Topic: Runes will be worthless. Don't waste your precious BTC on huge fees. (Read 534 times)

If you think "Bitcoin DeFi" includes everything involving the currency "Bitcoin", then I can agree. So if you include tools like RGB/Taproot Assets, where some of the operations are taken off-chain, then I see a bright future for "Bitcoin DeFi".

But on-chain Bitcoin DeFi should be quite difficult, because Bitcoin's blocks are much more limited than Ethereum's, and thus the high fee problem will make many typical DeFi operations unfeasible. Some years ago, the Counterparty project intended to bring a extensive DeFi suite to Bitcoin but even the fees in 2016 (much lower than those today) were too high for an ecosystem to evolve, while Ethereum thrived. They had even planned Turing complete smart contracts (see here) but development stalled for a long time; more recently it seems to have made progress in this field again.

A "good" outcome could be that Runes people could develop a technology similar to OmniBolt using LN for Runes Transactions. But being aware that the Runes community is very much a spinoff of the Ordinals community and they were quite eager to put everything onchain, I doubt that.

From the standpoint of an user spending fees to "etch" or "mint" a rune which will never see a buyer, the money is wasted.

I still am unsure if it's positive or negative that Runes fees are delaying the effects of halving to miners. I tend towards the latter: the miner income drop will come eventually, so it's currently only delaying it, with the cost of people leaving Bitcoin (delaying adoption "as a currency") because the network is more expensive to use.

@satscraper: Seems to be an obvious move to delay the death of Ordinals with some circlejerk token distribution, like the "Runestone" Ordinal tokens (not to be confused with the Runestone Rune platform ...)

@franky1: A full node is every node hosting all the data necessary to validate Bitcoin transactions. It should not be necessary to host the "original" data.

Most of Runes will obviously die, and buying them today will absolutely be a very stupid financial decision. BUT, from a viewpoint of a user who wants to do his/her shitcoinery exclusively in Bitcoin, Runes might unlock a very LARGE amount of capital in the system - if they do it right. Bitcoin DeFi could be as big as Ethereum DeFi in my opinion.

There are builders that are bringing smart contract programmability on-chain, https://www.arch.network/

Plus for "wasting" our precious Bitcoins on huge fees, listen to OP. Plebs like us don't have enough capital for on-chain shitcoinery in Bitcoin. BUT for those users who decide to pay for huge fees, they are technically not wasted. They pay the miners to secure the network and to continue mining new Bitcoins to distribute in the system.

They launched RSICs - Rune Specific Inscription Circuits - that allows to mine runes. Those RSICs were distributed among particularly ardent ordinals fans.

The more of these RSICs a rune-miner has and the more transactions containing them will be included in one bitcoin  block, the greater the mining power of this miner, and therefore the greater the likelihood to mine the metablock relevant to those runes , the total number of which should not exceed 21,000,000,000, just like with Bitcoin.

That is why rune-miners have the  incentive in having  in the bitcoin  block as many  RSICs-containing-transactions as possible and increase fee rate allocated for such transactions.

The secondary market for these runes has already begun to form and reportedly the price for one RSIC is around 0.12BTC.  

 

running a fool node is not a full node(they sound the same, but not the same)
once you start pruning/stripping data and not validating data you are not a full node, you are not part of the same security level of full node network of peers that offer true IBD to new full nodes nor are you able to then relay certain unconfirmed transactions as you are not validating full length data of transactions such as signing proofs after certain opcodes

but yes gmaxwell sees a future where actual full nodes are not a free offering/open source, but instead a SaaS people have to subscribe to
.. and their lays the rub.. core dev wanting to privatise full nodes and pretend the free(fool) version is "full" when its not

In the case of Runes, this is not correct. Runes uses a quite old mechanism: OP_RETURN. It was introduced already by Satoshi, but made standard in v0.9 (in 2014) just to allow data to be stored in a way the rest of the users and nodes are affected the less possible.

Why was it introduced? Because in 2013/14, a lot of token and NFT mechanisms were created which used other techniques, like encoding the data in a fake public key. This is still possible, and in fact this is the way Stampchain SRC-20 and Doginals (on Dogecoin, which uses old Bitcoin code) work. In these olden days token systems like Mastercoin (now Omni) didn't create that much of a fee spike than Runes/Ordinals do nowadays. But the reason why it was seen as harmful is that it introduces UTXOs which will never be spent, and these UTXOs have to be kept in memory by the nodes.

Basically, devs realized that there was no way to prevent arbitrary data being stored on the blockchain. So they "legalized" a way which makes it less harmful. OP_RETURN outputs can be safely pruned by full nodes.

So technically, Runes is an "ok" technology, very much contrasting with BRC-20 which is harmful because of its inefficient mechanism leading to excessive bloat, and hopefully died now.

But the economic model of tokens which are first "etched" by somebody, then "minted" by anyone, and then should accrue some kind of value? That's really Fantasialand, worse than memecoins and other altcoin stuff, and that's why I'm making fun of those people here in the thread

Here you could be right. At least there are already techniques being developed to validate the chain without having to store everything, and thus being able to provide a complete "full node" in a pruned state, deleting most of the data items/tokens on the chain. "Token lovers" would then have to reccur on archival nodes, which for several reasons (e.g. legal risk) will probably not be free to use. This should make the whole token business unviable in the long term, at least on Bitcoin.

