Topic: Runes will be worthless. Don't waste your precious BTC on huge fees. (Read 1124 times)

Good thing the hype mostly ended. Mempool.space also report there aren't many TX on mempool which contain arbitrary data.



Although some of them use fake pubkey on multisig rather than OP_RETURN or inscription, which suggest SRC-20 or similar protocol still used by some people.

A little update:

It seems the second Runes wave in late may/early June is now also over.

Runes transactions are declining (again), and that has led to much nicer transaction fees in the last week:


Source: Cryptokoryo

But also the prices of individual Runes tokens have been weak in the last week. While "Dog go to the moon", the most popular Rune token afaik, could hold its value approximately (but staying 40% below of its ATH in mid-May), most of the tokens listed on Coingecko went down 10% or more. GOB*IS...etc. and MEMERUNE are bouncing a bit but they are also significantly (40 to 70%) below their ATH in May or June.

Will there be a third wave? For sure. But I guess it will be even weaker than the last wave.

I'm the same as you, I'm agnostic because technically they're not breaking the consensus rules and they're paying the miners the fees required to have their transactions in the blockchain. Who am I to tell them to leave?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Although I'm just a mere pleb, I'm very happy with my Bitcoin savings. The amount of shitcoinery I'm willing to do will be mere $100.00 bets for fun, not something to lose my sanity over. I'm having enough of that in Bitcoin.

the ordinals and runes are not NFT. nor bitcoin standard. they just want to abuse branding to get instant fame from other projects, whilst all these runes and ordinals offer is scammery

true NFT are like unique serial numbers/hashes per unit whereby they are not mass produced such as hundreds of units per utxo
true NFT have unique features that offer the recipient unique things

the runes and ordinals are more like ICO scams.. not NFT

as for true NFT we have yet to see the real best case utility/possibility of them, but these scams of runes and ordinals are not even in the same league/sector/category of NFT potential

You're correct, in most cases I think NFTs have a similar bleak "value proposition". This applies mostly to "collections" of small images with no artistic value. But at least they're unique. And that makes me understand the NFT frenzy a little bit more than the BRC-20 and Runes frenzy. There are also NFTs I could consider "art". And there are other non-artistic NFTs which can accrue value in some cases when people charge these images with symbolism. I guess that's what explains the whole Pepe frenzy or perhaps also the "Bored Apes". Basically they are a bit like collectibles.

In the case of the BRC-20/Runes tokens, however, the only thing they have as an USP is the name. And there are potentially thousands or even millions of token units ("token satoshis"). In theory, if you own one unit of a token you already get the benefit of the USP. Basically owning many of these tokens is like "Yeah, I'm rich because I'm owning 5% of the name (of a particular protocol, on a particular chain)". Of course there is also some symbolism involved like in the case of memecoins, but the analogy with "real" collectibles becomes much harder to understand.

Of course this doesn't apply to Runes/Ordinals which do have some specific purpose, like an in-game currency, or a crowdfunding mechanism.

What would you say about NFTs from that perspective? It's almost the same thing right.
Yet there are so many people buying and selling it everyday.
People have literally paid millions to buy some random creepy image.
I was really shocked to see such dumb people paying such high amount of money for such shit images.

I cannot really be sure regarding how the topics could overlap in terms of how we might talk about the effects of runes and ordinals (inscriptions too) on bitcoin, and including potentially our own personal financial considerations that might involve how much that we might want to get involved or financially dabble in pump and dump baloney as compared with just building our BTC holdings and/or engaging in other practices to try to protect our BTC holdings during many times that there might be both ambiguities in the market but also congestion on the blockchain that might cause some of our UTXOs to either unspendable or uneconomical to spend.

On a personal level, I don't really have any problem with guys who are tempted to gamble in various ways, including if they might see some potential areas in which they might earn more money - yet we know with bitcoin people might end up getting deceived and distracted away from bitcoin, as the prize possession... so if there is such a great asset such as bitcoin itself, why add additional risks when you have nearly a sure bet (yeah, I know nothing is guaranteed, so we have to account for even bitcoin not being guaranteed either)...

I know for you personally (Wind_FURY), many times you have claimed to come from a kind of impoverished starting point, so then there is a bit of an implication that you are having to struggle to build the size of your BTC holdings, so perhaps you are not even close to being in a position to having enough (or more than enough) BTC, so your distraction into other ways to increase your BTC stash seem to be greedy rather than practical, so maybe my own punchline consideration would be regarding how much of your BTC are you willing to put at risk in either your diversion of BTC into gambling on runes, decentralized finances, ordinals/inscriptions or whatever other bullshit pump and dump nonsense that you are identifying to potentially be profitable?  If we are talking less than 10% of your BTC holdings (without cheating about it), then sure, that might be within the realm of reasonable in order to satisfy your urges to gamble and to try to get rich quicker than you otherwise would be able to with a more pure bitcoin approach.

