Transcript 0:00 [on-hold music] A $250,000 Bitcoin NFT was just given away to a random Minecraft player on Minecraft's oldest anarchy server. 1:51 If that sentence doesn't make any sense to you, you should listen to the rest of this. I'm gonna be explaining kinda how this happened. 2:00 A random Minecraft player this past week kind of stumbled into a significantly valuable digital asset. Um, welcome back to Bitcoin Season 2. I'm Charlie Spears. Uh, this is produced by Blockspace Media. 2:14 We got a lot of content, the Gort Show, the Mining Pod, Bitcoin Season 2, and our newsletter. I cover the metrics that happened this past week. 2:22 I look at what happened on Bitcoin and in the ecosystem so that you don't have to. 2:27 Um, if you're listening, this I'll, I'll typically break out some charts, uh, for some visual aids, but otherwise we're also gonna cover like, I think TapSwap launched, Farmer Joe did an interesting piece on Bitcoin liquidity, and, uh, something very technical, recursive covenants. 2:43 But before all that, let me get a word from our sponsor. Bitcoin Season 2 is brought to you by Botanix. 2:49 [upbeat music] Botanix Labs is pioneering a new direction for DeFi with the first EVM L2 running on Bitcoin that's built to be forward secure, decentralized, and share gas fees generated by the network with users. 3:03 See the future of DeFi at Botanix, botanixlabs.xyz. Yeah, so on Saturday... I'm just gonna jump right into it. 3:11 So on Saturday, uh, if you're not really caught up to speed, um, there's the guy who literally invented the way to put NFTs on Bitcoin. This was considered impossible previously, 3:23 but the guy who literally invented the way, his name is Casey Rodarmor, um, he invented a way to put NFTs on Bitcoin. 3:31 Um, and he did this about a couple years ago, and he's become very, very famous and very well known, and he has, uh, he's never, uh, sold anything, and he's never given any of his own NFTs that he's made away. 3:49 These NFTs we call inscriptions, and they are on ordinals. So you may use the term ordinals or inscriptions interchangeably. 3:57 So this past weekend, out of the blue, Casey Rodarmor, the guy who invented Bitcoin NFTs, tweets out something very cryptic. Let me show you what he tweeted. So [clears throat] 4:10 on Saturday afternoon this past weekend, Casey tweets out this cryptic tweet, "Cactus seeds with numbers two five one three eight slash two nine seven four six. You have eight [clears throat] hours." So this 4:26 was very cryptic, um, [clears throat] and kicked off a whole, like, um, puzzle hunt because eventually people realized, oh, this is a, this is, this is some kind of puzzle or riddle that Casey's put out. 4:39 Well, pretty quickly after, people made the connection that the word cactus seeds refers to this particular inscription that Casey made. 4:51 It's one of his own, like, skull collection inscriptions from his collection called Dia de Pixales, and cactus seeds refers to the Satoshi or the ordinal that this particular inscription, uh, is associated with. 5:07 I won't go into how Satoshis are named, but it's all-- it's a very interesting, uh, mechanic and concept. So anyway, 5:15 the people quickly realized that if you figure out what the riddle is, you will get this particular, um, inscription, and this is pretty significant because 5:27 many of us in the ecosystem, myself included, would, um, imagine that this, uh, this particular inscription could sell for as many as five Bitcoin. 5:37 So if you do the math, that's over a quarter million dollars, but, uh, you know, regardless of how much it could be worth, it's worth a lot. So the next question was, where, uh, where is this hidden? 5:51 Um, what are these numbers referring to? Well, hours go on. 5:55 Um, I, uh, in the Ordinals Discord, um, pop up a, uh, um, a stage and just start hanging out there.And then Casey himself after several hours comes in and joins, so he starts dropping clues and pretty quickly, um, or eventually we figure out that, uh, he-- these, uh, these numbers are actually coordinates, um, to a specific location in Minecraft. 6:23 In fact, it's actually, um, a location in a Minecraft server called 2B2T. What is 2B2T? 6:35 2B2T is a public Minecraft server, it's called an anarchy server, where there's no rules, anything goes. This particular Minecraft server is legendary. 6:45 It's been going on for, I think, over a decade, and many, many YouTube videos have been made about it. 6:51 And Casey, uh, revealed that he has, uh, that these, uh, that he's just given the coordinates for where he is on the Minecraft server, so whoever can find him first, uh, gets... 7:04 uh, will be rewarded this, uh, this Dia De Pixalis skull inscription. So then the race was on. 7:13 We're in the chat live, um, talking through this as many people are scrambling to try to get onto the server, and then to go try to find him. It's very difficult to get to certain locations in the Discord. 