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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

#171

Post by simiones »

smashem wrote: post #66
mvdtnz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they pushed up fees for everyone else (there is limited block space, so miners take the highest bids) Imagine if your Visa card became hundreds of times more expensive to use during the Christmas shopping period.

That's why there's layer 2 solutions like Lightning to scale bitcoin's usability. And application-level solutions like Cash App.

Lighntning, also known as not-Bitcoin. Lightning does away with Bitcoin's guarantees, unless you close the channel after each transaction, at which point it costs more than sending BTC directly.

And something like CashApp is even worse - it only uses BTC as a way to circumvent banking regulations, and for name recognition. Otherwise, it could just as easily work on top of regular banking, or do away with BTC entirely and simply work with their own centralized ledger.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#172

Post by simiones »

medo-bear wrote: post #155
usrbinbash wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI had tangible use cases even when it wasn't developed to the point where it could be applied to those. The problems AI is used to solve, existed before the technology to solve them. Bitcoin, and all the other "crypto"-tokens, have been looking for a problem to solve for 14 years.

A problem to solve? It is not uncommon for companies to loose over 2% of revenue in banking fees and other enforced banking inefficiencies for transactions that could be handled much more cheaply and efficently with crypto solutions

Yes, because both BTC and ETH are well known for how cheap transactions are.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#173

Post by simiones »

andhans wrote: post #133
quickthrower2 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi called it digital cash. Turns out it is not a great cash alternative. Therefore it is now an asset. And we can revise history so that Satoshi meant asset all along. I didn’t say ponzi did I? No. good.

« The “electronic cash” envisioned by Satoshi is cash; it is not notes, scrip or bank credits. We have come to think of bank notes as cash, but they are actually contracts for debt. The note holder is owed something by the issuer. Cash is a commodity with certain properties that make it useful as money. Cash is largely gone from the world, and people cannot return to physical commodity money, as it cannot be moved on…

> Bitcoin is really our only option to guard against inflation, counterfeit, capital controls and high costs in general.

Cash (and Bitcoin) are just as vulnerable to inflation as traditional currencies. If oil is more scarce, the cost of all oil-based goods will increase, regardless of whether you can mint more BTC or not. Not that it would be any serious difficulty to increase the supply of BTC either - it's ultimately just a number in some program.

Counterfeiting is fixed by all digital payment systems. Visa cards are just as secure from counterfeiting as BTC wallets.

Capital controls are much more easily enforced when you have a public ledger.

High costs are inherent to BTC, at least as the community exists today. And the network itself is completely impossible to scale to anything like a full payments system, as you yourself admit.

Also, censorship is easy to implement on top of BTC: just require miners to be licensed, require licensed miners not to validate transactions from certain wallets, and to ignore blocks proposed by non-licensed miners. Since mining is an extremely centralized and high-capex + high-opex operation, it's easy for a a powerful government to shut down any significant miners who aren't licensed. So, if BTC payments ever become a significant way of circumventing sanctions and censorship, the ban hammer will come down swiftly. Of course, so far BTC is both too low in scale for major governments to care, and too convenient as a honeypot to find sanctions breakers.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#174

Post by willmadden »

nullc wrote: post #74
willmadden wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing I said was untruthful. The Taproot upgrade made the witness data discount from Segwit available to be used by inscriptions. This is what led to the explosion in BRC-20 transactions that are clogging up the mempool. According to this research, it's all coming from a single entity.

> Nothing I said was untruthful. Not so, the very first sentence of your post was a flagrant untruth. > 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, Okay, go ahead link to this "recent change" in support of "BRC-20" tokens. -- gonna be pretty hard in light of the fact that BRC-20 activity appears…

Segwit expanded the blocksize by allowing extra space for digital signatures at a discounted price. Taproot allowed BRC-20 to take advantage of this discounted data, which immediately led to the backlog. Whether that was the intent of the developers or not is not the point of my comment. The statement is factual.

