals on top of Bitcoin, does it basically unlock any of interoperability and bridging between chains?
Because at the end of the day, Bitcoin will be the chain that will be present on all other layer ones that we have now and that will probably pop up in the future.
So is there any way that through Ordinals you can bridge or enhance interoperability between chains?
That's my question, guys.
So just a quick thing maybe for me is I'd say no.
You know, Bitcoin is kind of Bitcoin native and usually just Bitcoin only.
There are things like Lightning, though, which is like an L2 to Bitcoin.
Basically, it's a two of two multi-sig where you lock up some funds and have a credit and you kind of transfer that Bitcoin around that way.
Lightning's super cool.
And there's something called Taro that's coming out or Taro, and they're trying to do NFTs on Bitcoin Lightning.
And I believe that could be a bridge.
But in terms of these, it's very Bitcoin native.
And L1 is a very closed loop system.
And that's on purpose.
So, you know, there have been cases where people like Jason Williams have basically burned a $170,000 board ape and, you know, inscribed it bit for bit on Bitcoin, which is really cool.
It's called like a Teleburn.
Maybe Post could go into that a little bit.
But, yeah, as for interoperability on the L1, I don't believe so, unless Post, you have some other suggestions there.
You pretty much nailed it, right?
I raised my hand with the intentions of mentioning the Teleburn thing, and you got right to it.
So there is a feature where you can, you basically, you derive an address on like Ethereum or Solana or it could be, you know, really any chain.
And that address is like provably associated with the inscription, right?
So you're like linking these two assets.
Now, you have to send it to this address.
And, you know, if you think about like the way that private key security models work, you can't spend it.
You can't send it to some random address and then spend it.
Like nobody's ever going to figure out that private key, right?
So you're burning it.
You're just burning it in a way that's provably associated with the inscription.
So this does create a bridge, but it's a one-way bridge.
And I like to, my meme for this is all your NFT are belonging to BTC.
I'm currently in the process of abducting Shizoposters, the NFT that I'm wearing right now.
I've got quite a few of them.
So far, I've teleburned nine of them.
I expect it to be like an interesting thing, but you're entirely right.
So Bitcoin doesn't have and probably doesn't want, I mean, we'll find out what Bitcoin wants over time.
But if I had to guess, Bitcoin doesn't necessarily want the ability to alter ownership based on the state of another network,
which is ultimately what's required for this concept of like two-way bridging.
You have to ask some other network like, hey, who should I update the ownership to this to?
And as far as Bitcoin's concerned, the owner is whoever is defined as the owner on Bitcoin.
And there is no modifying that ownership, right?
Like Bitcoin is very, very hardcore about this concept of ownership and doesn't necessarily see a lot of logic behind like asking some other network to tell you who owns something,
which fundamentally that's what you have to have to create a two-way bridge.
So for right now, it's a one-way bridge.
I do think you're right.
Lightning, by default, is like very, very solid for interoperability.
I think that Tarot is going to be like a massive, massive action space,
and we will almost certainly see interoperable assets at scale through Tarot.
Yeah, that's interesting.
There's actually a solution JustedDev and I have built for the CryptoPunks,
allowing CryptoPunks owners to safely inscribe their punk over to Bitcoin using actual provenance by tying that address over to Ethereum.
But I'll go ahead and let JustedDev talk on that in further detail.
Yeah, so the portal punks that Neem is referring to were basically we've developed an inscription service where when –
and it's token-gated so that when somebody calls it to inscribe their ETH asset over to Bitcoin,
they tell it what the token is, where to inscribe it to, and after the inscription's complete,
the service goes back and it updates the ETH smart contract to say, here's the inscription ID.
And what we're doing is we're creating provenance back to the original inscription.
It's not a tele-burn process because, you know, we feel like a lot of ETH NFT owners want to get some exposure into Bitcoin without actually burning their ETH asset.
But we're looking at opening up the portal that we've developed to more potential projects,
and we're developing some tools that will help more ETH-native developers utilize Bitcoin inscriptions and provide that service to them
so that they're not having to run a full Bitcoin node in the Ord software to be able to do inscriptions for their project.
And then also being able to – what we're calling it is basically using ETH as a layer 2 for Bitcoin to handle mints of projects
and things like that, where somebody will be able to, you know, do their minting transactions on Ethereum,
tell it where to send the Bitcoin ordinals to, and then the service will pick those up, do the inscriptions,
send them to the destination addresses, and go back and update the provenance record on Ethereum.
And what we see that being able to do is people being able to build out collections,
being able to automate building of metadata for the contracts with all the inscriptions that are associated with it,
and providing that data to marketplaces so that you have that full linkage of data.
