jimmysong

Bitcoin Expert
Open-Source Coder
Follow me to learn #BTC

Author of 5 Bitcoin books

Fiat Ruins Everything: https://fiatruinseverything.com

PGP: C1D7 97BE 7D10 5291 228C D70C FAA6 17E3 2

Public Key

npub10vlhsqm4qar0g42p8g3plqyktmktd8hnprew45w638xzezgja95qapsp42

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

NIP-57 Address

[email protected]

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nprofile1qqs8k0mcqd6sw3h524qn5gslszt9am9knmes3uh268dgnnpv3yfwj6q3f9zmx

Publishing to

bitcoiner.social

nos.lol

nostr-pub.semisol.dev

nostr-pub.wellorder.net

nostr.bitcoiner.social

Author Public Key

npub10vlhsqm4qar0g42p8g3plqyktmktd8hnprew45w638xzezgja95qapsp42

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Last Notes

2024-06-26 12:30:34

I'm going to guess that whoever gave the 8 BTC donation to Assange is on Nostr.

2024-06-25 07:40:56

hotel room keys that keep demagnetizing have to be some of the most unnecessarily painful UX

2024-06-24 13:15:23

All companies die eventually. protocols, on the other hand, generally survive.

2024-06-23 17:52:12

You don't need to try harder, you need to repent.

2024-06-23 12:06:49

so few people are interested in seeing reality as it is.

2024-06-21 11:25:47

Pilgrimage complete. A little disappointing to find that the statue is so close to the Microsoft building.
https://ibb.co/vvzKrV6
https://ibb.co/RyTMw1c

2024-06-21 09:34:55

I've never seen someone getting into altcoins, start getting fit, becoming more disciplined, having lots of children. They mostly seem to have and up drinking a lot and getting fat.
altcoins are fiat 2.0

2024-06-20 18:47:14

- reply

The South wasn't a bunch of innocents, for sure, but the question we need to raise is, did he need to wage war? if you think that he did, then I would argue you haven't studied history enough. Why did chattel slavery end everywhere else before and after the Civil War without a war?
I believe revoking the Fugitive Slave Act and letting the South secede would have ended slavery in the same way it did in Brazil, through economic means and without millions of deaths.

2024-06-20 18:36:29

There are still people that think the lockdowns were justified, much like how there were still people in 2007 that thought invading Iraq was justified.

2024-06-19 09:44:34

Anyone starting an argument with "we need to compete with X" where X is some shitcoin can be safely ignored.

2024-06-18 14:37:47

People love self serving delusions

2024-06-17 15:23:05

Who's with me?
https://m.primal.net/IoAq.png

2024-06-16 08:07:11

1200 gram wagyu
https://m.primal.net/ImcF.jpg

2024-06-15 11:58:17

Don't talk about your diet or exercise routine, show me your body.

2024-06-14 12:27:05

AI is really just a good search engine. It does not create because it has no telos.

2024-06-13 20:30:09

Wish more men in BTC would wear suits and not hoodies/jeans/sneakers.

2024-06-13 20:25:11

- reply

I've seen this a lot.

2024-06-12 14:36:26

The graffiti in Prague bothers me. I strongly suspect it's a remnant of it's communist past where people didn't learn responsibility.

2024-06-11 21:23:31

On X you're the product.
On Nostr you're the producer.

2024-06-10 15:44:38

For free subscribers: Hyperpleasures, Needing Enemies, Reality and Engineering, Soulless Virtue and more!
For paid subscribers: Ark v2, LN Alliance, OKX fee screwup, DCG's bad behavior and more!
#Bitcoin Tech Talk #400
https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-400

2024-06-09 09:30:16

If you don't care about virtue, you will be ruled by vice. Shotcoiners, for example, don't care.

2024-06-08 13:12:30

Austrian economists that don't understand programming, technology and cryptography will dismiss Bitcoin or attempt to change Bitcoin because of what they don't understand.
Programmers, cryptographers and technologists will do the same because of the economics that they don't understand.
Stay humble.