You are arguing about intent and who is to blame for the backlog. My comment has nothing to do with this other than pointing out that the OP shows it is coming from a single entity.

If you assume “good intentions”, BRC-20 is stupid and makes no sense. It’s a reduced feature set ERC-20 token with far less throughput capacity that causes harm to the Bitcoin ecosystem.

I agree this could be an adversary with an incentive to take market share away, it could be someone speculating that a token on Bitcoin could be an opportunity for profit, or likely both.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#175

Post by rchaud »

golergka wrote: post #170
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if Visa and Mastercard formed a duopoly and used their market power to extract fees from merchants to the point of warranting government action to cap the fees.

Why do people still compare Bitcoin to Visa/Mastercard instead of SWIFT transfers?

A tiny percentage of people know what SWIFT even is. Everybody knows Visa/MC.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#176

Post by the_sleaze9 »

gtirloni wrote: post #168
super256 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently paid a lawyer I had to hire in the US with USDC, rather than paying 40€+ on top of exchange fees for each time I wire him money. Another use case is domains and servers. When big companies like Porkbun, namecheap and vultr offer their services to be bought via Bitcoin there is probably some demand.

That demand comes from scammers and other fun activities.

Source?

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#177

Post by this_user »

smashem wrote: post #66
mvdtnz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they pushed up fees for everyone else (there is limited block space, so miners take the highest bids) Imagine if your Visa card became hundreds of times more expensive to use during the Christmas shopping period.

That's why there's layer 2 solutions like Lightning to scale bitcoin's usability. And application-level solutions like Cash App.

The best way of scaling bitcoin is by not actually using bitcoin. That should tell you everything you need to know about crypto currencies.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#178

Post by adastra22 »

cykros wrote: post #151
adastra22 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern day paper currency are not debt instruments. They are very much cash. Whether bitcoin is used for direct payments or payment channel settlements is irrelevant. What is important is self-custody. Cash works and has the properties it does because it is a (mostly) fungible bearer bond. Bitcoin is also a (mostly) fungible bearer bond regardless of whether you transact on chain or through lightning.

They are debt instruments. Liabilities of the central bank that issued them. Cash was the gold that you used to be able to redeem said liabilities for. These days, you can simply transfer the bank's liability to you to someone else, as a way to offset your own liability. Just because the bank has no intention of ever paying cash at this point ever since Nixon left behind specie payments doesn't change the fact that t…

By going off the gold standard paper currency is no longer a debt instrument.

There is intrinsically no difference between deciding gold is the scarce thing that we all accept as money, or some specific hard to duplicate paper money. They both serve th same purpose.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#179

Post by adastra22 »

jelani_t wrote: post #136
andhans wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

« The “electronic cash” envisioned by Satoshi is cash; it is not notes, scrip or bank credits. We have come to think of bank notes as cash, but they are actually contracts for debt. The note holder is owed something by the issuer. Cash is a commodity with certain properties that make it useful as money. Cash is largely gone from the world, and people cannot return to physical commodity money, as it cannot be moved on…

I like the tech. I even paid for my coffee with the Lightning network in El Salvador and went to BTC Miami. The things I'm still not sure about are: 1. When will the value become relatively stable? This flies in the face of the store of value argument. 2. How is Monero-like fungibility going to be added? Good cash needs to be fungible.

Monero-like fungibility will never be added to bitcoin. The core devs are specifically against it.

Re: Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person

#180

Post by adastra22 »

tromp wrote: post #167
jacquesm wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As to '2' I don't think that can be done without losing some other desirable properties.

You can significantly improve privacy without harming scalability (in fact improving scalability at the same time) [1]. Admittedly you still lose full supply auditability [2]. [1] https://forum.grin.mw/t/scalability-vs-privacy-chart [2] https://phyro.github.io/grinvestigation/why_grin.html

You know that’s not true, tromp. All CT approaches incur an intrinsic 10-30x validation cost and similar (though decreasing) witness cost.
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