“Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!It’s a bug alright – in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you *still* haven’t learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance?If a change results in user programs breaking, it’s a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to Understand?” -Linus Torvalds

Don’t break userspace. This is Linus Torvald’s golden rule for development of the Linux kernel. For those of you reading this who are not familiar with the nature of Linux, or operating systems in general, the kernel is the heart and soul of an operating system. The kernel is what actually manages the hardware, moving bits around between storage and RAM, between the RAM and the CPU as things are computed, and all of the little devices and pieces of the actual computer that need to be controlled at the hardware level.

Every application or program written for an operating system has to interact with the kernel. When you download Photoshop, or Telegram, everything that program is doing boils down to essentially calling the kernel. “Hey kernel, take what I just typed and process it and send it over a network connection to the server.” “Hey kernel, take the color shift I made to this pitch, take it out of RAM and send it to the CPU to modify it, then put it back in RAM.”

When the kernel is changed, in a somewhat similar fashion to Bitcoin, the chief goal of developers is to ensure that existing applications that assume a specific way to interact with the kernel do not break because of a change to the kernel. Sounds very familiar to Bitcoin and the necessity to maintain backwards compatibility for network consensus upgrades doesn’t it?

“Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand? We particularly don’t break user space with TOTAL CRAP. I’m angry, because your whole email was so _horribly_ wrong, and the patch that broke things was so obviously crap. The whole patch is incredibly broken shit. It adds an insane error code (ENOENT), and then because it’s so insane, it adds a few places to fix it up (“ret == -ENOENT ? -EINVAL : ret”).

The fact that you then try to make *excuses* for breaking user space, and blaming some external program that *used* to work, is just shameful. It’s not how we work.Fix your f*cking “compliance tool”, because it is obviously broken. And fix your approach to kernel programming.” -Linus Torvalds

Linux is one of the most important, if not the most important, open source project in the entire world. Android runs on Linux, half of the backend infrastructure (if not way more) runs on Linux. Embedded systems controlling all kinds of computerized things in the background of your life you wouldn’t even consider run on Linux. The world literally runs on Linux. It might not have taken over the desktop as many autistic Linux users wanted to see happen, but it quietly ate almost everything else in the background without anyone noticing.

All of these applications and programs people use in the course of their daily lives depend on the assumption that Linux kernel developers will not break backwards compatibility in new versions of the kernel to allow their applications to continue functioning. Otherwise, anything running applications must continue using older versions of the kernel or take on the burden of altering their applications to interact with a breaking change in the kernel.

Bitcoin’s most likely path to success is a very similar road, simply becoming a platform that financial applications and tools are built on top of in such a way that most people using them won’t even realize or consider that “Bitcoin ate the world.” In a similar vein to Linux, that golden rule of “Don’t break userspace” applies tenfold. The problem is the nature of Bitcoin as a distributed consensus system, rather than a single local kernel running on one person’s machine, wildly changes what “breaking userspace” means.

It’s not just developers that can break userspace, users themselves can break userspace. The entire last year of Ordinals, Inscriptions, and BRC-20 tokens should definitively demonstrate that. This offers a very serious quandary when looking at the mantra of “Don’t break userspace” from the point of view of developers. As much as many Bitcoiners in this space do not like Ordinals, and are upset that their own use cases are being disrupted by the network traffic Ordinals users are creating, both groups are users.

So how do developers confront this problem? One group of users is breaking userspace for another group of users. To enact a change that prevents the use of Ordinals or Inscriptions explicitly violates the mandates of don’t break userspace. I’m sure people want to say “Taproot broke userspace!” in response to this dilemma, but it did not. Taproot activation, and the allowance for witness data to be as large as the entire blocksize, did not break any pre-existing applications or uses built on top of Bitcoin. All it did was open the door for new applications and use cases.

