Making Bitcoin Great Again
It is time for Ordinals to enter the arena.
I remember the exact moment when I discovered Bitcoin, as if it were yesterday.
It was November 2013, and as usual, I spent my evening googling ways to get rich, tumbling down many strange rabbit holes.
At some point, I clicked a link to a news article describing Bitcoin's meteoric price increase, and my life changed forever.
As I spent the evening reading what felt like every article ever written on magical internet money, I underwent what could be described as an almost spiritual experience.
The libertarian part of my brain rejoiced as I discovered that we could have an alternative financial system not controlled by any one central authority or government. Control could be stripped from the banking overlords that had inflicted so much suffering on the world.
The paranoid (but also mildly rational) part of my brain was exuberant that this was a form of money that couldn’t be taken directly from my bank. Even if the suits from thousands of miles away decided to YOLO my savings recklessly, I wouldn't be impacted.
The resource allocation part of my brain lit up as my calculations showed that one Bitcoin could be worth more than a reasonably sized house if it captured even a small portion of the global money supply.
The philanthropic part of my brain was delighted as I read about how Bitcoin could end the tyranny of global money transmitters, shrinking the cost of remittances to near zero. It would end the stranglehold they had over the industry and alleviate some of the pain and exorbitant 10% fees anyone who sent money overseas to friends or families had to experience.
https://www.finder.com/remittance-fees-global-world
The yearning for community part of my brain was ecstatic that I could join a pact of eccentric but intelligent, open-minded people on a quest to change the financial system forever by spreading the gospel of Lord Satoshi.
So sure was I in my conviction that I downloaded the least user-friendly looking piece of wallet software ever constructed and sent a whole month's salary to a random stranger on localbitcoins.com, praying they would send me some magical internet money back.
Thankfully they did because that was my entire savings balance!
I was now the proud owner of one whole Bitcoin. What a magical experience.
Feeling very pleased with myself and my new discovery, I tweeted from my real-life human being Twitter account something like, “In the next few weeks, Bitcoin is about to make a lot of very smart people very rich.”
LOL!!!!
The next few weeks made anyone who had recently purchased Bitcoin very poor.
Almost ten years have gone by since the moment I first discovered Bitcoin.
A lot has changed. While I still believe in the core world-changing improvements that Bitcoin brings, I can say for certain that the experience of being a "Bitcoiner" is no longer magical.
Bitcoin to me no longer symbolises a community filled with free-thinking individuals that celebrate intellectually curious discussion. The unorthodox but endearing part of the community has been drowned out by the closed-minded, belligerent but loud minority.
It's now an environment where innovation and experimenting are shunned, and even the slightest hint of discussion around a new idea is instantly portrayed as a wild, crazy scam. This attitude is baffling to me as it is antithetical to the origin story of Bitcoin.
It feels strange to me that, despite being a long-time advocate and holder of Bitcoin, I’ve never even used Lightning, but I have bridged across to 10+ experimental EVM chains. Heck, I can’t even remember the last time I sent a Bitcoin transaction outside of moving it from an exchange into cold storage.
If people like me, who philosophically and fundamentally believe in the potential of Bitcoin, have not even been incentivised to use it, what chance do we have of converting any new users who have not had years of thinking about this stuff to Bitcoin?
It is time for Ordinals to enter the arena.
Bitcoin's natural advertisement happens organically. Every time a bank goes bust, Bitcoin gets a TON of free marketing. "Not your keys, not your coins" becomes an incredibly powerful meme when the financial infrastructure around the world that everyone blindly trusts begins to crumble.
(A pretty good advertisement for Bitcoin)
Winning the blockchain wars is as much about winning the cultural war as it is a technology battle. If we want to encourage new users to even think about Bitcoin, we need to hit them with guerrilla marketing tactics in the form of dumb-looking JPEGs.
Would Ethereum have experienced such rapid user growth over the past couple of years without the NFT boom? While DeFi is a brilliant innovation, it struggles to capture the hearts and minds of anyone without an abnormal interest in finance. I would argue that most normal human beings can relate more to pictures of apes and amusing memes than they can to complicated financial products named CRVV1ETHSTETH-A.
Could Solana have built such a cult-like following without a prospering NFT ecosystem? Probably not, because every single DeFi chart was primed to make seed investors rich and leave secondary market participants holding the bag.
It is time for Ordinals to enter the arena.
Ordinals, for the first time ever, allow users to inscribe images directly onto the Bitcoin Blockchain. Think NFTs on Ethereum, but with a cooler sounding name.
Ordinals give Bitcoiners a chance once more to take back the cultural mantle from the toxic maximalists.
Ordinals allow Bitcoiners to embrace the chaos, the fun, and the memes that made it such a fun place to reside almost a decade ago.
Ordinals encourage those who are inquisitive to FINALLY have a reason to download a Bitcoin wallet.
Ordinals allow Bitcoiners to explain to new users the benefits of a truly trustless decentralised network. Images inscribed onto Bitcoin are truly on-chain and cannot be manipulated or tampered with in the same way that an image hosted on a centralised server can be.
Ordinals entice developers to have a reason to start building on top of Bitcoin. If there is a huge demand but a severe lack of products to serve the users, a Cambrian explosion of innovation can happen in a short period of time.
Ordinals, for all the reasons listed above, can bring a HUGE number of users, new and old, to discover Bitcoin, and maybe, just maybe, some of them will stick around.
This is honestly the first time in as long as I can remember that I am excited about Bitcoin again.
I must also give a massive shoutout to Udi and co who have lead the charge despite much pushback to promote the discovery of Ordinals.
I really believe that Ordinals and Taproot wizards in particular can be a pivotal moment in Bitcoin's history.
Let's allow the volume of fun to drown out the negativity and embrace a new way of celebrating Bitcoin.
It's time for Bitcoin to become magical again.
