Oddbean

On Ordinals #It'sOn I am about to drop some Bitcoin bombs on Nostr. What could go wrong? I am the owner of two NFTs. One on Ethereum and the other on Bitcoin. The Bitcoin one was accidental. I just wanted to see a Bitcoin movie advertised on Blockstream's website when I was purveying some choice hot wallets, Green and Aqua. And yes, you got that right. I was an early adopter of the Liquid side chain. Even if I didn't fully understand it. I still don't. Before you stone me to death, like an adulterous woman in an Islamic regime, I have a good excuse. I love art. Not only do I consume it, I make some, too. Mainly paintings, mixed media. I have dabbled in watercolors, acrylics, oils. I have even done some sculptures with molding clay. Not the Thinker, mind you. I am no Rodin. I just made a beautiful bowl to hold my jewelry and painted it in purple and yellow. Alas, that's all gone now. When I first came to Bitcoin, I did come at it from a technology point of view. Blockchains and distributed ledger data structures. I only bought Bitcoin to test how to do it. As an engineer, I just wanted to see if I could figure it out, I didn't have any idea of the monetary implications, barely noting that it was supposed to be digital money. I used an obscure exchange called sfox which used canned algorithms for making purchases, rather than easy spot buys like on Coinbase. I din't even know that Coinbase existed. Or Binance. It took me forever to get some and I finally had some Bitcoin. I left it on the exchange. Luckily for me, it was not Mt. Gox or Quadriga. I was not rug-pulled. I completely forgot I had Bitcoin until that fateful day when I happened to watch some carnivore diet podcaster, a new one I was trying out, and he had Bitstein on. Needless to say, the proverbial light in my head went on. I looked up my Bitcoin and it had gone up five-fold! I only bought a small amount so I could't yet retire or buy an house. I did not sell which is good. The rest, as they say, is history. Unfortunately for me, being prone to technology, I began looking at other blockchains. I was particularly attracted to NFTs. I even considered creating some but never got very far. Thank god. I just bought a token. Next, I got sucked into some plan, called The Plan, to arbitrage small changes in price using bots to accumulate profits. By then I was a Bitcoin maxi and was attempting to short Ethereum and Solana, to go long Bitcoin. I didn't have to time the market, the AI was supposed to algorithmically buy and sell based on some set parameters that should have guaranteed serious profits . As you may already know, if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Once again, I thank God the almighty for seeing the light and selling off all my crypto positions for Bitcoin. I did not spent too much time regretting my shit-coining losses. I chucked it up to the price of Bitcoin education. You get Bitcoin at the price you deserve, right? Well, I got mine at the all-time highs and rode the curve down, and up and then sideways. Which is funny because I am terrified of roller-coasters in real life. I won't be caught dead in one. The Bitcoin roller-coaster I can handle. I have diamond hands and continued to DCA and learn as much as I can about Bitcoin. Which brings me to drive-chains, side-chains and ordinals. I admit I have been largely avoidant of these discussions. Maybe it is an over-reaction of my shameful history in shit-coins. Today, I decided I shouldn't ignore it just because it makes me uncomfortable. I watched Pete Rizzo on Peter's show and it was not disappointing. They really get into it and I mean it was threatening to devolve into a fist-fight at one point. Just kidding, it wasn't that bad but it did get contentious. If I understood Pete's argument correctly, he was saying that if you are truly a Bitcoin maximalist, that is someone who believes Bitcoin will make all cryptocurrencies obsolete sooner than later, then you have to accept that technological tinkering and innovations will be the reality on the Bitcoin timechain. Notice how I didn't write blockchain. That was part of my hard-won education. This fact will drive Bitcoin monetary purists up the wall. In fact, the ordinals debate is already doing that. On a spectrum between Bitcoin being a technological marvel and a perfect money, we Bitcoin HODLers are not evenly dispersed on that normal curve. The skewness of that curve, the kurtosis, cannot be ignored. However, given the law of large numbers, and the wisdom of the crowd, the tendency of the curve will literally normalize over time. That is, the "hard-liner" position is untenable and the toxics will have to cede way for "normies" to be "normies". No pun intended. The thing is, normies are not normal. That is, they are irrational and do degen things. That is why I always had trouble with Milton Friedman's Nobel prize win in Economics which was predicated on market actors being rational. I think it was the Expectation Theory. People in real life are not rational. They do stupid things all the time, present company included. Maybe it is the lack of complete information, maybe it is a form of lazy-thinking. I don't know why but purism doesn't work. We can't live in a vacuum. There is always friction in life, it is an absolute. If you value first-principle thinking, you can't get past slippage. This is painful to accept as someone whose least favorite expression is "the perfect is the enemy of good". I want perfection. I want a money-only use case of Bitcoin. I also want a life, a real one. The messiness of life is a feature not a bug. I still don't understand how ordinals really work. I only know that if people want them and are willing to pay a premium for them, they can't be that bad. What I don't understand still and wished I can ask Pete directly, why can't the technological innovation on Bitcoin happen on the higher layers, and not on the base chain? Can't we have our cake and eat it too? A pristine monetary on-chain and all the fun on the subsequent layers. Someone find Satoshi. We have a new "Byzantine General's" dilemma on our hands. This time it is Marie Antoinette. Don't bring back the guillotine just yet Bitcoiners. I want to keep my pretty little head.