So what do we do here? To try and filter, or break by a consensus change, people making Inscriptions or trading Ordinals is to fundamentally violate the maxim of “don’t break userspace.” To do nothing allows one class of users to break the userspace of another class of users. There is fundamentally no solution to this problem except to violate the golden rule, or to implement functionality that allows the class of users’ whose userspace is broken now to adapt to the new realities of the network and maintain a viable version of their applications and use cases.

Not breaking the userspace of Bitcoin is of critical importance for its continued success and functionality, but it is not as simple as “don’t change anything.” Dynamic changes in user behavior, that require no change to the actual protocol itself, can have the same effect at the end of the day as a breaking change to the protocol. Are developers supposed to pick and choose which applications’ userspace is broken to maintain that of another application? I would say no, and go further to say that anyone advocating for such behavior from developers is demanding them to act irresponsibly and in a way that harms users of the system. So what is the answer here?

There is no answer except to push forward and continue adding improvements to the protocol that allow applications being broken by the behavior of certain users to function in the presence of emergent changes in users’ behavior. Otherwise, you are asking developers to throw out the golden rule and effectively play kingmakers in regards to what use cases are viable to build on top of Bitcoin.

If we go down that road, then what are we actually doing here? I can’t tell you what we’re doing at that point, but I can tell you it’s not building a distributed and neutral system anymore.

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This is an opinion editorial by Roy Sheinfeld, the co-founder and CEO of Breez, a Lightning Network mobile app.

The more wonderful something is, the more passion it will arouse. Bitcoin is among the greatest wonders of the late-modern world, so Greg Foss is understandably very passionate about it. So passionate in fact, that he dropped 11 f-bombs in 31 seconds out of concern for its future (and this despite the fact that he’s Canadian!).

Why is such a stalwart Bitcoin proponent so concerned? Because two guys in cheap wizard costumes did a cringey Fortnite dance? Surely the stakes must be higher.

According to some, there is a battle underway for the future and soul of Bitcoin. According to others, we’ve just gained a fun, nerdy and innocuous way to play with Bitcoin that makes it even funner and nerdier, though no less revolutionary.

Ordinals, inscriptions and the BRC-20 protocol are the bone(s) of contention. Ordinals allow individual sats to be identified; inscriptions allow objects like text, images and data files to be written onto them; and BRC-20 allows second-order tokens to be minted directly onto them, like an Ethereum-lite. In effect, they introduce storage as a new use case for the Bitcoin blockchain in addition to its existing and principal use as a ledger for currency transactions. These features are affecting block sizes, transaction fees and validation times, so they’re not inconsequential.

The bone of contention is what they mean for Bitcoin’s future. Are they pathological, like a tumor? Do they offer a competitive advantage, like chlorophyll and claws? Or are they just harmless and benign, like male nipples or that little dangly thing at the top of your throat?

Ordinal ABCs One, Two, Threes

Of the recent developments in Bitcoin listed above, Ordinals came first. Casey Rodarmor, the guy who “invented” Ordinals (this time around), sought to devise “stable identifiers that may be used by Bitcoin applications.” In other words, he wanted to index sats by giving each one a serial number that would survive across time and UTXOs.

Of course, giving each sat a unique identifier means that they are no longer perfectly fungible because they are no longer strictly identical, when applying the Ordinal convention. Just like the Library Of Congress Classification (LCC) system for books in research libraries or URLs for web pages, Ordinals make each sat unique and retrievable. Identifiability affects fungibility without eliminating it.

Inscriptions are the second controversial, recent development in the world of Bitcoin. The “Ordinal Theory Handbook” gives a marvelously succinct definition of inscriptions, helpfully relating them to Ordinals:

“Inscriptions inscribe sats with arbitrary content, creating bitcoin-native digital artifacts, more commonly known as NFTs… These inscribed sats can then be transferred using bitcoin transactions, sent to bitcoin addresses, and held in bitcoin UTXOs. These transactions, addresses, and UTXOs are normal bitcoin transactions, addresses, and UTXOS in all respects, with the exception that in order to send individual sats, transactions must control the order and value of inputs and outputs according to ordinal theory.”

