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Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

block21m.substack.com

31–40 of 235 posts

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#31

> 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 (possibly, as nothing here is certain) mined most of this worthless "NFTs". Maybe out of passion, maybe hoping to sell them to idiots, maybe just to spam Bitcoin's blockchain.

That's it. That all the conclusions to be had here.

The whole thing is a big nothing.

Idiots duped to pay for this stuff raised the floor for price of blockchain space from artificially low (due to still low adoption) to a more reasonable one (reflecting the value of global replicated censorship-resistant database). It doesn't change much in a great scheme of things. Some Bitcoin users are annoyed that Bitcoin transactions aren't nearly free as they used to, but it was always just a matter of time.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#33

> 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?

I am not a crypto fan, but I believe this would constitute a 51% attack https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp

This has nothing to do with a 51% attack. All this article seems to be stating is that someone with large amounts of bitcoin can raise the transaction fees by sending a lot of transactions, which isn't really a surprise since only a limited amount of transactions can fit in a block.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#36
post #14

Ordinal is a fairly new feature so it isn't terribly surprising that it's not widely used yet. Somebody has to be the first user, just as Satoshi mined most of the early blocks. More concerning is that the Bitcoin blockchain is getting clogged with Ordinals, crowding out other transactions. Spending $29M to DoS Bitcoin is either a really large or really small amount depending on your perspective.

As far as I can tell ordinals are just NFT's? Is that correct?

They store JSON using the OP_PUSHDATA. The JSON has known fields like ticker, containing the name of the asset, call type like "transfer", "mint" etc. and an amount field. There are then external indexers that index these transactions and keep tabs.

It is not a feature like GP mentions. It is a fun hack that's being taken too seriously.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#37

> 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?

I disagree with the following, but my understanding is Bitcoin purists believe that ordinals are moving Bitcoin away from Satoshis’s whitepaper introduction of Bitcoin as peer to peer electronic cash. In this mindset, meme coins and nfts are scams or at best unimportant entertainment commodities rather than a core innovation of blockchains. So the use of the Bitcoin chain’s limited block space to create these ordinal…

I think your last statement is completely wrong. NFT's and memecoins are a grift by scammers, no more. People being duped is certainly no evidence of any actual threat to state powers.

Most of the memecoins seem to just be money raising vehicles to bolster exchange profits

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#38
post #8

> 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.

I think this is the point that gets missed in arguments about state actors being involved. That doesn't matter, what matters is that very few people (e.g. miners, exchanges, whales, etc) can determine very large outcomes for cryptocurrencies, with no way to avoid them.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#40

> 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,…

Does that means that the cost of transferring bitcoin will only go up with time?
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