2024-06-07 18:15:46

As Bitcoin price increases, so does envy about our situation.
I talked to @JohnathanBi about how to deal with it looking at envy through the lens of philosophy.
https://youtu.be/-5Aqo-inaMc

2024-06-07 12:33:16

if hurt people hurt people, then journalists must be seriously hurt

2024-06-06 17:21:57

I'd like to see Bitcoiners buy profitable businesses and provide value to the communities they're in.

2024-06-04 10:54:33

There's a tremendous amount of capital that Bitcoiners have. We will literally be building the future.

2024-06-03 16:45:16

Free issue for the first Monday of the month!
Shrinking Control, NK Remote Workers, Crippled Miners, Clams, Ross Pardon and much more!
#BITCOIN Tech Talk #399
https://open.substack.com/pub/jimmysong/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-399

2024-06-03 07:52:51

Freedom is paid forward

2024-06-01 07:03:28

aisan cultures do orders of 10 in groups of four instead of three.
so western is thousand, million, billion and so on, which are 10^3
east Asian is by 10^4, so the word for 10,000 is mahn in Korean, and 100,000 is 10 mahn and so on.
maybe the reason we have 100,000,000 sartoshis per BTC is because Satoshi was east Asian. 10^8 is much more natural in those cultures.

2024-05-31 01:11:18

What do you think happens if Trump is assassinated?

2024-05-30 14:47:39

All altcoins ultimately trade on association with Bitcoin's success.

2024-05-30 03:49:54

Savings vehicle or jpegs and memecoins? your choice

2024-05-29 01:32:16

way more people would travel if border controls weren't so onerous.

2024-05-26 15:04:38

Nothing like 20 hrs of travel to catch up on some Bitcoin reading.
Also @npub1a2c…w83a's book is a great work of scholarship while being very accessible. I regret not starting earlier.

2024-05-26 01:44:30

- reply

funny, I do this when I go to church.

2024-05-25 16:30:43

I would like to see clients surface older notes based on content. This is something YouTube does very well that Nostr could benefit from.

2024-05-24 17:09:50

A picture is worth a thousand words.
This was sent to me by my tour guide from the West Bank of a child waiting at a checkpoint to get to school.
https://m.primal.net/ILWM.jpg

2024-05-24 15:03:48

Mindful consumption is way better than haphazard, propaganda driven consumption.
Hard to live that, though.

2024-05-23 15:27:41

I find it strange that the reasons I don't like Trump are the things most of his haters give him credit for. Like the lockdowns and the vax.

2024-05-22 22:42:21

In this excerpt from my book, I argue that people draw the wrong lessons from Pizza Day. Instead of day dreaming about being a lucky gambler, you should be providing value instead.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/bitcoin-magazine-books/the-wrong-lessons-of-pizza-day

2024-05-22 14:43:16

How would jewelry that hides a private key work?

2024-05-21 18:44:47

There will be a lot of Bitcoiners that will regretnot having more kids in 20 years

2024-05-21 14:54:26

The attacks against Bitcoiners show just how important decentralization is to our collective security.

2024-05-20 22:36:07

Most people that we want to orange-pill or even Nostr-pill need to be security-pilled first.

2024-05-20 18:37:51

One of the biggest reasons people don't succeed is because they don't know what they want. Yes, everyone wants a lot of money, an attractive partner and so on, but what's your priority? What do you really want? Those other desires, the *results* are generally very vague and therein lies the problem. Your goals are not specific enough and your vision not clear.
That's why you lack passion. Because it hasn't come from you, it's come from envy of others.

2024-05-19 15:05:06

Using a Daylight computer is changing how I spend my time.

2024-05-18 17:01:35

The monetary system sets you up to be fragile.

2024-05-18 16:59:07

- reply

From what I understand of the protocol, no. That's one of the main features is that the fact of its privacy preservation is hidden in what look like completely normal transactions.

2024-05-17 19:39:08

My Nostr key is mine in the same way my Bitcoin private keys are mine.
We own these things in ways that are qualitatively different than anything else. We have property rights that exceed that of physical possessions.
This still blows my mind.