7:26 And then, um, I see, uh, someone has in a, a, on a, on a, on a Twitch stream. So someone-- There's, there's various people streaming them playing on, uh, Minecraft servers on the streaming platform Twitch. 7:44 Um, one of the people in our chat went to one of those streamers and said, "Hey, can anyone get to these coordinates?" So in a different stream on Twitch, a user Bruno, 7:57 um, uh, managed to get user RhyNoHowl here, R-H-Y-N-O-H-O-W-L, to, uh, to go look for these coordinates. Now, remember, this is the public, you know, this is the public gamer community. 8:13 These are people who do not know anything about Bitcoin NFTs. They don't really know much about... They may know a little bit about crypto, but, like, a lot of this would sound like a scam. 8:22 But regardless, Bruno managed to get user RhyNoHowl to, uh, to, uh, to go try to look for this, uh, for, for where Casey was hiding on the server. 8:36 So anyway, um, here is the particular user stream. Uh, his name is Riths, R-I-T-H-S. This is the stream that the chat happened on. 8:48 So this streamer was streaming, and then someone in the chat, a friend of his, was the one who went and to go look for where Casey was hiding. Well, anyway, long story short, 9:00 um, RhyNoHowl found Casey Rodarmor hiding on the Minecraft server 2B2T and was able to pretty quickly drop an ordinals receiving address, a Taproot address, 9:14 to which Casey immediately sent this, uh, script inscription. The first ever that he has ever given out in two years. 9:24 I think it's very, very notable because [laughs] like, you know, people have wanted to pay vast amounts of money for these inscriptions, and they've never been able to because Casey just never, has never sold anything. 9:35 Um, so he, he still has not sold anything. He's just given it out. So, um, we-- this is kind of, uh, still in progress. Um, RhyNoHowl, here is his Twitter. He's, uh, at least connected on Twitter, 9:50 um, that, uh, he-- uh, this is him, this is his official account, and, um, he is over the moon. He's very happy that, uh, he was given this particular NFT. 10:04 So he pretty quickly got up to speed on, like, how it works, and he has listed it on Magic Eden, uh, for ten Bitcoin. 10:17 Um, this is the cactus seeds inscription, and he's listed it for sale at ten point two Bitcoin and, uh, you can now bid on it. 10:29 So his, his idea is he wants to allow people to, um, place bids if they wish. They're able to, uh, uh, say, "I..." You know, "You have it listed for ten, but I'll buy it for five." 10:44 So right now I assume there's people bidding, uh, on this, uh, ordinal as we speak, and it could be sold at any moment, or it could, it could go on a long time. 10:56 So, um, anyway, I thought I would kick it off with that story. Um, this is a notable event because this is the literal creator of ordinals and ordinal theory, um, and his first ever, uh, uh, 11:09 inscription that he's given away or sold. 11:13 And, um, so this is kind of a first of its kind event, so congratulations to RhyNoHowl, and there's some other people who are kind of involved on the stream, including the streamer himself, Riths. So 11:24 without further ado, let's get into the technical. So, 11:28 um, earlier today, you know, we've seen all the, all this type of activity happening on Bitcoin, driving fees up, but earlier today we saw the first one sat per vByte block come through in months. 11:41 In fact, I think it's been over a year since, uh, we saw a single sat per vByte block, uh, clear and, um, we saw this happen a few times this morning, 11:53 and it just means that people are just not really using Bitcoin as much. 11:57 I mean, look, we-- if you look at the kind of like the, the chart of mempool depth here on mempool.space, we are now eating into the one sat per vByte transactions. 12:08 That is this red strata here if we zoom really far out.Look at the past year, you can see that we've had a lot of transaction activity, but it's just been declining with specific, you know, events and pulses which drives up the fees over a one to two-day period. 12:23 But the sustain-- we've not seen like the sustained activity, um, for months on end. In fact, it usually happens for like a day or two. And so right now, um, transactions on Bitcoin are sig-- are very, very down. 12:37 Um, and, uh, even, even the runes and ordinals transactions are not, uh, keeping up, uh, are, are not really keeping up demand. So we'll see how this plays out. Um, will the mempool clear? Uh, who knows? 12:53 We will have to see. It could clear, um, really any time now. If I'm going to zoom out, it looks like we are classic sixty-nine blocks from totally clearing the mempool. That is under half a day's worth of blocks. 