Original - Odaily
Author-husband how
Editor - Qin Xiaofeng
Recently, Binance launched ORDI, causing a collective surge in the BRC-20 token sector. Since the Bitcoin ecosystem is still in its early stages, new projects and gameplay are emerging one after another. Most crypto investors do not understand the specific current situation, which has also caused a lot of FOMO emotions in the market.
On the evening of November 8, Odaily held a Space event to communicate with a number of well-known KOLs in the industry on the development status of the Bitcoin ecosystem and exploring potential wealth opportunities. The guest lineup is as follows: Waterdrip Capital Bill, OrdzGames CMO Preston, independent researcher BlockPunk, independent developer BitDuck.eth, independent researcher Big Pang Dun, BTCs community volunteer Sun Xin.x, Ordinals ecological builder Charlie.
The following is a simplified AMA content. For details, pleaseListen to Space Review。
For more background knowledge and updates, seeGetting Started Guide: Speedrunning BTC Basics and Popular Protocolsand special topics“The Ordinals track is recovering, is the Bitcoin ecosystem going to rise?”
Odaily: First of all, please introduce yourself.
Preston：Hi, Im Preston from the OrdzGames team. Our team is currently building the game on the Ordinals ecosystem, which was launched in March this year.
BlockPunk：Hello everyone, I am BlockPunk, and I have been following the BTC ecosystem since March this year. From my personal perspective, I believe that Bitcoin’s technology accumulation can carry some relatively complex applications, including minting assets and meeting the needs of more users.
Bill：Hello everyone, I am Bill from Waterdrip Capital. Waterdrop Capital was officially established in 2017. It is an international investment institution focusing on the vertical field of blockchain. It is committed to becoming an organic bridge between the traditional financial market and the blockchain ecosystem, and actively invests in high-quality projects in the blockchain industry. .
Charlie：Hello everyone, I’m Charlie. I used to work in the Polkadot ecosystem and later served as the head of Polygon’s Asia Pacific region. Later, I came into contact with many Ordinals projects and developed a Launchpad called Ordinals Council. I found that the Ordinals ecosystem has a certain developer culture. The emergence of Ordinals has brought the developers and ecological narrative of the Bitcoin ecosystem to a new level.
bitduck.eth:Hello everyone, I am BitDuck. I am an individual developer. I used to do some development mainly around the NFT market.
Big Fatty:Hello everyone, I am an independent researcher and have been paying attention to the Bitcoin ecosystem since the beginning of the year. I think the explosion of the Bitcoin ecosystem may signal the beginning of the first year of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
sunxin.x:Hello everyone, I am the representative of the Xiaobing community. Our community was established in early August this year, with members including Bitcoin OGs and miners, and has now become one of the most active communities in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
The development status of Bitcoin ecology
Odaily: In the past, the Bitcoin ecosystem did not receive much attention compared to the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems. As a result, most people did not understand the Bitcoin ecosystem. Please briefly introduce the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Preston：In the early days of the development of Bitcoin, the three projects known to everyone were BCH, STX, and BSV. They were all based on the concept of Bitcoin fork chains, but I personally feel that these projects are dividing Bitcoin traffic, and even want to Bitcoin is made into a VM, which conflicts with the idea of Bitcoin OG. But after the emergence of the Ordinals protocol, it is equivalent to the narrative scene of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem constructed on the Bitcoin main chain after the upgrade based on Taproot. This is a completely different story from before. After Ordinals has tokens and NFTs, it completely changes the Bitcoin ecosystem, because with liquidity, more people will be attracted to enter the Bitcoin ecosystem.
The emergence of BRC 20 brought traffic to Bitcoin, and then we discovered that what projects like Ordinals can do, other developers are actually trying to do. For example, token standards like ORC 20, SRC 20, DRC 20 have emerged, and even these things that can be done on Bitcoin can also be done by other chains.
Over time, protocols like Atomicals emerged that were on par with Ordinals. Later, Casey, the founder of Ordinals, developed a new protocol, Runes, which is specifically used for fungible tokens and is an independent protocol from Ordinals.
In general, the emergence and development of Ordinals allow us to see what can be done on Bitcoin with other chains. I think every chain is a country, and Bitcoin is the largest country. We can enjoy the best things in our own country. I agree with Waterdrop Capital’s view that the Bitcoin ecosystem must be one of the big engines in the next bull market.
BlockPunk：At the beginning of this year, due to the influence of Ordinals, the Bitcoin ecosystem received a large amount of traffic. But if we go back in time, Bitcoin developers were also very active in the past few years. They have proposed many solutions related to Bitcoin expansion, including Lightning Network, RGB, RSK, etc. However, most of these solutions have little to do with the Bitcoin network itself. They just choose a way to achieve Bitcoin expansion without upgrading the network. The real expansion of Bitcoin related to the main network is its two upgrades.