2024-05-16 21:00:26

As a techie, it's easy to overestimate peoples' ability to use technology. My wife spent an hour helping my mother in law figure out how to check her text messages to log into a two-factor auth account.

2024-05-16 16:30:30

I talked to @AnjanKatta about our relationship to Technology. He's the founder and CEO of @daylightco and is building devices that will reset this dysfunction.
#Bitcoin Fixes This #124
https://rumble.com/v4um1o5-bitcoin-fixes-this-124-relating-to-technology-with-anjan-katta.html

2024-05-16 01:48:18

- reply

Sad to say, but IQ has a big part to do with it.

2024-05-15 15:26:24

- reply

Less built around engagement, more built around ideas. Formatted for quick consumption, not continuous consumption. Less built around links and lots of good exit points so I can do other stuff. Make it easy for me to save long-form stuff for me to read later.
Basically, more contemplation, less reaction.

2024-05-15 14:27:14

I wonder how many bad design patterns have been built into most Nostr clients. I'd pay for one that's built to serve me rather than the other way around.

2024-05-15 01:15:11

Our enemy has always been, and always will be, those that abuse their authority, to steal, jail and murder.

2024-05-14 14:39:35

Has anyone made some sort of Nostr dating app? Every single guy I talk to seems very frustrated with the centralized dating apps that currently exist. Wouldn't one that isn't so exploitive do better?
But then again, the big problem to solve is, how do you get the single women on here?

2024-05-13 18:14:19

As an engineer, doing something under duress is likely to have a lot more problems later on. This is called technical debt and you pile it on when you're doing things reactively and urgently.
Like most fiat things, technical debt doesn't really get paid off in most places because every non-engineer hates spending resources paying it.
But Bitcoin is different because it's not built reactively or urgently. It's not fiat and we do pay off technical debt. That's why it's got the record that it has, especially compared to altcoins. Something like Ethereum 2.0 is building something from scratch because there's too much technical debt.
Bitcoin is not going to imitate fiat practices. We will make things in due course, with sufficient review and consideration.

2024-05-13 00:11:31

15 years of payments vs. savings.
Savings has won every.single.time.

2024-05-12 14:39:45

Back when I was in elementary school, I was obsessed with computers. This was back in the 80's when they weren't that common, but my parents saw that I really liked them, so they got me one for my 9th birthday. It was a Commodore 16, not the 64 which had lots great games, but the 16, which had like 3 games, total.
Having nothing else to do with it, I learned how to program simple programs in line-basic. Stuff like this:
10 print "hello"
20 print "world"
30 goto 10
Honestly, I didn't know many commands, so goto loops were about the most I could do.
My mom somehow found a teacher for me to take computer lessons. She was doing something with networking computers and I guess had graduated with a degree in Computer Science. She was also pregnant.
I took lessons for about 5 months (until my teacher gave birth) where I learned stuff like variables, prompts and so on to make a really basic text interface. It was the first time I felt like I could make something useful with this device.
Anyway, I tell this story because that's what a good mom does. My mom was a recent immigrant who had no idea what computers were, but she found the right teacher for me so I could develop my talents. For all you moms out there, this is one of the best gifts you can give your kids.
Thanks mom.

2024-05-11 18:26:16

I can't decide whether the people complaining about lightning are perfectionist engineers or disgruntled latent altcoiners.

2024-05-10 14:20:44

OK, question for @npub1get…0nfm now that I've hooked up primal to Alby, I can't see who's zapped me and it makes all my posts seem like there aren't any zaps on it, even when I'm receiving them. How do I fix this?

2024-05-10 01:49:41

Inside of you are two wolves.
The one that wants to be lazy and rent-seek.
And the one that wants to beat up that other wolf.

2024-05-09 01:55:36

The only thing we have to fear are authorities that tell us there's nothing to fear.