But we're basically using Ethereum as a L2 for Bitcoin.
Yeah, I've been, like, pretty interested in the whole PortalPunks thing.
On the – okay, so first, on the whole, like, have to run a node bit,
creating an inscription itself is just a Bitcoin transaction.
And you can absolutely deliver the scripts for somebody to just, like, inscribe from a browser wallet or a phone wallet or, you know, whatever,
without running a node.
You can see the first example of these scripts in action is at inscribetheplanet.com.
There's a library that was produced specifically for it called Biton.
So if somebody wants to, like, take that and run with it, it's all MIT-licensed.
Like, by all means, pick it up, add it into your product.
That's – I will say that, like, for creators, I think it is really, really worth considering being a part of Bitcoin's infrastructure
if you're going to be a creator.
I won't necessarily, like, go into, like, exhaustive detail about that,
but there has been a lot of conversation about this.
I'll be happy to review it with people that are curious.
If you're creating a collection, there are very good reasons why you would want to consider running a node, right?
So – but to the PortalPunks bit, the one thing that – I guess the difference that stands out to me is –
and I'm going to say this in kind of critical language, but please understand that as I'm saying it,
I'm not telling you, like, you shouldn't be doing that or anything like that.
The mechanism is a rehypopulation of the asset, right?
Like, I'm duplicating the ETH NFT as an inscription, and then, like, I've got –
I basically, like, segmented the value of these things.
And, you know, if the market is naive, I can just dump one or the other of them
and then carry on with the one that I think is more valuable.
Whereas with Teleburn, I'm saying, like, I'm transferring the qualities of this over to here.
Now, there's reasons why you might not want to do that, right?
Like, if the – like, Bake is a really good example of this, right?
So, Bake has all these, like, off-chain benefits for Bake owners.
Well, if Yuga doesn't say that you're allowed on the boat party with your, you know, your inscription,
your Teleburn inscription, then you basically screwed yourself out of the benefits.
So, there are definitely things for consumers to be aware of.
Like, when you choose to Teleburn, you know, like, know what this transfer of ownership type means.
But I would say that there's some balance to be considered there.
Like, I personally, for me, I would be much more likely to buy a Teleburned asset
than I would have duplicated that stuff, right?
Yeah, that's why I was –
No, and I agree.
And that's where, you know, we're looking to do more than just, you know, copying ETH assets over.
That's why we're building the tool sets where people can create new collections
that become 100% Bitcoin native, just using ETH as the L2 for the minting functions
because there's so much you can do with the smart contract layer on Ethereum.
And, you know, one of the main driving factors of PortalPunks was that people were taking CryptoPunks
that they didn't own the IP rights to and just inscribing them over to Bitcoin
and people were assigning value to those assets as if they were done by the original owner of the IP.
So, the thing with PortalPunks is that they are, you know, 100% within copyright rights.
You know, there's no IP violations because it's provably linked back to the person
that owned the rights to that asset that could create derivatives
or anything that they wanted to with their asset.
So, that's kind of the driving factor behind PortalPunks.
For just like a fun – for just a fun experiment, if you could name –
you know, like you said, there's a lot of stuff you can do with the EVM
that you can't do with Bitcoin.
And to a certain extent, that's definitely true.
But what do you think are, like, the most valuable product development services
that you can do in Ethereum that you have not yet sussed out how to do with Bitcoin?
I had the same question, but I wasn't going to phrase it as eloquently.
I would say, you know, like what we've seen so far with some of the mint processes
where people are having to trust that people will return their funds
if they're not successful in minting.
You know, we saw it with the 12-fold mint, the Degods mint,
where people are sending their funds to a project and, you know,
they just have to trust that that project's going to send them their funds back.
Well, to be clear, we were doing trustless mints and auctions
two weeks before 12-fold released.
Why those guys chose to do it the way they did, I cannot explain to you.
But the technology most certainly exists, is extremely resilient, works very, very well.
You can even go so far as to wrap the reveal transaction inside of a PSBT
and you can actually do mint events the same way that we do them in Ethereum,
but on Bitcoin, completely trustlessly.
Yeah, and that's through PSBTs, right?
And that's kind of what we were kind of alluding to earlier.
But yeah, there's definitely people that use different techniques
and we're hopefully, you know, trying to drive people in the right direction
through the trustless aspect of this.
And I just think a lot of people are new to this
and, you know, obviously have been on different chains.
So, you know, they're kind of used to just taking all the funds
and then hopefully refunding it.
But yeah, you know, long term, we're hopefully, you know, going to phase that out
because that just leads to so many rugs and it doesn't need to be that way.