Of course, Bitcoiners are far too sophisticated to get suckered into all that Bored Ape nonsense. If we were to copyright cartoons on our blockchain, we’d do wizards instead of apes. I mean, apes? C’mon.

Whatever. Think of inscriptions like blockchain tattoos. Some people are going to love them, others are going to disdain them. The world (and the witness data of a transaction) is big enough for both.

The third recent development in Bitcoin is the BRC-20 protocol, which lets people mint and distribute tokens according to predefined parameters. These tokens are written as inscriptions onto sats marked with Ordinals, which brings us full circle. These three features allow users to create digital artifacts/NFTs and to use the Bitcoin blockchain to distribute and trade them.

So, how’s it going? Not surprisingly, some people are attracted to particular numbers, like one, seven or 69,420, so some sats are coveted because Ordinals have made them “rare” (although, if you think about it, each Ordinal number is unique, so each one is exactly as rare as the others).

There is also a market for BRC-20 tokens, many of which are just second-order bitcoin. For example, the $OG$ token and the $PIZA token both have a supply of 21 million (just like bitcoin) and, at one point, had market caps of around $10 million.

The upshot is that:

1. Sats are now uniquely identifiable according to a new convention
2. People can add data to sats
3. Token-minting algorithms are a kind of inscription data, so people can mint tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain

It’s important to note that, while Ordinals, inscriptions and BRC-20 are recent developments in how Bitcoin works and how we use it, they’re not really “innovations” because they’re not really new. Something like Ordinals was proposed under the name BitDNS back in 2010. Using OP_RETURN to store strings of data on UTXOs goes back nearly a decade. And minting second-order “tokens” on an underlying blockchain is basically the idea behind Ethereum, which isn’t really new. (Hat tip to Giacomo Zucco, who took a deep dive into this in a presentation he gave in Prague.)

Plus ça change…

What This Means For Bitcoin: Transaction Fees

Ordinals, inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens are, of course, controversial. Though some love them, as the transaction fees of recent months attest, others are bemused or annoyed. Even the guy who invented BRC-20 has said, “These will be worthless. Please do not waste money mass minting.”

OK, but “worthless” isn’t a synonym for “evil.” Some people think tattoos and Big Macs are worthless, other people love them. So, what’s the big deal?

Opposition to Bitcoin’s new features usually stems from the suppositions that:

1. Ordinals and inscriptions make bitcoin less like money
2. They make transactions more expensive

Let’s deal with the last point first. Thanks in part to Ordinals, the number of transactions in the mempool has increased by about two orders of magnitude, and the data in the backlog has increased about 150 times.

The effects are ambivalent. On the one hand, more data per transaction increases the storage and computing burdens for node operators, for which they receive no compensation. Not great.

On the other hand, more data to compute means higher fees for miners. In fact, the average on-chain transaction fee reached $30.91 recently. High on-chain transaction fees are not evil. In fact, high fees are a good thing. They incentivize miners, which attracts miners and spurs them to invest, which keeps the hash rate high and makes Bitcoin more secure. That’s about as evil as a St. Bernard carrying a cask of brandy.

Moreover, high on-chain fees merely reinforce the different use cases between on-chain bitcoin and sats on the Lightning Network. On-chain payments have arguably never been well suited for quick microtransactions because they treat small and large transactions pretty much the same. By contrast, Lightning fees are proportional to the transaction amount. If you’re paying two-, or three- or 10 times the price of your beer or pizza in transaction fees for an on-chain payment when you could be paying one one-thousandth of it on Lightning, you’re doing it wrong.

If on-chain fees are inhibiting you from paying with bitcoin, then you should probably take advantage of Lightning’s proportional fees. If Lightning fees are inhibiting you from paying with bitcoin, then you should probably take advantage of the one-size-fits-all, on-chain fees.