2024-05-08 15:20:29

https://m.primal.net/IEcg.jpg
# On Memecoins
The VC token industry is not what it was in 2017 or even 2021. Back then the newbies to the "crypto" space trusted them to give recommendations on what to buy and what to not buy. Fortunes were made by crypto VCs as almost anything they promoted would be bought by the gullible public and subsequently pump. They made money on all kinds of tokens, from EOS, to IOTA, WAX and STEEM. Those were the golden days when they had influence in the market.
The crypto VC influence has significantly waned the last few years and the days of making 30x on an ICO are long over. Their reputation since has been sinking faster than Bill Cosby's, as the market that they built their funds on got away from them. In a sense, though, they deserved it, as pretty much everything they pumped did horribly, and the promises of these tokens about as likely to be fulfilled as a Kardashian wedding vow. The run they had was unbelievable, fueled by a ZIRP environment and insane FOMO, but when the altcoin market started going south, their prospects crashed along with them.
## The Demise of VC Tokens
Despite their struggles, Venture Capital benefit from the fact that it's a lagging industry. They typically raise the next fund while the iron is hot, and can raise crazy amounts during these bull cycles. They can survive a long time on their 2% yearly management fee, even as their 20% of profit looks increasingly unlikely. Crypto funds have all done terrible the last few years and most of them are deeply underwater.
The few coin pumps that they've tried have more or less died before they had any chance to pump, BitClout and WorldCoin being two notable examples. VCs poured a lot of money into these things, hoping to bring back the good old days, only to find that the market no longer trusted them. And who could blame the market? The coins they pumped previously were down significantly in USD terms, and in BTC terms, they looked like the Venezuelan Bolivar.
## The Rise of Memecoins
But that doesn't mean altcoins went away. Memecoins obsoleted the VCs and ultimately brought some more honesty to the Neitzchean will-to-power games that were always being played. The original memecoin, of course, was Dogecoin, and Elon Musk pumped that thing like a hot air balloon, and surprisingly, the market followed. What Dogecoin did was to lay bare what was actually going on in the altcoin markets. The narrative didn't matter and it was all a power game, a Keynesian Beauty Contest, and mob rule. These "blockchain" use-cases were about as realistic as a Milli Vanilli comeback, so in a sense, the altcoin market reduced to its essence.
Dogecoin was also notable because it cut out VCs. It was a retail phenomenon and VCs for the most part, didn't get into it. How could they? These are people that supposedly figure out what the future is going to look like and invest accordingly. There's no expertise, no due diligence and no market research needed in a memecoin pump. VCs don't have any special access or insight in the memecoin market and they didn't provide anything of value to the pumpers. They got cut out as middlemen.
Doge was followed by Shibu Inu and its success rapidly rendered VCs completely unnecessary. The game that was being played didn't require large injections of capital, just the appropriate buzz and enough marketing to achieve escape velocity. Shibu pumped purely as a meme, copying Dogecoin and it similarly required no VC pumping to succeed. And with that, VCs became the cable news of the altcoin industrial complex, where the only attention they garnered was from their deluded peers.
## A New Cycle
We're now in an environment where memecoins have become the altcoin pump and dump of choice. Indeed, just about the only coins this cycle that are pumping are either memecoins or platforms for memecoins.
For what it's worth, memecoins seem to have a similar dynamic as other altcoins, in that a few mainstays seem to hold significant mind share while everything else dies a quick death. What's different is that because these memecoins don't have large marketing budgets, they get to their dump phase much quicker.
All this is good. The altcoiners are in a sense a lot more honest this time around. There's no grand promises of crazy applications using blockchain, or disrupting some industry. The people that are getting into memecoins know that it's a gambling vehicle and that they're playing a greater fool game. There's little deception in PepeCoin or DogWifHat because they're not claiming any utility or even a future.
And don't feel sorry for the VCs. They are reaping the rotten fruit of hype and fraud that they've sowed. Many have destroyed their reputations pumping useless stuff and the fact that no one is listening to them is the market functioning properly.
There's also a lot less waste of developer time. Instead of altcoin platforms wasting developer time on barely working, insecure projects, they're eschewing utility altogether for "fun." The entire altcoin industry has been about gambling and now, everyone knows.
In the end, memecoins make Bitcoin look better and better.