We will actually be doing, we will actually be doing,
this is a low-key show, I'm not usually the guy to do it,
but I think this one's particularly funny and topical, so I'm going to.
We are going to be doing what I think is an absolutely hilarious
and quite good art release later tonight.
It should be, I think it's 9.30 or 10.30 Eastern time.
There will be a trustless mint event for a collection called 12 Frog
that you should totally go check out.
It's amazing.
The guys that are doing it are some of the funniest people
I've ever worked with in my life
and I've really enjoyed working with them.
I wanted to go to, excuse me, I wanted to go to Sphinx really quick
and then board a pixel clip.
Yeah.
God, did I just forget what I was going to say?
Shoot.
So, damn it.
So, well, one thing I wanted to say is, you know,
I think that 12-fold, most people would tell you
that it wasn't really done the best way possible.
So I think that can be a learning lesson, obviously.
But as far as the, you know what, come back to me
because I forgot what I was going to say.
Yeah, yeah, no worries at all.
Board it, go for it.
And then I'll swing over to Nima.
Hey, guys.
Yeah, glad to be here.
Thanks for having us up.
Yeah, I'm just quite excited for Layer, actually,
because this was sort of a problem we had when we were looking at, you know,
getting our own collection out onto Bitcoin.
Because there's, you know, the security side, you know,
making everything secure also for your community, right?
And, you know, at the beginning of all this, beginning of March, we thought,
okay, there's no way we're going to do it on the Bitcoin side
because there's too much risk and there's too much, you know, going on.
Like, you know, there's D-Gods.
They had quite a few things.
You know, things went smoothly overall, but it could have not gone that way.
And also 12-fold, right?
So what we've, you know, a little shill right here,
what we're doing is actually we're going to be, you know,
minting on the Ethereum side and we're airdropping the same, you know,
NFTs on the Bitcoin side.
And they're going to have a logo on each side, right?
So you know exactly which chain they're going to be on because, you know,
you guys were talking before about the interoperability, right?
And it's like we don't know what's going to happen down the line, you know?
Like people potentially could be wrapping NFTs on Ethereum side,
moving them to Bitcoin and back and forth, right?
So if that does happen, you know, at least in some sense,
we do have a way of figuring out, okay, you know,
the provenance and where these actual pieces come from.
So, yeah, I'm pretty excited what you guys are building at PortalPunks.
Do you, are you guys like planning to expand that out to other collections as well?
Absolutely.
And that's kind of what I was alluding to with using Ethereum as an L2 for Bitcoin.
And, you know, because we want to help onboard people that are, you know,
currently ETH native into the Bitcoin ecosystem.
And, you know, by developing some products that are tooled towards ETH developers,
we think we can bring more people in faster that way.
And then, you know, as Bitcoin tools develop and get better
and people get acclimated to the Bitcoin ecosystem,
you know, they can shift more into Bitcoin native tools.
And one of the things there is, you know,
we're not trying to create a duplicate collection on Ethereum.
What we're doing is we're just creating like the right to receive that asset on Bitcoin.
So there's no Ethereum collection that gets generated and not,
it's not traded on marketplaces or anything like that.
It's just creating a process where people can do their mint transaction using Ethereum,
using Ethereum funds, using smart contracts that developers are familiar with
and processes and development tools that they're familiar with for creating mint pages
and delivering ordinal asset to the minter.
Can I just say?
Yeah, yeah, I completely agree with that.
I mean, it's like the number one thing we always think about as a community, right?
Like making sure, you know, the security there, everything can run smoothly.
So, you know, we're wanting to take the risk on our side, on our collection.
Let's say if there was an issue with an inscription of getting our art out,
then it's like we take that hit, right?
I mean, if some of these other big collections out there,
I don't want to know if like one day, let's say there is an issue with some of these inscriptions that come out.
I mean, D-Gods did have a reorganization on there.
I think it was their block, right?
You know, who's going to take the hit on that, right?
If something does go a bit more wrong.
So, you know, that can be, of course, something else potentially dangerous for community members minting, right?
And I think Casey, you know, the creator of Ordinals, you know, he mentioned that as well for 12-fold.
So, you know, that's number one in our book.
And it's just great to see, you know, new things being created to, you know, ensure that safety and security.
And then when everyone gets onto Bitcoin's side, it's, you know, properly done and, you know, safe for everyone to mint.
Yeah, but I just do want to interject something here because I think that just to be real here,
the tech is there for the most part.
The tech is there.
We are not forced to do this on the Ethereum side as an L2.
So make no mistake.
I'm not faulting anyone for doing something on Ethereum and sort of using that as an L2.
That's very creative.
That's, you know, that sounds really interesting in its own right.