What This Means For Bitcoin: Money-ness

As for whether bitcoin is still money in a world of ordinals, there are a couple of ways to answer that question. First, we could comb through various definitions of what money is, come up with the ultimate list of criteria and use it to evaluate the Bitcoin white paper and all subsequent protocols. Aristotle would be proud, but the answer would be unnecessarily theoretical and abstract.

Alternatively, we could actually observe what people are doing out there in the world. However sensible this new use case is, people like inscriptions and are willing to pay for them.

• Whom are they paying? Miners.
• How are they paying? Transaction fees.
• What are miners doing with the transaction fees? Reinvesting some to cover the costs of mining more bitcoin.
• Where does that bitcoin go? From the miners out into the world, where it circulates.

And there we have it: payment and circulation. People pay miners, miners pay people, they’re using bitcoin, ergo bitcoin is money. We’ve found the essence of currency without a dictionary (sorry Aristotle).

In other words, bitcoin is still money, but the Bitcoin blockchain can also be used for storage. Note the Boolean operator: (money and storage) not (money or storage). Indeed, adding new, sensible use cases might be a prerequisite for any currency from this point forward. The question is merely, what counts as “sensible”? But time — and the market — will tell.

Good, Bad Or Benign?

So, let us return to the original question: Are Ordinals, inscriptions and BRC-20 good or bad for Bitcoin? Or are they just a new feature of the world that we’ll adapt to without much consequence?

Well, these functions weren’t at the top of my personal list of priorities. I can’t say that Taproot Wizards or “Ordinal tokens” are really making the world a better place.

But I don’t fear these developments either. They raise fees, and higher fees have beneficial side effects for the blockchain. What’s good for Bitcoin is good for the world, whether it’s intentional or not.

And they reinforce the case for Lightning as a low-fee means to use bitcoin as money for smallish, everyday purchases and transfers. Generally, what’s good for Lightning is good for Bitcoin, which is good for the world. Wizards GIFs and subsidiary tokens can’t really do much harm, so I’m just gonna stay cool, stack sats and continue making Lightning as good as it can be.

This is a guest post by Roy Sheinfeld. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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This is an opinion editorial by Robert Hall, a content creator and small business owner.

The race for the 2024 U.S. presidential election is starting to kick into gear, featuring some of the same cast of characters from the last few elections. On the Democratic side, you have Joe Biden, Robert F. Kennedy and Marianne Williamson suggesting they will run. Then, Former President Donald Trump, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy are on the other side of the aisle.

If you have been following the race so far, you might know that Trump seems to be walking away with the nomination before the process even starts next year. If he ends up being the nominee, we will likely get a re-run of 2020, where we have two men over 70 years old who both think that they know what is right for the country. Who else is tired of having baby boomers running the show? I am, to be honest.

Boomer Presidents Don’t Understand Bitcoin

Baby boomers, you’ve had their time in the sun. It’s time to leave the stage and let the younger generations of leaders have a chance to lead the country. We need leaders who understand the emerging challenges facing America as we speak.

We need leaders who thoroughly understand economic policy and the value of innovation in the financial space. For instance, the baby boomers at the top of the ticket don’t have the depth or the capacity to understand the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that Bitcoin presents to America and the American people.

Biden and Trump have been openly hostile towards Bitcoin because they believe in the supremacy of the fiat dollar system. The time is now to elect someone with a bold vision for the future, who understands that the way that the entitlement systems are set up and the dollar’s role in the world isn’t sustainable over the long term.

If America stays on its current path, it will only lead to chaos, lawlessness, and a lower standard of living for everyone. Is this the future that you want for your children and grandchildren? 2024 is our chance to start a new journey toward freedom, the rule of law and the opportunity to make something of yourself, regardless of your station in life.

Why We Need A Bitcoiner As President

It has been reported recently that the mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, is close to a decision on whether to run for president next year. For those who don’t know him, he is one of the most pro-Bitcoin politicians in the country. He has actively courted Bitcoiners to come to Miami and help make it the Bitcoin capital of the world. So far, he has largely succeeded in doing that.

