Currently the Bitcoin (BTC) core community has managed to get into an impasse over the Ordinals technology, with the old guard boomers at war with zoomers of the BTC movement over the minting of Ordinals in the mainnet.
As of writing, there are still considerable fees in the BTC mainnet for all types of transactions, whether is inscribing or just sending Bitcoin out to friends, exchanges, family, or payment – which are largely caused by people trading and minting Ordinals on the BTC mainnet.
Obviously, it’s not the first time when BTC has been this congested and had high fees, but there are a lot of concerns coming from the old guard especially about how is the 1MB blocks being used in terms of value and data. Here is a quote from the alleged Satoshi Nakamoto himself!
"you can't stop them" well ofc! bitcoin is designed to be censor resistant. doesn't stop us mildly commenting on the sheer waste and stupidity of an encoding. at least do something efficient. otherwise it's another proof of consumption of block-space thingy.
— Adam Back (@adam3us) January 29, 2023
Taproot update wasn’t technically made in mind so people could start issuing ordinals on the chain, its core purpose was something different it just happened to be that people experimented and someone basically deployed the first ordinal back in December 2022 according to some sources.
Now the person who is leading the Wizards & Ordinal movement in BTC right now mostly is Udi Wertheimer and to sum up his views and thoughts on this matter can be summarized here on one of his latest tweets.
HOW I BROKE BITCOIN / by Udi Wertheimer, a guy who’s more important than Satoshi*
You probably know that @ercwl and I broke bitcoin.
As I’m typing this tweet, bitcoin network fees have risen to levels 100x higher than they were just 2 weeks ago.
Children are dying.
But why?…
— Udi Wertheimer (@udiWertheimer) May 12, 2023
Now there are maxies who are advocating for actual changes on the mainnet by an update and then people who want to keep the ordinals technology in Bitcoin as well. Ironically it does seem that Lightning Network hasn’t really gotten any more traction than usual due to the congestion and there are many reasons for that, which we won’t talk about in this article however.
I’m not gonna lie, but I am more sympathetic to the ordinals crowd in this sense. Bitcoin barely has any functioning plans or systems to combat fees and the only way to do that truly is via increasing block size, which I’m not sure will ever happen on this chain.
Hard Fork Situation & End of Cycle
So this finally gets us to the crux of the point I’m making here, which is that due to this civil war in Bitcoin, we might see that Bitcoin will go through a hard fork where a large crowd of the younger generation will continue using Ordinals tech in their own chain while the BTC boomers will keep using their chain, which one will be cored core remains to be seen.
The last time BCH split into BSV/BCH respectively caused a massive crash and this will likely have a similar impact since everyone’s bitcoin will be duplicated on the new chain that will be created. I Do not believe that the ordinals crowd will jump back into BSV or BCH and any fork on BTC will make every chain weaker by causing lower hash rates on all of them.
BTC Boomers cannot also expect that if they roll out some patch and wipe out people’s ordinals, they are essentially wiping someone’s finances to zero since there is already a massive ordinal collection that people are buying. Are these people gonna stay loyal? I think not if you are going to take away their assets.
The Big Warning I’m here to give you is that if there is going to be any sort of a hard fork happening due to infighting you may consider the whole bull cycle canceled, because recovering from stuff like this is gonna be really hard, especially given the recession. Faith in the markets is not going to be the same and people are going to view Bitcoin Core differently if it takes such an aggressive position on the matter.
It’s almost comical how off this is. The generational denominations are really unhelpful here. Boomers, millennials, gen X and z alike are all using BTC, and all the generations have first-principle understanding of how it works. Sure, there’s definitely a higher concentration of altcoiners who are younger and have stimulus money or DINK money to blow because they don’t have a lot of financial responsibility. That’s always been a thing, shit tokens on Bitcoin are just the latest fad.
There’s not a civil war among bitcoiners. There’s a bunch of alt coiners who came over to Bitcoin to pump and dump. The cool thing about Bitcoin is that it’s decentralized and the fee market disincentivizes spam. If ordinals are worthwhile, then that crowd will keep burning cash and paying miners to mint tokens. If not, they’ll move on to something else. What’s not happening is any substantial conversation about forking Bitcoin, either to wipe away ordinals, or to increase the block size. The people who are complaining on Twitter about it simply don’t know enough about Bitcoin. Probably because they haven’t been around on the network long enough to actually learn how/why it works. Udi didn’t break Bitcoin, and transaction fees are only a small picture of how the network manages itself.
The Denominations aren’t off because that’s what we are witnessing here, its the younger demographic who are into ordinals not the old ones. Boomers have least amount of technical knowledge of using BTC that’s a fact.