Nept819🧙🏻‍♂️ | BIP-420🐱

it's easy to get caught up in the noise but the fact is this is a historic day for bitcoin and for america bitcoin and usd-stablecoins have a promising future let me tell you when i started here 12 years ago i wouldn't have believed it higher

2 months later and this tweet is already spot on

stay humble stack cats

Upgrading Bitcoin with OP_CAT: Week 1 gmeow! We launched @quantumcats 1 week ago. The Quantum Cats community meowed and purred, and in 1 week they made more impact on upgrading bitcoin, than anyone else did in the last 2 years 🐱 Here’s what they achieved in 1 week: 1. THOUSANDS of ordinals enjoyers posting tweets, articles, and videos explaining OP_CAT This one is just so cool. I don’t think any proposal for any bitcoin upgrade received this much attention in the last 2 years. The amount of quality content produced by the community in such a short time is nuts! OP_CAT is a potential upgrade that would enable a type of smart contracts called “covenants”, and through that can enable Bitcoin L2s, bridges to other chains, and more. But that’s meaningless if no one knows about it and no one promotes it. That’s why the educational posts matter. We at the Taproot Wizards team have been working on Quantum Cats for a while! We’ve talked to top bitcoin devs and researched OP_CAT thoroughly, and yet in the last week I learned A TON about OP_CAT that apparently I didn’t know yet, just by reading and watching the content produced by ordinals enjoyers. It’s that good. And this really matters, because this expanded the discussion from a circle of a dozen or so developers, to hundreds of thousands of eyeballs. Now everyone cares about OP_CAT, and about upgrading bitcoin in general. There are spaces held about this every day, conversations and discussions accelerated in multiple forums, and people are just really interested to learn more. And they’re HAVING FUN while doing it. 2. “BIP Land” breaks down the soft fork process There isn’t a single bitcoin developer group chat that wasn’t hit with a link to BIP Land by @Dr_DAO_. No matter what they think about ordinals, or what they think about OP_CAT and other upgrade proposals, no bitcoin dev could ignore this one. The thorough - and hilarious - visualization of bitcoin’s convoluted soft fork process was praised by many gigabrains (even Adam Back!) but also helped newcomers learn how the process work and what they can expect. But it did more than just that… 3. The OP_CAT proposal gets “unstuck” and ready for testing Thanks to the massive spike in attention and educational content from the Quantum Cats community (1), and thanks to the deep dive into the specifics of the soft fork proposal process via BIP Land (2), some bitcoin devs noticed that the OP_CAT proposal was needlessly “stuck”. TLDR: the OP_CAT proposal authors were waiting (for weeks-months) to get assigned a “BIP number” by the “BIP editors” so that they can begin testing in a testnet called “Bitcoin Inquisition”. Sounds confusing? Yeah, I know. But it turned out after browsing BIP Land, that the “BIP editors” didn’t know that a “BIP number” was required to begin testing, so they never assigned OP_CAT a number. Luckily, problem solved! The maintainer of “Bitcoin Inquisition” noticed the problem and decided to allow activation OP_CAT for testing without requiring a “BIP number”. It’s a small thing, but it’s real progress! OP_CAT was “stuck” in red tape for a while but now testing can continue! 4. Other bitcoin upgrade proposals gain some steam! While we really want to amplify the conversation around OP_CAT, there are competing proposals that could also work to improve bitcoin. One of them is “OP_CTV”, a proposal originally by @JeremyRubin, that shares some of the same benefits that OP_CAT has. CTV proponents hoped to gain more attention before, and I think they’re happy that the conversation around covenants heated up! They even decided to embrace parts of the Quantum Cats strategy, and started wearing their own brand of JPEGs to promote OP_CTV! If you’ve seen a lot of sandwhich pfps on the timeline this week, that’s why! They call them “Rubin’s Reubens”, named after Jeremy Rubin himself 🥪 It’s hilarious! Honestly it’s purr-fect. But it also reinforces the idea that JPEGs can help form communities that help push bitcoin upgrade proposals. We love the Reubens and we hope they succeed on their mission to upgrade bitcoin! 5. OP_CAT COVENANTS HAVE BEEN ACHIEVED INTERNALLY In 2021, Andrew Poelstra, a gigabrain bitcoin researcher at Blockstream, published a blog post that explained how OP_CAT could be used with some neat cryptography tricks to enable covenants, the type of smart contracts that we discussed before, which could be used to build Bitcoin L2s and more. This was a groundbreaking discovery, but Andrew never implemented or tested it in practice, and as far as we know, no one else did either! Today our very own @rot13maxi published his code of the first known example ever of a covenant built only with OP_CAT. There’s A LOT more work to do, but this early result indicated that an activation of OP_CAT on bitcoin could enable the complex things we’re hoping for, like L2s, trust-minimized bridges, vaults, and more. 🐱🐱🐱 As I’m reading this, I can’t believe we achieved this much in just 1 week. And it’s all thanks to the ordinals enjoyers and Taproot Wizards community, who quickly established the new Quantum Cats community, formed “Team Dead” and “Team Alive”, and got to work. Together we’ve achieved more than anyone else did in the last 2 years to upgrade bitcoin and make it more magical. But there’s A LOT more work to do, and we will continue to need your help. If you’re into that, follow @quantumcats and turn on notifications 🔔 THERE IS NO SECOND PET.

