It's actually not that bad of an idea. Since there's already people who are doing their little "BRC-20" thing with Ordinals which seem to be unnecessarily complex transactions, at least such a protocol (especially being proposed by someone like Casey, which means that while adoption would remain voluntary, it actually stands a good chance of having people decide to adopt it). It's pretty apparent, at least in my opinion, that ordinals/inscriptions aren't going anywhere; neither are the other implementations of such technology that people are dreaming up. Its also my opinion that this will continue to go on and the people who are participating in these activities do not give a shit about the various arguments certain purists here would make against it. That being the case, I think it's actually a pretty wise/prudent thing to push for.
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Love the impotent rage that posts like this attract :) You go ahead and build ser. Permissionless open networks FTW.
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Seriously...for a group of people who generally pride themselves as being open-minded/free-thinkers, it's pretty hilarious (and ridiculous) seeing the inevitable screeching histrionics that these sort of threads seem to always inspire in a certain few. There are responses from those who think it's stupid or can't be bothered to care about it and are dismissive, and then there are the responses from those who are literally filled with genuine rage, which tells me that those who belong to the latter group should seriously consider finding some alternative outlet for that anger and rage, it's certainly not good to be wound up like that over something so ultimately trivial.
I don't care if my tendency to speak out against any kind of "toxic bitcoin maximalist" bullshit (for lack of a better term) gets me pushback from certain people, I'll continue to do it because the folks who engage in this kind of behavior tend not to realize just how incredibly off-putting it is to outsiders and curious newbies who might've considered the bitcoin way of doing things, only to get ran out on a rail after being mocked/ridiculed/dismissed. Which oftentimes leads to them becoming shitcoiners and getting scammed, losing money, etc.
Too often I see people who treat bitcoin as a stand-in for religion or something, they treat it like it's some kind of panacea capable of fixing all of the world's/society's ills; this is equally as delusional (not to mention dangerous) as those who still perpetuate the myths propping up our 'traditional' fiat economy, just in a different way. These sorts of ideological purity tests and gatekeeping that I still see happening within the Bitcoin community is the very kind of shit that I became interested in Bitcoin because it was an ALTERNATIVE to this kind of garbage, I didn't become interested in Bitcoin because I wanted to experience MORE of it, if that makes sense.
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Fucking hell, please keep posting. Couldn't agree more.
It's sad that I've had to shed the fiction that bitcoiners are any smarter, more principled, more truth-seeking than anybody. I wanted to believe that, but they manifestly do not, as a group, live up to those ideals, and evidence is everywhere. But maybe almost no group really does, when viewed as a group. And you can't deny that there certainly are some who are supremely awesome in all the ways you'd hope.
I think SN is a nice crucible. There is so much interesting btc-related discussion just waiting to be had, where thoughtful people could try to get smarter and understand the world better. Btc touches so many things, the opportunity is so high! I'm optimistic that we'll get there.
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With the 2020 environment and subsequent run-up we picked up a political element. The White Paper as evangelism gave way to The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean is hyper-political); Austrians broke cover en-masse (esp in BitcoinMagazine); the S2F model was in full swing (PlanB is hyper-political); large public mining companies exploded in a conservative state because that state is the only one with an independent grid that excludes them from most federal oversight; the IDW were common guest speakers at bitcoin conferences and on podcasts (Thiel, Peterson, Weinstein etc); Rogan had just gotten his Spotify contract... It'll all fade, and many will be surprised at the very different voices representing the culture late into next cycle.
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Just so everyone is aware, he's not advocating for fungible tokens. He's opposed to fungible tokens.
He's trying to propose a fungible token standard that's better than BRC-20. BRC-20 transactions leave little dust UTXOs littering the chain, and it's a major reason for the UTXO bloat since Ordinals came out. He's merely trying to propose a system that he hopes is better and will overtake it, for the sake of the UTXO set.
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Harm reduction
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Mental illness. There's already a fungible token on top of Bitcoin. It's called sats and it isn't made up bullshit.
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That's point!
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Exactly. I consider anything else on top of bitcoin to be a shitcoin. Just use sats. You don't need a new token to monetize your new game or app when sats already exist.
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Dumb question, but what is a fungible token, exactly? I mean, how would you describe the construct?
I think sats or their aggregates aren't fungible by most definitions, since their provenance can be tracked and distinguished, unless one goes to great pains to obscure that statistically.
Is that the issue that he's talking about, that these other things (Counterparty, etc) supposedly address?
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There are 4 key points to understand about fungible tokens:
Interchangeability: Fungable tokens are mutually interchangeable. If you have one unit of a fungible token, it has the same value as any other unit of the same token. For example, one Bitcoin is always equal in value to another Bitcoin.