But it's not because the tech is not there.
I mean, posts can tell you, but you can trade, you can do all that stuff in a trustless manner.
And Yuga, you know, made an honest mistake and hopefully we can learn from that.
But that is not an example of, that's not a limitation of what can or can't be done on ordinals.
The other thing that I wanted to say is that, you know, and anyone can correct me if I'm wrong,
but when it comes to inscribing these NFTs that are on other blockchains, so anyone can inscribe anything, okay?
But once you claim that that's the real one, that's where it gets tricky.
So it's not really a matter of, you know, it's like, oh, now we inscribe this one.
Well, okay, but I can go inscribe the same exact one a hundred times tomorrow.
And the fact is that there are going to be 101 inscriptions that look exactly the same.
The whole point with the Teleburn is that it identifies which one is actually was owned by the original NFT holder
so that that person does not, in essence, lose the utilities that came with that project.
Yeah, and just maybe to jump on that a little bit too, like I said with the Bored Ape, the guy that burned the Bored Ape,
there's a lot of concern where if maybe you wanted to, you know, bridge your Bored Ape to Bitcoin,
but, you know, you just made a bit by bit, you know, exact replica,
but then went ahead and went and sold your Bored Ape on, you know, Magic, or sorry, OpenSea for, you know, 100K, right?
So, you know, those are the things that are definitely concerning because, you know,
someone that's buying that Bored Ape may not have no idea that you, you know, inscribed it on Bitcoin
and you kind of made that public and, you know, all, you know, that, you know,
hopefully that, you know, value kind of transferred over to Bitcoin.
Obviously, this is all subjective, but, you know, there's definitely concerns with that.
And, you know, I just, there are definitely a lot of questions, right?
And that's why we're all here, right?
I'm myself, Post Capone, Sphinx, OX, a lot of these people on stage are here to help educate.
So, you know, we appreciate all the questions and, you know, thanks for having us up.
Just as well, I added something to Nest, which I thought was super cool.
For people on Solana, I used to be a Solana guy.
I'm a big Bitcoin guy now, but I used to do Solana stuff.
And they are actually doing a Bitcoin inscription, like ordinals, mint from Solana.
So what you do is you have your phantom wallet and you basically pay one soul.
And if you had like a meerkat like myself, then you could inscribe this through the smart contract.
And all you'd have to give is a Bitcoin address and it would inscribe for you and send it to your Bitcoin address while paying in Solana, which is super cool.
I thought that was really interesting.
And, you know, first of its kind.
I don't know if there's actually been more or not, but that could be something that you could do on ETH as well, where if you really value ETH and you want to pay in ETH,
you can pay in ETH and give a Bitcoin wallet and then they'll do the whole process for you and give you that inscription.
So it's just definitely an interesting way of going about it.
Post, go for it, sir.
I wanted to touch on the Reord conversation for a second, if I could.
It's an interesting conversation space, like without a doubt.
Yeah, orphan block.
Yeah, so, well, so there's pretty good evidence.
It's not conclusive, but there's fairly strong evidence that what we saw was more than a typical orphan block that we would see about every 20 to 25 days, right?
So there were three blocks that were all issued.
We looked at nodes, about 20 different nodes from kind of scattered perspectives all over the world, and all of the nodes sort of concurred that all three of these blocks,
even though the block time stamp on the block showed them as being like several minutes apart, the blocks were received within a period of about like six or seven seconds.
And so what it looks like was basically that, you know, a coalition of miners knew that this DGOTS block was going to have a lot of fees in it.
And so they decided to kind of like mine in isolation until they had a chain that had one block on top of the DGOTS block.
And that way they would own the chain with the fees from the DGOTS thing.
Which, you know, like when you think about that, it's like, oh my God, that's also very scary.
Isn't that sort of what a 51% attack is?
But in reality, you know, this isn't novel by any means.
And it actually happened a lot for a very long time in Ethereum.
So there used to be, like, the context is slightly different, but the end result, like the analysis is basically the same.
There was this really common trend in smart contracts for a couple of years that it took a lot of effort to convince Solidity Devs to stop doing it.
Where they would use timestamps as, like, a seed of randomness for their contract.
And Ethereum miners would be, you know, they can manipulate the timestamp on the block.
So they could basically manipulate the randomness and they could force smart contracts to give them, like, economically favorable outcomes.
And then they just use, like, you know, typical MEV transaction ordering kind of strategies to make sure that their transaction goes in at the right spot to get the right thing that they wanted.
And these attacks would happen, like, all the time.
I mean, like, in some cases, multiple times a day for two or three years.
What's important is that the application layer knows how to not make themselves vulnerable to these type of attacks.