But in addition to making the U.S. an epicenter for Bitcoin innovation, having a Bitcoiner like Suarez as president will, critically, stop the emergence of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in America dead in its tracks. If Biden or Trump is elected, it is almost certain that some form of CBDC will be activated in America. With the deployment of a CBDC, you can kiss your financial freedom goodbye. You can kiss your privacy goodbye.

You will no longer have autonomy over what you can eat or how far you can travel. You will have a social credit score, as has been implemented in China. Is this the type of life that you want? We have to strive for a better life.

Just recently, the rails for a CBDC were introduced to the public. FedNow, as it is called, will be operational by July 2023. It is said that it will be used to speed up payments between customers and businesses, which may be accurate at the moment. However, as with any system, it will likely evolve into something vastly different than what it was intended to be.

Can we really trust a government that has given us the Patriot Act, PRISM and now the proposed RESTRICT Act to resist total control over what you spend your money on?

The RESTRICT Act, for instance, put forth by none other than Bitcoin-hating Senator Elizabeth Warren, has the potential to harm Bitcoiners in the United States with its overly-broad language about digital communication tools being a threat to national security. While the overt target may be TikTok, nothing is stopping regulators from using this law against Bitcoin in the future.

Looking past this smokescreen, you can see that they are building their case to the public: Hilary Clinton, international regulators and the U.S. Treasury have all warned about the dangers of cryptocurrency.

Now, put this in the context of $31 trillion in U.S. national debt, unsustainable entitlement spending, a world slowly moving away from the dollar, high gas prices and uncontrollable inflation. Then it becomes clear that they will close off the exits to Bitcoin before most people learn about how to use them. They want to herd the masses into a CBDC for a “great reset” of the monetary system. This is coming if we don’t start electing people who understand that Bitcoin is our last chance to escape a sinking ship.

Mayor Saurez gets it, and if any other politicians in America understand Bitcoin, it is time that we support them and get more Bitcoiners in office. The dollar is the Titanic, and Bitcoin is the lifeboat. Will enough people get on to be saved? Time will tell and the upcoming presidential election could be a final chance.

This is a guest post by Robert Hall. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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Bitcoin started the week climbing back above $28,000, as markets returned from the Easter holidays. The move saw the world’s largest cryptocurrency briefly break out of a key resistance level of $28,500. Ethereum was also higher, as it closed in on the $1,900 level.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin (BTC) was back above $28,000 to start the week, as market sentiment shifted towards the bulls following the Easter break.

BTC/USD rose to a high of $28,532.83 earlier in today’s session, after trading at a low of $27,828.48 the day before.

As a result of the move, BTC/USD marginally moved past a ceiling at $28,500, however momentum has since shifted.

Initially, today’s rally came as the 14-day relative strength index (RSI) bounced from a recent floor at 58.00

As of writing, the index is tracking at 61.07, with the next visible point of resistance at the 65.00 mark.

BTC is trading at $28,327.63 at the time of writing.

Ethereum

In addition to BTC, ethereum (ETH) was also higher on Monday, with prices closing in on the $1,900 level.

Following a low of $1,828.78 on Sunday, ETH/USD climbed to a peak of $1,873.06 to start the week.

Today’s jump in price came as bulls re-entered the market, after a brief breakout below a floor at $1,830.

Earlier gains have since eased, which comes as a result of the RSI nearing a key resistance point of 62.00.

As of writing, price strength is at a reading of 58.83, with the index closing in on a ceiling at 62.00.

Should ETH move beyond this point, it is likely that prices will surge above $1,900.

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Will ethereum continue to move higher this week? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Eliman Dambell

Eliman was previously a director of a London-based brokerage, whilst also an online trading educator. Currently, he commentates on various asset classes, including Crypto, Stocks and FX, whilst also a startup founder.