2024-05-07 14:33:27

Watching the Tom Brady roast, it made me think that there's a deep cultural ritual that was being performed.

2024-05-05 19:14:37

Bitcoin doesn't care what features you want, but anyone is free to build tools.
Complaining about something that doesn't exist as if it's just a matter of politics is a very fiat way of thinking.

2024-05-05 16:23:41

Some day, we'll be able to leave a QR code and go.
#note1r7v…x5l4

2024-05-04 19:08:37

- reply

Churchill was the worst PM of all time.

2024-05-04 18:37:17

Worst three presidents of all time:
Lincoln, Wilson, FDR

2024-05-04 14:41:38

Oxymoron: fat OG bitcoiner

2024-05-03 19:19:46

This man is Jared Bernstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
He does not understand the monetary system that he's advising on.
https://m.primal.net/ICpT.mp4

2024-05-03 15:03:55

Bitcoiners without Nostr accounts are a bit sus to me now.

2024-05-02 15:00:40

We already have decentralized IDs. They're called npubs.

2024-05-01 16:46:17

This, too, shall pass.

2024-04-30 17:39:35

Decentralized tech is not for the marginal user.

2024-04-29 22:29:49

Nostr generally has poor discovery. I don't have many moments on here where I find new people to follow that I don't already know from other platforms.
Thankfully, being decentralized, the client that comes up with more effective algos will have an advantage and will get copied. I just wish there were more interesting data-driven attempts at discovery being tried.

2024-04-29 17:15:36

For Free Subscribers: Tech Inevitability, Art of Hanging Out, Nobody Reads, Education Replacing Family and more!
For Paid Subscribers: Practical Multisig, Verifiable PRNG, LNAddrD, Dev arrest, FBI warning and more!
#Bitcoin Tech Talk #394
https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-394

2024-04-29 01:42:53

Man it must suck to be a company having to navigate the SDNY DoJ right now.

2024-04-28 16:04:57

Your real life begins when you realize you don't need "their" approval.

2024-04-27 22:43:08

There's a big difference between Bitcoin "owners" and Bitcoin Maximalists.
The vast majority of people that own Bitcoin don't care much about the KYC requirements the US government is attempting to add.
The vast majority of Bitcoin Maximalists do.

2024-04-26 23:16:38

There's almost nothing that makes me feel as good as doing a hard workout.

2024-04-25 19:21:21

Image is nothing to the didactic learner.
Image is everything to the status seeker.

2024-04-24 17:07:55

I heard that John Stewart is on the Daily Show again.
I'd bet the only people that watch him are the people that watched him 20 years ago. That is, in their attempt to make leftism "cool" again with the young, they've inadvertently shown how outdated they actually are.

2024-04-24 02:30:48

Bitcoin is the perfect tool for charging money to people that want the service but don't want to give up any personal information. To my knowledge VPNs are about the only service that's really embraced this.

2024-04-23 17:11:43

We'd like to think that when we're neutral it's the result of wisdom and humility. But if we're honest, much of the time, neutrality is really the result of cowardice and laziness.

2024-04-22 22:32:55

Instead of moving away from gmail (another service, making your own mail server, etc), is there a way to move out of email altogether?

2024-04-22 20:22:52

Fiat stupidity goes away when reality chokes it out like a submission specialist in an MMA fight.

2024-04-21 15:20:05

COVID lockdowns, Ukraine funding, Israel funding
It's rare to meet people that are against all three outside of Bitcoin. Shows how prone to propaganda normies are.

2024-04-20 16:41:26

Turns out the halving event was a scambrian explosion.
2000 altcoins minted or being minted in just 14 hours using Runes.

2024-04-20 15:07:56

- reply

## Update:
Apparently, there's a minting process that was added to the Runes protocol, so you have to first commit to the symbol using a hash and then reveal some number of blocks later. I was going off of the initial blog post, but a few people have pointed me to the update of the protocol because they saw this same problem. Thus, the one dollar auction dynamic does not happen, though there's plenty of altcoins being launched. There's already over [1000 new altcoins](https://unisat.io/runes/list) either minted or in the process of being minted on it.