And the reality is the application layer doesn't want the miners being able to juice their shit like this.
So the application layer does eventually start to take steps and reduce them.
So, like, in D-God's case, if D-God's had built the application differently, if their mint had run differently,
then it would not have created the attack surface that made this, you know, presumed attempt at what we call a selfish mining effort.
It wouldn't have made it possible.
And it's not, like, I want to be, like, really, really clear about this.
It's not compromising to the security of Bitcoin really in any way.
You, like, you could get into some arguments about miner incentives and how, like, if you distort miner incentives too much,
then you could see, like, certain miners over time that are willing to play distorted incentive games sort of win.
And then, like, maybe, like, the ethics of your hash rate gets messed up or something like that.
But in reality, the protocol assumes that miners and all participants will do whatever is most economically rational for them.
It assumes that everyone using the network is selfish and it will only call itself secure if it can say that it is secure in those conditions with everyone being selfish.
So, no, it's not compromising to the security of Bitcoin in any way whatsoever.
It is an interesting conversation space.
And very similarly to what we saw in Ethereum, this comes down to developers in the application layer getting an understanding of the technology stack that they are working with
and knowing how to build secure applications for themselves on that stack.
Just to Dev, go for it, sir.
I just wanted to follow up on the link that Bugsy shared for the Solana product.
And that's effectively what Lair has developed for Ethereum.
We're in the final stages of auditing our contracts that we'll be deploying and making available to Ethereum-based teams.
And it's all about minimizing that onboarding friction for people that are looking to launch a collection and getting them into the Bitcoin space.
That is super cool. Thanks for letting me know about that.
I think something that might be important to realize, like what's going on the back end here,
think of it like a gumball machine where they preload it with a bunch of Bitcoin.
I don't know how you guys may have done it, but, you know, if you're doing like a 10K collection,
that's going to be like, you know, $70,000 to $100,000, maybe $200,000.
So, you know, usually that ETH to Bitcoin transfer, basically, you know, like doing the exchange,
doesn't happen at the time of Mint.
They usually preload it with a buttload of Bitcoin and then take your ETH as, you know, as payment.
And then they'll do that conversion or hold on to that ETH or whatever.
Right. So something to think about and actually really cool.
And I applaud people for building this stuff.
So, yeah, really cool.
Yeah, there's definitely some treasury management that has to happen when you're accepting payment
in one currency and then having to go to the other currency to keep funding the inscription service and everything.
But, yeah, that's basically what we've got going on.
So it's really cool to see that people are doing it over on Solana also and, you know, just, you know,
really kind of taking the charge on, you know, developing in this space.
And, you know, it's something that we plan on, you know, investing heavily in.
So, guys, for people that aren't developers that believe in this and want to contribute to the growth of what's being built,
I've been told one of the ways to contribute and just contribute to Bitcoin overall is to run a node.
And I brought this up in Sphinx's space yesterday.
I felt like I was going off topic, but she made it very clear that, no, it's right on the money.
It's very much on topic.
And so for people that might have not heard the knowledge that was dropped yesterday, would love to know.
I'm going to guess here that running a Bitcoin node.
Oh, one more Bitcoin node added to the network is one more step or just one more block to fortifying the entire network and making it more decentralized.
What are the steps of running your own Bitcoin node?
And what are the costs?
What's the barrier to entry?
All that good stuff.
I think you guys have got post or Bugsy.
Go ahead.
It doesn't matter.
Bugsy can probably represent it pretty well.
He strikes me as somebody who's pretty familiar with it.
But the costs are really minimal, man.
If you, so like, really, you could run a node.
First of all, it does not cost anything.
Like, you don't pay the network anything.
You don't have to, like, stake something through a node, anything like that.
You do have to have a little bit of equipment, some gear, right?
Now, a Bitcoin node can run on something as slim as a Raspberry Pi and actually run quite well.
The time to sync on something like that would be small, like, fairly long.
But, like, once it's synced, like, once it's caught up to the current point of the chain, a Raspberry Pi would be, like, sort of more than enough resources, right?
The thing that you're going to want to be considering of is storage space, right?
Like, today, I believe we're at, like, 580 gigabytes through the blockchain.
And then if you want to run ORD, you're going to have a little bit additional storage requirements.
And also, ORD is a little bit more computationally expensive.
But that being said, I mean, an old used laptop with a 2-terabyte drive tied up to it would, like, get the job done.
You know, like, it would do it.
But we have spent an enormous amount of time helping onboard nodes.
Like, we, the estimates right now, like, if you look at most analytics, the first month that ORD was live, there were approximately 3,000 nodes added to the network.