HOW TO KILL ORDINALS I’ve been contacted by multiple laser-eye maxis, and some bitcoin developers, who tried to understand “what’s going on” and “how can we stop this”. Here’s my advice. 1. Start using it. The number 1 issue you guys are facing, is that you have no idea what’s even going on. You don’t understand what type of data is being written on-chain and why. You don’t understand what causes the fee spikes on some occasions, and not on others. You don’t understand what drives ordinals users, where they’re coming from, what they’re trying to achieve, and how this affects the shared resource that is the bitcoin network. You don’t have to agree with them, but how do you expect to deal with the situation if you don’t even understand it? I’m not trying to convince you that inscriptions/BRC20s/stamps/etc are not spam/scam/whatever. You can call them whatever you want. But you have to understand what they are and how they work if you have any hope of doing anything about it. Ethereum and Solana users who got their first BTC a couple of days ago, now understand what’s happening on the bitcoin chain better than you do. I’ll try to be nicer for the rest of this post, but right now I must get this out of the way: you should be ashamed of yourselves. Ordinals have been living rent-free in your minds for a full year, you’ve been tweeting and podcasting about it non-stop, yet you couldn’t get yourself to spend a few minutes to try it and understand it. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU??? You have to accept that your approach so far has been abysmal, otherwise there’s no way you’re going to achieve your goals. So download an ordinals wallet, load it with ~0.005 BTC and start playing around. You’ll probably lose all of it. Your goal here isn’t to make money, it’s to understand the ecosystem and what makes it tick so that you can do something about it. If you absolutely can’t afford to lose 0.005 BTC then maybe sit this one out, champ. You probably have more pressing issues to attend to anyway. 2. Talk to devs from the ordinals ecosystem Lots of ordinals teams have very strong devs. They can help you fill the gaps in your understanding. They can explain why things are the way they are, what technical issues exist, and how they think things might evolve over time. I recommend putting your hubris on pause for this step. Don’t assume that just because they’re doing ordinals stuff, these devs are idiots. You’ll find that many of these guys understand bitcoin better than you do. Yeah, I can see your face turning red already, but it’s true. Remember, the goal of this exercise is to learn. So that you can finally kill ordinals. So be open minded here. I would’ve recommended to also talk to ordinals enjoyers who aren’t devs, but I know this is probably too much for you to handle… 3. Compete When strong financial incentives are involved, it’s hard to stop people from doing things by yelling at them. After you spend time playing around with ordinals (step 1), you’re likely to agree that complaining in tweets, blogs, and podcasts is probably futile. No amount of name calling, appeal to authority, or pseudo-moral mumbo-jumbo is going to stop people from taking advantage of what they perceive as a massive financial opportunity. What could help, if you choose to go there, is competition. Some of these protocols are highly inefficient. BRC20 for example blows up the UTXO set for no reason and has a lot of overhead. Degens could probably get the same benefits with a more efficient protocol, while being better stewards of the bitcoin network. If you build alternatives that offer same or greater potential for degens while respecting their responsibility towards the network, that could improve the situation for all of us. @rodarmor is already doing this with “runes”, and there’s probably a lot more that could be done. Build and support better protocols, and drive out the inefficient ones. At least consider it… But there’s another form of competition you can do: improve the incentives and infrastructure for the transactions you DO want to see! Personally I’m of the belief that there’s very little demand for non-speculative BTC payments right now. I say that based on 10 years of evangelizing bitcoin. I just don’t see that demand. And I believe that’s why the bitcoin mempools were empty prior to ordinals, and why lightning isn’t seeing a lot of usage. It’s not for any technical reason, it’s due to lack of demand by consumers. That’s the main reason why I believe ordinals are not a problem in the first place. It’s not like there are that many people who wanted to use BTC payments otherwise. But if you disagree with me, prove it! Build better products and services that give people a reason to use BTC payments. Build better scaling solutions that stuff more economic value into L1 transactions. Better lightning solutions would help, better sidechains would help, covenants would help, rollups would help, a lot of other stuff would help. If you think I’m wrong about the lack of demand for payments then you should build those layers and compete with ordinals. Scalable L2s would pack more economic value into each L1 transaction, allowing them to pay higher fees and drive ordinals out. 4. Wait. “Everything is good for bitcoin”. Let the market do its thing. If you don’t want to test, learn, and compete, just wait. Eventually the market settles down and we will find out if people want to use bitcoin exclusively as the ordinals chain (unlikely) or not. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. As much as I think ordinals are important, I have no doubt that BTC as store of value is more important, and this stuff will figure itself out eventually. While you wait, I recommend taking care of your mental health. Maybe get a job. Tweeting and yelling all day about how much you hate ordinals is unlikely to help, though. I know you don’t believe me. I know you think if you just yell a little harder, if you just convince a few more low IQ “plebs” that ordinals are a scam, then this will all immediately blow over. You’re wrong. Yelling won’t help. Filtering is not possible. I know you don’t want to believe me but the evidence is clear: you’ve been yelling and promoting filtering for a full year and it didn’t help. In fact, as I’m writing this, ordinals are bigger than ever, and trading volumes are at all-time-highs. ————— As for us, we will continue to do what we believe is the best thing we can do for bitcoin for now, which is leveraging JPEGs to accelerate bitcoin adoption and bring new capabilities and functionality to the orange chain that we love so much. We’ve helped HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people experience the magic of bitcoin for the first time in 2023, and in 2024 we’re going to shake things up even harder. If you want to learn more, follow @TaprootWizards and turn on notifications 🔔. We’ll have more magic to share very soon.

BITCOIN IS UNDER ATTACK JPEG and BRC20 enjoyers revived the orange coin But evil laser-eyes, funded by NSA and KGB, are spamming our chain with useless lightning transactions We must stop them. Follow @TaprootWizards, and turn on notifications🔔 Reply below if you’re ready👇

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. - @TaprootWizards, most influential bitcoin brand, 2023