2024-04-20 05:05:45

https://m.primal.net/HxhK.png
# Halving Fee Chaos
The Bitcoin halving is an anticipated event, one of those Bitcoin holidays that happen every once in a while. Along with Soft Fork Activation and various financial instrument introduction days, it's one of those not-quite-predictable days that occur every few years which give Bitcoiners reason to pay attention and mainstream media to speculate.
This year's halving was much anticipated, as halvings usually are, but we had a bit of an incident that requires some further explanation. The block subsidy decreased from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC on block 840,000 as expected, but what wasn't expected was the 37.626 BTC in fees that came along with it. To give some context, that's easily the highest ratio of fees to block subsidy that Bitcoin has *ever* had. [One transaction](https://mempool.space/tx/152b928e97bb9e874da1bd4abdf766ae0cdc7a2f260dad5542967cb414c58489) paid nearly 8 BTC in fees by itself.
## More Fees
It wasn't just block 840,000 that had high fees, over the next 5 blocks, we had fees of 4.486, 6.99, 16.068, 24.008 and 29.821 BTC respectively. The fees are the highest it's ever been. This situation in Bitcoin is unprecedented.
Up to this point in Bitcoin's history a block whose fees were higher than block subsidy were pretty rare. There were a few in the 50 and 25 BTC eras, but these were mistakes by the user (usually forgetting to put in a change address) and almost all of the fee came from a single error transaction. In the 12.5 BTC subsidy era, there were a few transactions toward the end of 2017 when the cumulative fees exceeded the 12.5 subsidy. In the just-ended 6.25 BTC subsidy era, there were many blocks during the ordinals craze which exceeded the 6.25 BTC subsidy.
Still, these were relatively rare, and most blocks even in the most recently completed era mostly didn't exceeded 1.5 BTC. Yet in this new era of 3.125 BTC subsidy, every single block as of this writing (block 840018) has had fees exceed the subsidy, some by many multiples. So what happened? Why was the halving block getting so much in fees?
## Runes
The reason has to do with a new protocol called Runes. It's yet another colored coins protocol on top of Bitcoin that Casey Rodarmor designed back in [September of 2023](https://rodarmor.com/blog/runes/). The main idea is to allow coin issuance on Bitcoin that uses the UTXO set natively.
Now to back up a bit, colored coins have been around for a long time. The main idea is that you can "color" certain Bitcoin transaction outputs as meaning something in addition to the Bitcoin amount in the output. It could be another "asset" and issued as a token. The first implementation of such a protocol happened 11 *years* ago in 2013 and there have been many attempts since, including MasterCoin (renamed Omni), CounterParty, and more recently, RGB, Taro Assets and BRC-20.
As Rodarmor states in his blog, his motivation for making another protocol is to bring some of the asset issuing from other chains to Bitcoin. To make the launch of this protocol more interesting, Rodarmor decided to start the issuance on block 840,000, leading to the chaos we saw.
## Simplification vs Game Theory
Casey Rodarmor is also the creator of ordinals, and he took one of the concepts, which was to name assets using the capital latin alphabet on Runes. This is a normal fine choice, but what happens when there's a conflict? If two assets have the same name, how do we distinguish between them?
To simplify things, the protocol just looks up what assets exist already and if the name conflicts with something that exists, then the new asset isn't issued. This indeed simplifies the client and gives a global unique name to each asset. Unfortunately, it also makes for some terrible incentives.
## Sniping Asset Issuance
The first incentive problem is that if the transaction issuing the asset is sent out to the Bitcoin mempool, then as that transaction is gossiped to nodes around the network, other observers can snipe the name by getting the transaction in earlier.
Now "earlier" in Bitcoin is a strict concept. Blocks are ordered and transactions within a block are ordered. Whichever comes first gets the symbol and the asset issuance. But if you want to squat on a good symbol name, you can just look for mempool transactions that are attempting to create a new asset and create your own with a bigger fee. That's the essence of sniping.
What's really terrible about a situation like this is that *both* transactions will likely go into the block, but only the first will successfully issue the asset. The second will not issue the asset but *still pay the fee*.
Miners generally order transactions by fee rate, so a higher fee likely means that they'll get to issue the asset. I say likely, because there's a second incentive problem here I'll discuss later. But game-theoretically, both participants are incentivized to increase fees continually to one-up each other. The dynamic is similar to the [One Dollar Auction](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction), where participants end up making rational choices, but end up with an irrational result (like paying $1.50 for $1). Every loser pays lots in fees for nothing.
## Second order Game Theory
Now given this first-order incentive playing out, it's not a surprise that a lot of issuers purposefully put in a very high fee initially to discourage anyone from trying to snipe the symbol. After all, if your sniping attempt fails, then you lose out on the fees you tried to snipe with. There's also a significant uptick in the usage of RBF for this reason, so that you have the option to one-up the sniper and the sniper to do the same to the issuer.
Note that RBF isn't useful here to *get out* of paying the fee, as a replacement transaction has to pay more than the previous transaction in fees. Either way, the miner ends up with the fees.
Now back to the miner's role. The miner can, if it so desires, give preference to the *lower* fee transaction by including it earlier in the block. Indeed, the incentive is to give miners off-band fees if possible to order transactions in such a way as to win by not revealing how much you've paid. Miners in this protocol have a lot of leverage.
## Conclusion
Runes have resulted in some really high fees, though it's hard to know if the design was intentional or unintentional. What we do know is that Runes have been hyped up for the last few months and have been anticipated for a while, and certainly being one of the first assets issued under the protocol has some marketing value for the eventual goal of getting them listed on an exchange.
Sadly, in addition to the normal scamming of altcoins being completely centralized, there is a deeper cost in terms of block space congestion, where fees of 1000 sats/vbyte are currently not enough to get into certain blocks. The Runes asset issuance has overridden almost every other use case at the moment.
That said, the current rate of Runes issuance is completely unsustainable. Just in the first 18 blocks, there's been over $20M in fees spent, most of that in Runes issuance. At this rate, Runes issuers would be spending $150M a day or $1B a week. I honestly can't see them doing this for much longer than a month or two. In the meantime, it must be great to be a miner finding these blocks.