Any "token" built on top of bitcoin's current on-chain infrastructure will eventually be worthless.
It's well established that these types of tokens are exploiting certain features that Taproot and SegWit have to upload data on the blockchain that wasn't meant to be there. It's fitting to the definition of a bug because this is very far from intended functionality.

If from a certain point on this gets addressed, transacting these types of "tokens" will be deprecated. Just having them sit on-chain without being able to move them would be very odd, but it's a realistic scenario. With more and more people getting fed up with transaction fees especially, core developers have also gotten up to the task of discussing to find a solution to this issue. Hopefully we see some resolution soon and the fools looking to upload PNGs on-chain will have to move on uploading their files to a shitcoin's "blockchain".

Even if today there was a new maximum of Runes transactions, there is somewhat good news: As of now, every day less new runes tokens are created ("etched"). So the current transactions are basically Runes which already exist but now people are minting them. Then there will be a new wave when they're trying to sell them.

While of course it was to expect that the halving block was the most popular one, it could have been expected that in the next days the "etching" activity was stable or even growing due to lower fees, but instead until now there's a steady decline.



Source: CryptoKoryo Runes Dashboard

Also, Ordinals seem to have died. Same will happen to Runes, the question is only "when"

You're correct. I'd forgot that. Corrected the post. Anyway it's now owned by an exchange business, and exchanges also benefit from these hypes.

I really hope all this rune/ordinals stuff will be forgotten by next cycle

DCG sold coindesk to NYSE ex president tom farley

About the "miner conspiracy": I noticed that Coindesk is generally quite positive about Ordinals, BRC-20, Runes and related stuff (examples are: this article, this or this video). Well, Coindesk is was owned until late 2023 (edited) by the Digital Currency Group (Barry Silbert's company), which is not a mining company itself (it also owns Grayscale and several exchanges) but owns a subsidiary which is into mining: Foundry.

So while I don't think there is really a conspiracy, I think miners are not unhappy about these developments and may try to push them with associated media. It's actualy old style lobbyism.

Exchange companies are also happy with everything related to new tokens they could list and be charging fees for. So in media related to exchanges, it should also be no surprise if the tone about Runes and Ordinals is favourable.

Coindesk's current owner is an exchange company called Bullish, so that fits in the picture too (Edited: See above). At least I feel it's a bit "strange" that we see such few articles in crypto media critical to phenomenons like BRC-20. NFT sellers, exchange companies and mining advertising can also play a role.

I'm personally not categorically against Runes, it's a better protocol than BRC-20 for sure, and such tokens could actually also be used for useful purposes. My problem is the economic model behind most of the tokens, and that they could also simply be deployed on an altchain more suitable for it. Also that it is presented as something "new" when it is a protocol very close to old-style Coloured Coins (Colu protocol, for example).

Runes are already dead! NFT mania is already dead! These are worthless things which is ruining the Bitcoin network and making bitcoin transactions super expensive. Just so tired of these nonsense!


This is surely a possibility! Because when the transaction fees go up, no one else is benefitted apart from the miners. But if this continues, Bitcoin will become an investment only and people will find new cryptos to make daily transaction. It's defeating the whole purpose of bitcoin.

 

That would be a very good argument and it might not be a conspiracy theory because the miners' earnings per block is -50% hhehehe. They also cannot easily leave mining because they have invested so much money already. They need to more resourceful.

I speculate that if one of the biggest Chinese miners begin selling their business, this will be a warning sign that mining will become more centralized faster than what we have witnessed.

Do you think the people who create and buy this shit don't think they can make a lot of money from it, surely they believe they can, and that is why they are in for something this worthless, you and i may know that this spam is worthless, but maybe not those who are into it.
This is a conspiracy theory that you cannot prove.

Why there are still people getting attracted to these kind of investments?

TBH, I don't care how investors invest their money. What I don't like is these people trying to use Bitcoin for their own sake. First, it's the Ordinals that made the transaction fees of Bitcoin rise to a point where it's very much pointless to make a transaction of Bitcoin blockchain. Now we are seeing a "here comes a new challenger" moment in Runes where they are doing the same thing as Ordinals did in the past. Increase the transaction fees to a point where it's pretty much useless to transact using Bitcoin again.

Well, the hype (if there is) around these Runes sh*t will just die down in a few months like what happened to Ordinals and pretty much soon, we will see transaction fees of Bitcoin back to normal. As for now, like what we did when Ordinals increased the transaction fees, we need to find an alternative way to make transactions. Ordinals. Runes. More will be coming soon I guess? What's worse is there are investors who are investing on these type of sh*t.

I don't doubt that there is an immediate or even short-term value of all this ordinal nonsense, but in the long term we can say that there is a high probability that this value will not exist because some new projects will push the old ones into oblivion. Someone has obviously found a gold mine and will dig in that mine as long as they can make a profit, and you can always sell the same junk to naive people just by changing the packaging.