13:09 So, you know, we could, we could see the mempool fully clear tomorrow if, uh, nothing-- if we don't have a-another influx of transactions. 13:19 Um, and we're also headed towards a, uh, an upwards difficulty adjustment, six-point-two percent upwards, and that happens in about four hours. 13:26 So like right now, Bitcoin's gonna get more expensive to mine here any moment. Nobody's-- Uh, there's really very little transaction activity on Bitcoin, like things are not looking good. And the election's tomorrow too. 13:38 So what if we have the mempool clear on election day? That would be a wild confluence of events. Onto the next thing. Um, uh, I will throw a bone to my Tap Protocol [chuckles] friends. Uh, Tap did launch a Taproot swap. 13:56 Again, this is, uh, this is a scheme where they post-dated Bitcoin and index it off-chain. They have a set of validators. They claim it's decentralized. 14:06 Uh, I'm just gonna come out and say it that I do not classify this as decentralized, nor is it permissionless, but I do think it's an interesting mechanism for posting and indexing data off-chain. So this is interesting. 14:19 It's kind of in the same broader category as like Opnet or Arch Network, although there are distinguishing-- differentiating factors between each. But there is a swap live now and, uh, Taproot swap. So congratulations. 14:32 Uh, interesting, fun to watch this, uh, product develop. Also, in kind of the Bitcoin Fi ecosystem, we have Farmer Jo this past week update what we call like Bitcoin Ecosystem TVL. 14:47 Now, I think this is a little narrowly defined because like I think mainly it's just counting, um, people who have interacted with ordinals and the Bitcoin, like the new Bitcoin Fi trend. 15:00 But, uh, he says, contrary to popular belief, the Bitcoin ecosystem is not growing in TVL. 15:06 Um, he pulls data from Ren over at Electric Capital, um, where, uh, we look at wallets which have been active in the runes and ordinals ecosystem, and look at like the dry powder of Bitcoin that is not related to, um, an ordinals asset, but rather just related to normal fungible or what you might call cardinal Bitcoin sitting in those wallets. 15:30 Um, so, uh, here is the chart. We've actually seen the overall, um, [clears throat] like dry powder, this orange line, here decline a little bit since, uh, this past spring, 15:42 and, uh, in US dollar terms, this has also declined a little bit. So, um, he has some insights from this, like, um, this Bitcoin replenishes only when external demand and new participants enter the ecosystem. 15:57 We don't see this currently happening. 15:59 Eventually, when the dilution stops minting new tokens, becomes negative EV or negative expected value for a sustained period of time, the winners end up being those which have been around for a sustained period of time. 16:11 Um, you know, the Memento Mori mint, which happened this past week, which was Casey's first runes airdrop with, uh, podcast co-owner and host, Aaron, that may have generated some activity. Um, 16:30 otherwise, um, uh, that, uh-- Yeah, we're-- we've just seen some, some kind of low events in the, uh, the Bitcoin, uh, Fi ecosystem. 16:44 I will share this last one, which is more technical if you manage to hang out with me. Um, this is one of my favorite, uh, reads this past week. Rearden, reardenCode, 16:54 um, published a writeup on Cursed Recursive Covenants. Um, this was a topic of discussion in the, in the technical Bitcoin space. 17:03 Basically, um, when we add an opcode like OP_CAT or CTV, you can make a covenants recursive, you can make a transaction recursive, so it can like recall itself or re-interact with itself later, 17:20 and this can have some unanticipated behavior perhaps. Um, so he did a really good writeup on this. This, I think, will be a-- 17:29 This is a, this is a conversation as we discuss, uh, Bitcoin soft forks, which speaking of which, if you're not aware, 17:37 the, uh, conference, uh, on Bitcoin soft forks, uh, happens this next weekend in Boston, Massachusetts on November ninth. 17:45 We at Blockspace are putting on Op Next, a scaling conference for Bitcoin builders, developers, and founders. 17:52 We have kind of a who's who of the Bitcoin technical community, um, Steve Lee, Ren, Portland Hoddle, Peter Todd, Satoshi, um, Alex B, Brandon Black, Ryan Del, the Wizards, the authors of OP_CAT, Jeremy Rubin, Pete Rizzo, 18:10 Rusty Russell. And, um, so I'm excited to-- we're really excited to, uh, have and host all these, uh, all these speakers in Boston this Saturday. 18:20 Um, if you want to grab a last-minute ticket, you can use, um, my last name, Spears, S-P-E-A-R-S, for a discount code on your GA admission ticket. Otherwise, thank you so much for, uh, watching Bitcoin Season two. 18:38 I believe as I'm streaming this, a tornado siren has gone off outside, so I'm gonna play the e-- I'm gonna play the outro and catch you all later. [upbeat music]