SegWit: The discussion of Segregated Verification actually started very early. The Bitcoin community is very neutral and has very high requirements for the purity of Bitcoin. I have introduced the three tenets of the Bitcoin community before, and the most important one is that it cannot Putting more burden on the Bitcoin network. Another rule is that you cannot upgrade the Bitcoin network because this will destroy the security of Bitcoin. Although Segregated Verification was proposed very early and was even discussed in the era of Satoshi Nakamoto, it was not until 2018 or 2019 that Segregated Verification was actually designed. This is equivalent to putting part of the signature data into the Segregated Verification data. Inside, it was finally achieved that the Bitcoin block size was changed from 1 MB to 4 MB.
Taproot: Although Segment Verification has appeared, other data cannot be placed in the Segment Verification space. It can only store signature data, so its use cases will be very few. Taproots solution is a complex and comprehensive design solution. It has the largest The effect is to allow any data to be stored in the extended block space of Segregated Witness, which can be encoded pictures, strings containing tokens, domain names, Layer 2 hash values and other data.
I think the prerequisites for Bitcoin are already in place. This means that in a 4 MB Bitcoin block generated every 10 minutes, we write a lot of different types of data. Based on these methods and types of writing data, projects such as the Ordinals project, token issuance protocols, and smart contract chains all have the basis for implementation.
On this basis, the Ordinals protocol and Taproot upgrades promote each other and greatly promote the application of Bitcoin. Now, we see almost all token issuance protocols being implemented using Taproot’s space. While the token issuance may not be pure enough for the Bitcoin community, it provides users in the crypto community with an opportunity to participate in Bitcoin, and it is an opportunity that can be used on a large scale. And the issuance of the token caused a lot of hype, which also increased the appeal of Bitcoin.
Next, I think using Taproot to write data in the upgraded space will produce many interesting projects, such aslikeBebop 2 items, which is a chain that implements smart contracts on Bitcoin. Moreover, this chain does not require changes to the Bitcoin network, and the implementation method is very native and very consistent with the spirit of the Bitcoin community.
Additionally, from the perspective of the entire crypto world, we are moving towards an era of modularity. The consensus of the chain, the ordering of transactions, the generation of blocks, security guarantees, etc. can now be turned into modules, run by different entities, and finally combined together so that users can use them normally and security can be guaranteed. Under this modular development, all chains may converge, so I think Bitcoin may eventually implement a smart contract platform similar to Ethereum.
Bill：I also conducted in-depth observations on the Bitcoin ecosystem in my research at Waterdrop Capital, and I believe that the Bitcoin ecosystem may have five major directions in the future:
The first is Bitcoin upgrades, such as the just-mentioned Segregated Verification, which was proposed and launched in 2017. This verification allows different nodes to perform Segregated Verification. At the same time, there is also the Taproot upgrade, which was proposed in 2021 and went live this year. These upgrades are based on the Bitcoin native protocol, and many entrepreneurs are building businesses around these upgrades.
The second is Bitcoin off-chain expansion. This is because Bitcoin is written in scripts and it may be difficult to perform some complex operations. Therefore, since 2014, many experts and scholars have begun to explore how to expand and improve the performance of Bitcoin. For example, Lightning Network and RGB, I think this will be a very big application direction.
The third is the side chain,Including such as Stacks and SK etc., these have very good development, and many teams are already starting businesses around these side chains.
The fourth is the expansion of Bitcoin and its combination with other functions, such as the Nostr protocol created by former Twitter CEO Dorse just mentioned. He may combine Taproot upgrades and Lightning Network to produce more complex applications.
The fifth is Bitcoin applications, including payments, wallets, etc., and even some node service providers or liquidity providers. These are all Bitcoin-based applications.
Charlie：I think the development process of Ordinals ecosystem is less than a year, but it has gone through nearly 4 years of Ethereum’s development process.
As more and more people participate in the Bitcoin ecosystem, they find that the market value of these projects is very low, and there is no pre-mining, VC participation, and rat positions, all of which make the projects very fair and decentralized. This decentralized feature has attracted many users in the Ethereum ecosystem. They were originally critical of Ethereums VCs and market makers. The Bitcoin ecosystem has given them new choices and allowed them to re-understand Bitcoin. decentralized features.
With the large number of retail investors and the increase in currency prices, more developers and projects have been attracted. These people have brought new innovations, including various projects such as DeFi, NFT, and even games. The emergence of these projects has once again attracted the in-depth participation of overseas institutions.
Now, some people already believe that Ordinals is the next wave of bull market trend, and they may already be planning and building positions. And as more people start talking about this topic, more people will participate in the Ordinals ecosystem in the future.
Finally, I think Bitcoin has now brought many people back to a philosophical discussion of principles and results. Should we adhere to the principles of decentralization and fairness, or should we only pursue results. This is a philosophical question. We need to rethink what the future Web 3.0 should look like. This may be the most critical.
Big Fatty:As a participant, I was skeptical about the Ordinals ecology in the early days. I once doubted whether it had enough value and potential. But when I saw the effects it had, I started to seriously study and understand this protocol.
The evolution of Ordinals has been interesting. In the early days, developers may have been resistant to the protocol because they did not understand why these new elements were added to the Bitcoin block space. However, over time, they began to realize the potential of the Bitcoin ecosystem. I think an important contribution of Ordinals is that it shows everyone in a simple form that ecology can be done on Bitcoin, and through its effect it attracts more people to participate, which undoubtedly promotes the development of the entire ecology.