I can tell you that I personally helped troubleshoot about 500 nodes to completion.
So, the onboarding process for nodes has been tremendously successful.
And, yes, every single one of those nodes is now, like, a new point of storage for the network, right?
And those nodes also can, if they choose, they can become data provisioners.
They could become marketplaces.
They could become ordinal explorers.
They could become analytic services.
There's, like, a million ways that you can sort of, like, leverage your own sort of local access to this data.
That, you know, to push those limits, you would probably need more developer experience or to partner with somebody with more developer experience.
But there are also a lot of open source tools, like Mempool, right?
The block explorer that we all use.
That's a completely open source tool.
You can run a local instance of Mempool.
And you can use that to, like, simplify queries for your own.
So, you don't, like, have to, like, get your hands dirty in Bitcoin Core and, like, learn all this, like, crazy C++ stuff.
You can install tools that will allow you to, like, really, if you're a web developer and you install the right three or four things on your node, then you can build whatever you want as, like, analytic services, explorers, marketplaces, all that stuff, right?
Like, it's very, very approachable.
And I would deeply, deeply recommend that people check that out, especially if you are providing services to the inscriptions market.
One thing to be, like, kind of aware of, nobody has to, like, you know, tie themselves up in, like, any kind of mental anguish over this.
But it's not possible to truly trustlessly participate in the ordinals market without running a node, which means that if we all depend on one node, one, we have, like, data provisioning issues.
Like, we have to pay to scale whoever this one node is up, right?
So, the market economically centralizes around whoever that actor is.
And then, two, if that actor ever starts telling erroneous information or is forced to cut people off from access to the network or anything like that, then you've got, like, really significant downstream problems.
You know, like, everyone downstream from that data provider is affected.
So, the more data providers we have, the more diverse incentives we have in the network, the further distributed the infrastructure will become, the more resilient the network is, the more available the data is, the cheaper it is for everybody to access it.
Like, it'll all play out quite well.
So, yeah, explore those avenues and see what's up.
But, Bugsy, and, go ahead.
Yeah.
Sorry.
No, I was just going to do a quick TLDR because Post is a great guy.
He has so much knowledge.
But, you know, it might be a little bit over a few of these, you know, audiences' heads.
So, quick rundown.
You need 400 gigabytes of space to run a Bitcoin node.
It doesn't take a lot of space.
You can buy a one-terabyte hard drive for, you know, like, 60 bucks nowadays.
Hopefully, it's an SSD.
And if you're a gamer, you can run it right on your computer.
You know, you probably have the requirements to run a Bitcoin node on your own computer.
Obviously, again, you'll need 400 gigabytes of access space, you know, additional space to run this.
But anyone can do it.
It's super easy.
You know, you just go download Bitcoin D or Bitcoin Core D.
I forget what it's called exactly.
But, yeah, 400 gigabytes of space.
And you can basically verify all your own transactions and not have to rely on anyone else.
So, when Post said, you know, some people might restrict you from viewing specific data, stuff like that, you know, you don't have to have a node to participate in ordinals.
But, you know, it's maybe recommended or, you know, if you look, you know, you want to take that next step, definitely maybe think about running your own node because this data is in what's called the witness, the segregated witness data.
So, there are nodes that can technically prune this data if they want it, meaning that they can erase it from their node if they want.
It's not really an issue because there's going to be plenty, you know, there's going to be so many archival nodes that, you know, I don't think this is going to be an issue.
But, if you're, you know, really paranoid and, you know, you want to host your own data, you want to own that data yourself, then run a Bitcoin node.
And, yeah, it costs less than like 200 bucks.
So, super cheap, super easy.
And, you know, it's definitely, you know, it's something that might scare you at first, but it's actually really easy.
Right on.
Okay, guys.
So, I mean, that's something.
Sorry, I'll add to that.
Yeah, go for it.
Ordinal's is now supported in the Umbral App Store.
So, you can literally, like, if you go through Umbral's product line, you can literally click one button and have a Bitcoin node and Ordinal.
All of it.
And for anyone that knows, doesn't know what Umbral is, Umbral is just a very nice, maybe kind of Apple iOS, you know, looking screen that can kind of help you, guide you through the Bitcoin node process without going through, like, you know,
your terminal on your terminal on your computer or, you know, like CLI, similar stuff.
So, it's just like a nice front end.
It is closed source, but it's, yeah, it just makes it look really fancy and nice like an iPhone app.
Yeah, I've been wanting to run a node for quite some time.
I haven't wanted it that bad, obviously, because I haven't looked deeper into it, but I have a lot of computers, old computers lying around.
Set one up here and there and participate in the fun.