Also, I am not really opposed to the idea of learning about something through putting some money into it, even if there might be a bit of a waste of time element to the whole matter, yet we still come down to putting limits on ourselves so that we do not get too diverted from actual wealth building and if you are claiming to having poverty-stricken circumstances, then you likely already realize that it can take 30-40 years in traditional investment scenarios to build wealth and potentially get to fuck you status (and many folks do not even get there after more than 40 years investing and doing all the right things in traditional investments). 

So, bitcoin potentially gives you a chance to actually get to meaningful and significant wealth building in perhaps less than half of the time as traditional investing 15-20 years and maybe even higher chances of actually getting to such a wealth-built status, so why fuck it up by potentially getting greedy and/or overly dabbling in shitcoins (runes etc) merely based on the fact that you might be feeling somewhat wealthy based on your already 8-ish years in bitcoin (congrats, I see that you just passed your 8 year anniversary on the forum - can't be claiming newbie status anymore.. hahahahahaha).

So.. yeah, even folks who had been modestly investing in bitcoin over the last 8-ish years might have made a lot of mistakes and still be feeling that they are doing somewhat well in terms of their own bitcoin investment performance levels.  This can happen with any investment in terms of the psychological components of a wealth effect that might contribute towards more spending, risk taking, withdrawal of capital and/or even temptations to diversify that might not be reasonable/necessary - while at the same time, it might be difficult to recognize and/or appreciate the value of sticking to the earlier course of action that would be to be continuing to stay focused on the prize (bitcoin in this case) and not getting lured into shiny objects that may well merely be serving as ways to separate you from the bitcoin you have so far built to date and also the bitcoin that you would continue to be able to build by remaining focused on ongoing accumulation of bitcoin rather than other "possible things that might (or might not) return more."

It's not only reasonable. It's at its lowest after Ordinals' release and its popularity among shitcoining circles. That was a very quick cycle of money coming from the "prey" to the "predators" with nothing technically new to show for. Plus the fees, the miners' cut, which speeds up the plebs' losses to the Shitcoinery Casino.

But to be frank, I'm tempted. It might be a golden opportunity for "traders" because there might be a narrative for "Bitcoin DeFi"  this cycle. I'm not good in trading though.

Just checked again, and got the same result as yesterday night.

I'm seeing several orders under the "Buy" tab. I interpret that the "Buy" tab does not show the buy orders, but instead sell orders for Runes you can buy. You can see at the right side that when you click on an order, you see a button which enables you to buy these Runes when you connect a wallet to this marketplace. So I'm sure these are sell orders.

While when I go to the "Sell" tab, then I only see the "waiting" animation and no orders appear. I'm interpreting thus that nobody placed a buy order, or publicly declared interest to buy.

Do you see the same thing or do you see lots of orders under "Sell" (which should be buy orders)?

There are no sell orders appearing at all on the latest Google Chrome. What the heck is going on?

I am apparently experiencing the opposite scenario as you. There are so many buy orders available but no sell orders.

So I'm guessing that either means that someone is busy pumping and dumping most of the Runes (I mean why wouldn't that happen, since only a few crypto bros use it anyway) or else there really is a dysfunctional market for these things.

I may reconsider my stance on that. If we can be sure that this script has basically no real use case apart from storing data, perhaps you're right and it would at least not be blocking any interesting contracts.

I wonder what the current standardness rules for Taproot scripts are in Bitcoin Core (apart from consensus rules specified in BIP-342). For P2SH there were (almost) no rules for some time, but that has changed with time. For Taproot all I can find is this handful of rules in the code (policy.cpp), related mostly to MAX_STANDARD_TAPSCRIPT_STACK_ITEM_SIZE, the control block and annexes. So the above proposed rule would be far more "detailed" and could be interpreted as "arbitrary heuristics".

There was also a proposal in the Ordinals community to store the inscriptions in the "signature annex" which was still open in February 2024. Would that also be prevented or would this be one of the methods which would lead to a bigger UTXO set? Still a bit skeptic, because if this is implemented the nonstandard rule would not bring any benefit.

Meanwhile, some Runes seems to have recovered from the recent crash and got double digit increases in the last 7 days. So I don't discard a second wave incoming. I believe it will be much "lighter" than the first one though.