Indivisibility: Fungible tokens are usually divisible into smaller units. For instance, you can divide one Bitcoin into smaller fractions known as satoshis (sats). This divisibility allows for more flexible transactions.
Uniformity: All units of a fungible token are identical in terms of attributes, value, and functionality. Each unit has the same properties as any other unit of the same type.
Standardization: Fungible tokens often adhere to specific standards or protocols on blockchain networks. These standards define the rules for token creation, transfer, and management, ensuring consistency and compatibility across different applications and platforms.
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Fungible means that any unit has the same face value. Of course all sats (and bitcoins) are originally fungible. The fact that they can be identified or traced is irrelevant in terms of fungibility. Euro or dollar bills have serial numbers printed on them too, yet they are fungible money.
That's one of the problems with Ordinals: adding non-fungibility to units of value that are (and should remain) fungible is not an amazing idea. Bitcoin was not made for this and twisting the protocol to allow it is not ideal (contrary to other blockchains, where NFTs are clearly separated and handled by specific standards).
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Fungibility is a point of view -- if people are treating units of the thing differently, then those units are not fungible from that particular point of view.
The dollar bill JFK had in his pocket when he was assassinated is fungible from the point of view the grocery store that will trade you a pack of gum for it, but not from the point of view of a collector. The sats from UTXOs originating in North Korea are fungible with those emanating from a block reward as far as my node is concerned. But that is not the only perspective.
Ordinals themselves are just a way of looking at things. Ordinal theory is literally a method to encode sats. You don't have to look at it that way. You don't have to interpret the ordinal encoding at all. But many people do seem to be adopting the ordinals point of view, and thus all the ensuing mempool sound and fury.
All that said, I'm still not getting what @rodarmor is talking about when he's talking about fungibility.
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No, fungibility is absolutely not a "point of view".
What you describe (collectible value for specific units) is just a mental construct. If you find someone to pay you $1000 for a $10 bill with "historical value", it's just an oddity — and a P2P agreement between 2 people that decided this banknote was special to them. But it doesn't change the fact that the $ is a fungible currency.
Again, this is completely different with a standard NFT collection (typical PFP collection of 10,000 items for instance), where each end every token is unique, usually with different properties. These tokens are non-fungible "by design".
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Fungibility is subjective. Some things have characteristics that make it harder to tell individual units apart, and thus people will be more likely to treat them as fungible.
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I don't know what to tell you other than what I've told you. You can have your definition of fungibility if you want, but it's not the one that has force in the actual universe. The very nature of money itself is a social convention in regard to how other people will interpret some symbolic construct. The subjectivity of that interpretation is the most real thing that there is as far as these things are concerned. Mises made this argument as forcefully as anyone could desire.
The fact that I can give you ten bucks and you'll do ten bucks worth of stuff for me is nothing other than a mutual point of view of what kind of behavior that ten-note ought to elicit. If you have preferences about which note you receive, then the notes are not fungible from your point of view. If everyone in the United States shares your point of view, the notes are, for all practical purposes, no longer fungible. If some entity can exert an overwhelming force about what our collective points-of-view ought to be, then it can often get its preference about what is equivalent to what.
The NFT example is useful because it shows how a protocol can support fungibility directly -- it can make a protocol-level distinction that X is not equivalent to Y. But protocol-level distinctions are not the only distinctions that matter, as various legal actions have demonstrated.
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If I delete the .png files from a NFT collection they are just a regular token like bitcoins
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I'd guess he mostly trying to distinguish them from non-fungible tokens.
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Another cool idea by Casey. This was an interesting part:
"One technique to avoid symbols squatting would be to only allow assignment of symbols above a certain length, with that length decreasing over time, before eventually reaching zero and allowing all symbols. This would avoid short, desirable symbols being assigned in the early days of the protocol, and encourage competition for desirable symbols later on, when such competition might be meaningful."
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lol i have to give him props for ignoring the haters
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Please...let's have some beer! Until we forget about it.
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I prefer these runes - https://pypi.org/project/runes/. Authentication allowing fine grained access controls to a lightning node (and appended restrictions, which can be quite handy.)
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Lol love how he says its used for 99.9% scams but heres the idea anyway, I guess we'll get a bunch of people minting runes in the next few months and bombing up blockspace to try and sell these things to a new bunch of suckers
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BRC 20 tokens are fungible tokens on Bitcoin I know of
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Another scam, another hype.
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Wish they used NFT for something meaningful instead of selling some Pixelated cartoons
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Be the change
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