Guys, I want to, I want to go back to one of the questions that was asked earlier, and I want to iterate it once more.
Is there, is there anything here, is there any potential here that, or rather, is there any potential on Ethereum that cannot be realized on Bitcoin with respect to NFTs, inscriptions, and everything that comes along with them?
In terms of file size, obviously, there's a restriction there because blocks are only four megabytes big, and you have to pay for all the data.
So, I think one maybe, you know, downside would be that if you wanted to inscribe a whole 10K collection, it would be very, very costly to do so.
Again, it would cost you, you know, $100,000, $200,000 to do so.
But you can do the things like the gumball machine where, you know, the people that are paying for it are the minters.
So, you can kind of pass that on to your customers rather than yourself, stuff like that.
And, you know, maybe it's not a downside.
Honestly, I think it's kind of an advantage because it really makes you, you know, if you're going to inscribe, you're going to have to pay a fee, right?
So, if you want it on Bitcoin, it's going to be valuable to you, right?
Whereas on, like, maybe other chains where you can just, you know, press one button and make, you know, 100,000 images on an IPFS server, that might not have as much value because you're not paying for each individual piece.
So, you know, maybe it's up to the person, it's up to the eye of the beholder for sure.
But, yeah, that's kind of maybe one difference there.
I'm not sure if it was post or just a dev that went up for us, but go for it.
Post and then we'll go to just a dev.
Yeah, I just wanted to throw, like, I think it's important to try and compare apples to apples, especially when we're talking about, like, consumers understanding what they're investing in.
Hardly anybody is writing any data, image data to Ethereum, right?
Like, most of this data is stored on a remote layer of one kind or another.
And the costs are different because you're not doing a thing, right?
Like, if you were to store the same data on Ethereum that we're storing on Bitcoin, it would cost you about eight times as much.
So, I agree with you.
Like, it is, like, you know, you're taking on this extra cost because, like, you care about it.
You want it to have the durability, availability, assurances on Bitcoin.
But, you know, like, if you don't necessarily care about it and you just want the asset to kind of float around for a year or two, then maybe you do the token on Ethereum.
But I do think that a lot of consumers are quite a bit misled.
I don't know if it's intentional.
Like, I don't want to say that they're, like, maliciously misled.
But, like, they've come to misunderstand IPFS.
And they don't necessarily get, like, we say, you know, oh, well, IPFS is an immutable storage layer.
Which, at a technical level, is a true story because, you know, it's associated with a file hash.
That file hash cannot change.
But it is not a censorship-resistant storage layer.
And the reality is that IPFS is very good tech and has a lot of great use cases.
It will not store these JPEGs forever.
Like, it simply will not.
It will not be economically rational for IPFS to host this data.
They will be forced to purge this data or you will be forced to pay to keep it in IPFS.
And then the costs will become pretty similar, right?
So what you're really looking at on a long-time horizon with Bitcoin is the ability to pay once to submit a file to a blockchain that finds it important to be canonical and have the history of the blockchain.
And that blockchain will protect your data, you know, for all of the foreseeable future.
Like, some very unforeseeable things would have to happen for that to change.
Just a dab, go for it.
Yeah, I mean, Post basically nailed exactly what I was going to say is that, you know, when you're inscribing your files to Bitcoin, you're putting all of that files information on chain through the witness data.
And basically, that's a huge difference from what we typically see on Ethereum, where people are putting reference links.
And I've noticed that it is substantially cheaper for data to be stored on Bitcoin than it is to store that same amount of data on Ethereum because you're limited to 256-bit storage slots on Ethereum.
And you pay a certain amount of gas for each of those storage slots.
So we're seeing kind of a radical shift in what exactly is stored with a token.
So I will be interested to watch kind of how transaction fees, what you're paying in sats per V-byte, change over time with ordinals as they, you know, continue to gain adoption.
You know, we've already seen transaction fees trending upward over the past couple of months.
So, you know, maybe at some point there, you know, you hit kind of a parity with Ethereum where it starts to cost about the same.
But right now, you can store a lot more information on Bitcoin than you can with Ethereum for the same transaction cost.
Well, guys, this has been a fantastic space.
I really appreciate everyone coming on.
I mean, I think we covered all bases, right?
And I think anyone that wants to go back and listen to this space can pretty much learn everything they want to know, at the very least from a high level about what's happening with Bitcoin ordinals, how they work, how you can participate, how interoperability would work, what the strengths are, what the weaknesses are.
I mean, I think it's really cool that I'm reading and Nima shared the layer post with me a while back about the being able to inscribe your punks onto Bitcoin with trusted provenance.
Because I didn't really understand how that would have worked before this space.
