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Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

block21m.substack.com

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Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#21

Post by WatchDog »

nl wrote: post #10

Background: https://www.coindesk.com/learn/brc-20-explained-how-tokens-o... > The total transaction fees spent by this entity to dominate the Inscriptions are estimated to be 1056 BTC as of May 25, 2023... We leave the conclusions to the reader. I don't really understand what conclusion we are supposed to draw. > However, we notice that by spending only 0.005% of the total Bitcoin supply on transaction fees, a single…

> 1056 BTC is ~US$3.1M at the current time.

Current exchange rate is around $27,774 USD, so more like $29,329,344.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#22

Post by sdenton4 »

dhbanes wrote: post #15
nl wrote: post #10

Background: https://www.coindesk.com/learn/brc-20-explained-how-tokens-o... > The total transaction fees spent by this entity to dominate the Inscriptions are estimated to be 1056 BTC as of May 25, 2023... We leave the conclusions to the reader. I don't really understand what conclusion we are supposed to draw. > However, we notice that by spending only 0.005% of the total Bitcoin supply on transaction fees, a single…

You're off by an order of magnitude. 1,056 BTC is currently worth approximately $29m.

But could you sell $30m of Bitcoin without tanking the price?

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#23

Post by willmadden »

TLDR/non-crypto summary: Bitcoin's developers made changes recently that allow much larger transactions, with blocks up to 4MB in size on the Bitcoin blockchain in support of "BRC-20" tokens, which is Bitcoin's feature reduced version of Ethereum's ERC-20 token.

These same developers block attempts to increase the block size in Bitcoin, which would allow more throughput and transaction capacity.

The increased demand for Bitcoin transactions from BRC-20 combined with the limited block size caused transaction fees to skyrocket, making Bitcoin too expensive (again) to be used for normal retail use.

The article points out that 80% of these giant "BRC-20" transactions were coming from a single individual/entity in control of one private key. Effectively one individual caused the backlog in Bitcoin with sky high transaction fees.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#25

Post by tric »

JoBrad wrote: post #8
dingledork69 wrote: post #4

> We leave the conclusions to the reader. As someone who hasn't kept up with Bitcoin for the past few years, can someone share their conclusion?

Probably that it’s very centralized. Or at least that the price is able to be highly influenced by a few individuals/groups.

>Probably that it’s very centralized. Or at least that the price is able to be highly influenced by a few individuals/groups.

The article and the parent comment are about Ordinals. Your comment appears to be an opinion about Bitcoin the asset and/or network itself.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#28

Post by dhbanes »

sdenton4 wrote: post #22
dhbanes wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're off by an order of magnitude. 1,056 BTC is currently worth approximately $29m.

But could you sell $30m of Bitcoin without tanking the price?

24 hour BTC-USD volume is > $15bn so yes.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#30

Post by RustyRussell »

dingledork69 wrote: post #4

> We leave the conclusions to the reader. As someone who hasn't kept up with Bitcoin for the past few years, can someone share their conclusion?

Someone is creating tokens with the hope of selling them onwards. Most of them are created by a single entity, who spent about $30M in fees to do so, so presumably they expect people to buy them, and thus profit.

The only reason most Bitcoin users care is that they pushed up fees for everyone else (there is limited block space, so miners take the highest bids). Such few pressure is expected to be the norm eventually, and has happened before, but there's been a prolonged period (years) of low fees so it was a bit of a surprise to many.

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