Here, for example. For some reason I'm not able to see buy orders for the most popular one "Dog go to the Moon" or this one starting with "Z", only sell orders. That would confirm my prediction but it's of course also possible that the website or my browser doesn't work correctly.

Personally since I don't have enough bitcoin to move around I didn't feel much bordered apart from recieving my campaign payment which I use for investing gradually and since it's relatively small i just leave it on the exchange for some time before I send to my wallet.

But it's a surprise to see the big issue that had many threads discussing high tx fees and the effect of Runes and Ordinals shit die off without notice. Whatever was done to pull that shit out of bitcoin is highly appreciated.

I will admit that I thought that the fees would stay higher for longer, and perhaps with a bit of uncertainty for several months.. .but, yeah we are ONLY about a month out and fees have been pretty damned reasonable for about the last week or so..

Where Can I find the order book? Couldn't find anywhere 

I saw só many people saying that bitcoin feels would be forever high, and nft were going to dominate bitcoin blocks... it died so fast lol

In Brazil we call this "chicken fight". Ever saw a chicken flying? Lol

Casey Rodarmor described Runes as something like a serious protocol for memecoinery/shitcoinery because he was skeptical of "serious tokens". From my perspective if a person wants to do some shitcoinery on top of Bitcoin, then use the more efficient Runes, don't use BRC-20.


To store token data, but there's nothing technically wrong with that, no?

It's almost die, where some exchange (including Binance) already delist it. And such change will take some time, so it's possible BRC-20 will die or at least closer to die.


AFAIK there's no security risk. But why should it considered as standard, when the script itself never executed (due to OP_FALSE in the beginning)?

Finally, it was a matter of time before they become worthless, it's in our best interest that this has finally happened, I don't even think that runes have ever contributed anything to bitcoin besides the congestion of the network, hopefully we get to see more normal transaction fees and reasonable transaction fees now that runes are basically worthless. I still thank those people that have wasted their bitcoin though, some of them are doing something for the market of bitcoin so they still get some high five from me.

It's true what you're saying; most people who say this coin is shit or that coin is shitcoin are usually the ones who end up being humiliated. And what most people say is shitcoin and that your capital is dangerous in those coins; instead of decreasing, investors are increasing even more due to the intensity of the hype.

Therefore, these shitcoins that are highly hyped are usually the investors who are obsessed with them; they are the ones who get rich, and the others get it right when they suddenly lose the size of the income from meme coins, or shitcoins as they call them.

I'd like to add a point to this discussion, because I disagree a little bit with you both.

In general I think the use case to fund a company with a premined token, be it on Bitcoin (less recommendable, but I could see some reasons for Bitcoin-specific apps) or on Ethereum or whatever, is not bad per se. It's often hard for companies to get fresh money when they start, above all in parts of the world where loans are not easy to obtain, and the opportunity to create something similar to a "share" on a crypto platform can actually make sense. Above all of course for crypto-related projects, but not only for them.

Cryptocurrencies still are bad for handling the "lending" use case: If you lend BTC to someone and the BTC price spikes or takes a dip, then one of both parties will get an extra benefit. Thus "lending" is mainly a thing in DeFi protocols where people basically use that to leverage trading between different shitcoins, but you wouldn't use a BTC lending platform for a credit to build your house, or to fund your company.

Tokens, on the other hand, are one way to manage "lending" for projects, because this allows them to offer a "value" independent from the volatility of existing cryptocurrencies. Of course the "cleanest" way to do that is to create an utility token which can be traded 1=1 for a service they provide. But sometimes this is not possible in the early stages. But in general, I think this instrument can be handled in a correct way.

But of course @buwaytress you are right about the impression that several of these project searched for a problem what didnt't exist. And some of course were - and still are - outright scams. The challenge is of course: how can investors be protected from that? For some it's like gambling, I think those investing in meme tokens know exactly what they can lose. But some get scammed by projects which look "serious".

Perhaps some kind of "transparency standard" for serious token projects could be elaborated, e.g. with voluntary "quarterly reports", a "prospectus" and so on (no, a "roadmap" is not enough ). In some jurisdictions I know this is actually already mandatory for security tokens (including EU from July on), but I think projects from other countries should embrace this kind of transparency too.

It's great that bitcoin is in a way purifying itself of all that useless stuff.

I can't say I'm unhappy because the fees went back to normal and all the people who were overpaying hundreds of dollars to put ordinals or runes into the blockchain lost. I appreciate the effort but you guys lost and bitcoin won.

Nobody is going to miss ordinals and runes but people who thought they'd do money from it, just like nobody cares that NFTs are worthless but people who still own them.