And now I have a great idea of how it works.
So I really appreciate everyone coming on.
If there are updates with Bitcoin ordinals and with the community, just shoot me a DM on my personal account.
I'm happy to hold another Socratic-style discussion like the one we had today.
I think it was very informative.
Probably going to be DMing some of you to figure out how I can get one of these nodes set up.
Maybe set up a couple at my parents' place, too.
I think it's – I mean, I'm a big Bitcoin believer.
I love Bitcoin.
And Bitcoin is what got me into this space.
I love Ethereum, too.
I'm not going to lie.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
I don't think it's going to be a zero-sum game between the two of them.
But, yeah, thanks so much, everyone, for coming.
Audience members, if you liked what you heard, give the panelists a follow.
Give us up here a follow as well.
Sphinx, I know you had your hand up.
So the mic's yours, man.
Thank you again for doing that opening.
It was awesome.
Oh, you're very welcome.
Thank you for the space.
And I just wanted to say, you know, we have that sort of educational-focused space Tuesdays and Thursdays with Post and the other mods who are kind enough to come.
But also, I'm going to do a Bitcoin node challenge.
So just stay tuned for that so people can get excited.
I really do think that, like Post said, what better way to really know how this works and be part of this system than to really do it the trustless way.
And I think everyone can do it.
So stay tuned for that.
And I can send you the details as well, Noah.
Yeah, I would love it.
And maybe one day we can do a space on stacks.
I would love to hear more about what the future of Layer 2s look like on Bitcoin and whether we could one day see ecosystems on Bitcoin the way that we do on Ethereum.
I just scratched my head and wonder if that's a possibility.
But I think we can save that for it.
But go ahead, Bugsy.
I think I might have just opened the door to a rabbit hole, but go for it.
Yeah.
Oh, no worries.
No, just a quick thing.
I'd recommend just for everyone to look into Lightning Network and Tarot if you're interested in L2s.
Obviously, me personally, I'm not a big Stacks fan because they like to use Bitcoin as a front for their other crypto.
I don't if you look at their their web page, like it says Bitcoin like 15 times and Stacks like five times.
So, you know, they might be using Bitcoin in a way and trying to settle on Bitcoin.
But I think Lightning is where it's at for L2s.
And, you know, they'll definitely be different implementations.
But yeah.
And again, you know, just just a quick rundown.
Like the inscription lives on chain and the Satoshi is being transferred around wallets.
And you're basically attaching you're not attaching the file to the sat, but you're assigning the sat to the file.
So just something to remember.
And yeah, thanks for having me.
I'm just here to try and help break it down and, you know, give it at more of, you know, like a lower, lower level, you know, like a grade five, grade six level.
Post is super smart, but sometimes for people in the audience, it might be a little difficult for them.
So I'm just trying to help Postie out and help the audience out.
So thanks for having me again.
Yeah, thanks for coming on.
And thanks, guys, for explaining things in layman's terms.
I think it's really important.
It helps me understand it as a person that's not technical.
It helps a lot of the audience members understand it.
Generally, people aren't as technical as developers.
And I really do believe that this stuff needs to be articulated in layman's terms in order for the average person to understand it.
And more importantly, in order for us to drive mass adoption.
Mass adoption doesn't happen until the average person is comfortable and confident in understanding these concepts.
And only then will they start to participate in the ecosystem.
And only then will we be able to grow as an industry and move the needle forward.
Nima, go for it, sir.
Yeah, one quick data point just for everyone in the audience.
So Ornals inscriptions started, I want to say, at mid or towards the end of January.
And to date, we have, I'm looking at the stats right now, 507,2,375 inscriptions.
So we're getting there.
Soon we'll hit a million inscriptions.
And that's going to be super exciting.
Yeah, really cool.
I think people are going to be fighting for that inscription number million.
And I'd imagine that's going to go for a lot.
Maybe not as much as the first one for 100 Bitcoin.
All right, well, I'm going to wrap things up.
It's been awesome, guys.
Again, thank you.
I always have a hard time closing spaces.
I feel like I want to continue, but I think this is a great stopping point.
Don't want to drag things on.
And yeah, shoot me a DM if you want to do other spaces on Bitcoin.
I'm letting that work on layer twos or anything else.
I'm always happy to just pick a topic that a community member picks and go with it.
WhaleCoinTalk community, you're listening to another Socratic-style discussion on the Aquarium.
Today we did Ordinals, Bitcoin, and beyond.
My name is Noah.
And remember that everything you hear on these broadcasts is meant for educational purposes only.
Nothing is financial advice.
So be safe out there, and we'll see you all on the next one very soon.
Take care.
Take care.