2024-04-20 05:04:40

2024-04-19 16:49:02

- reply

Amazing how no one has done a cover of this song with Bitcoin-related lyrics.

2024-04-19 16:24:20

Five-hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes. (is a year)
Four years is two million one hundred thousand three thousand eight hundred forty minutes. (add one thousand four hundred forty minutes for the leap day)
That's two hundred ten thousand three hundred eighty four blocks if they average ten minutes.
Not quite four years, but close.

2024-04-18 23:05:15

You can get my newest book Fiat Ruins Everything on audio and pay with Bitcoin!
https://store.bitcoinmagazine.com/collections/books/products/fiat-ruins-everything-audiobook

2024-04-17 18:58:29

Why does it feel like every elite person is for both wars?

2024-04-16 15:33:24

The most freeing moment of your life is when you recognize that you'll never fit in with the elite, that they don't want you and that you'll never be good enough for them.

2024-04-15 16:10:42

For free subscribers: Cycles of Decentralization/Centralization, Credit Card Reward Programs, Church/Fiat, Lenocracy and more!
For paid subscribers: Mempool Clusters, Constellation, Pathfinding Considerations, Bitcoin-only Startup Ecosystem and more!
#Bitcoin Tech Talk #392
https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-392

2024-04-15 14:39:37

Here's the beautiful thing. The market will try all sorts of features. Some will succeed, some will not. But what Nostr doesn't have is some corporate chain of command that innovators have to go through to get their feature approved.
So it should result in weirder and more interesting features and something will stick. Time is on our side.
#note19al…8rr6

2024-04-14 21:06:16

The difference between "digital" collectibles and physical collectibles is that with the latter, the creators can't change your item, revoke your item, or censor your item after the fact.