Im personally very interested in the RGB protocol. If RGB can cooperate with the Lightning Network, the smart contract functions of Ethereum can be implemented on Bitcoin, while also having some extended features, such as privacy.
In the process of ecological development, we will see the emergence of various new protocols, such as BRC 20, BRC 100, etc. I think everyone should study these protocols, put aside their prejudices, and witness the richness and development of the Bitcoin ecosystem together.
The wealth code of the Bitcoin ecosystem—the conversion of minting rights
Odaily: What other wealth codes are there in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and which projects are in value depression?
Preston：I think the Ordinals ecosystem has great potential to realize the ecological narrative of Ethereum and other EVM chains. I think the biggest benefit is that UniSats BRC 20-Swap is about to go online, which will help promote the development of Swap and may further promote the development of subsequent currency holding interest rate increases and Staking and other functions.
At the same time, I am also very optimistic about our GameFi project. The project went live in March, and our team has been working for 8 months on the PvP concept for Season 4. We made the game into HTML format and burned it to Ordinals to implement the game on the chain.
I recommend that you should buy the leading ORDI, which is the most well-known token of BRC 20. In addition, I also recommend investing in SARS because its transaction volume is very large and there are many currency holding addresses. I think the safest investment strategy is to buy the leader in large quantities and then invest small amounts in some BRC 20 tokens with innovative concepts.
Bill：I strongly endorse ORDI and SARS, and I hold both. Moreover, UniSats swap function is actually already online. You need to purchase a pass card first, and then you can experience the swap function.
I think if you want to invest at present, ORDI and SARS are both very worthy of investment, and you can also allocate a small amount of funds to others. But I prefer SARS because its market value has exceeded ORDI, and its trading volume is large and there are many currency holding addresses, so it has a lot of room for growth.
UniSat, like Uniswap before it, can be mined and added to liquidity. The major asset pairs are now benchmarked against SARS, just like how Uniswap used to be benchmarked against ETH. I think this is very meaningful, because it means that SARSs status in this ecosystem is improving.
In addition, I think SARS is very well named and designed, and its number matches the number of Bitcoins, which may also attract more investors. Moreover, SARS had a cost, which was one of its advantages. Because there is a cost, its price is unlikely to fall to zero, which provides investors with some protection.
Overall, I think the best investment strategy right now is to buy the mainstream BRC 20, especially ORDI and SARS. Then, some NFTs can be allocated in small amounts, as well as protocols that have not yet produced assets.
Charlie：Todays SARS and zoo projects are already quite popular, and I dont recommend that everyone blindly chase the rise. Appropriate configuration is possible, but there may be a callback, so you can pay attention to the missing ecological positions, such as NFT trading platforms, DeFi, etc., which have not yet been fully formed. These are opportunities worthy of attention.
I think the most important thing are those projects that are in line with Bitcoin culture and native value theory. If you can participate in the project at an early stage, the investment returns will be considerable.
The above recommendations are all discussed within the scope of BRC 20. If you step out of the scope of Ordinals and look at projects on other protocols, you will still be blank. Therefore, there are many opportunities for both developers and retail investors, and the key is to participate as early as possible.
BitDuck:I chose SETS as an investment target for two main reasons: first, UniSat will use SETS as the base token, and second, it has the expectation of being listed on the exchange.
In addition to SETS and ORDI, I would also like to recommend a token called Pizza. Pizza was deployed in May with the idea of making a token with the original spirit of Bitcoin. Every year on May 22, the Bitcoin community celebrates Pizza Day, a piece of Bitcoin-native culture.
Additionally, I looked at the Atomics atomic protocol. It is actually on the same track as ORDI, and I am personally very optimistic about the design of this protocol.
For projects like zoos, they are actually similar to early cryptocurrencies. Most of these projects will disappear, with only a few like Bitcoin, Litecoin, and XRP surviving. But memes with some native cultural attributes will be easier for everyone to remember.
Sun Xin:I was also inspired by your speeches. I think we should re-examine the wealth opportunities in the Bit ecosystem. Every big wealth opportunity or wealth transfer is actually a transfer of coinage rights.
In the initial stage of Bitcoin, miners became the richest group because they controlled the right to mint coins. Then in 2017, ICO project parties took control of the right to issue coins. They also created a wave of wealth myths by raising Bitcoins. In 2020, DeFi Summer’s minting power has brought a new round of wealth myths to institutions.
Therefore, I think wealth in the cryptocurrency circle is actually related to minting power. Now that wealth opportunities have returned to the Bitcoin ecosystem, this is actually the return of minting power. We spend a few dollars, a dozen dollars, or even a few tenths of a dollar to issue a coin. Whether these coins are valuable and whether there are opportunities for wealth actually goes back to the most original concept of Bitcoin - consensus.
Everything is air, and without consensus there is no value. So I think this is a process of handing over minting rights to retail investors so that everyone can participate fairly.
As for how to obtain wealth opportunities or how to make a fortune, this is a difficult question because different people have different investment logics. Depending on my asset situation, I will choose to buy some ORDI, Sats, BTCs or some projects with low market capitalization but high consensus.
