Runes: Tokens on Bitcoin | Casey Rodamor

Today’s episode is about exploring the frontier of tokens on Bitcoin with guest Casey Rodarmor. Casey is the creator of the Ordinals Protocol, a harmless protocol that simply allowed for arbitrary data to be inscribed into individual Bitcoin UTXOs, creating what are called Bitcoin NFTs. He is now also the creators of Runes, a second protocol, working to bring fungible tokens to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is changing and Casey appears to be one of main reasons for the change. Soon he’ll be unveiling a new protocol standard for Bitcoin - called Runes, which wants to be a bitcoin-native version of fungible tokens, on the Bitcoin L1 - which is going to be the topic of the show today. ------ 📣 PERMISSIONLESS III | BUY TICKETS NOW Bankless Citizens get 30% off: https://www.bankless.com/tools/perks Use BANKLESS10 for 10% off: https://bankless.cc/PermissionlessIII ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo 🔐 SAFE | ATTEND SAFE{CON} https://bankless.cc/SafeCon ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 5:00 The Guy Who Changed Bitcoin 10:21 Why Casey’s Building 16:45 Ordinals Cultural Shift 22:43 Runes 31:40 The Ord Standard 45:27 Bitcoin Blocks & Blockspace Limit 57:47 Bitcoin Innovation Implications 1:02:41 Rune Parameters 1:11:20 The First Runes (Uncommon Goods) 1:14:34 Timeline on Runes & Trading Ecosystem 1:17:12 The Future of Runes/Ordinals 1:19:48 The Bitcoin Renaissance 1:21:34 Winning Over Bitcoin Maximalists 1:23:45 Casey’s Podcast 1:24:58 Runes Team 1:26:37 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Casey’s 1st Bankless Episode https://youtu.be/ktL77zEWcEc Casey’s Twitter https://twitter.com/rodarmor Casey’s Hellmoney Podcast https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCflejnUswWof6yEMk9dRzOA ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today on Bankless, we are exploring the frontier of tokens on Bitcoin. Since the introduction of ordinals to Bitcoin, over 65 million inscriptions have been made, paying almost 7,000 Bitcoins, about half a billion dollars of fees to the Bitcoin network. As a result of the explosion of ordinals on Bitcoin, the entire Bitcoin ecosystem has experienced a changing of the season. Bitcoin builders, Bitcoin pragmatists, Bitcoin renaissanceers have all rallied behind this shift in Bitcoin culture, spawning a new era for the protocol, while laser-eyed Bitcoin monetary maximalists continue to claim that Bitcoin is only for BTC transfers.

• 0:43David Hoffman?

  Fast forward to today, Casey Rotemore appears to drop yet another bomb into Bitcoin land, this time with a new protocol standard for Bitcoin called Runes, which wants to be a Bitcoin native version of fungible tokens on the Bitcoin Layer 1, which is going to be the topic of the show today.

• 1:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Our assistance to you through this episode is to ask a whole bunch of the dumb questions to actually make this thing make sense. So that's what we did. We have Casey on the episode today. Before we get into the conversation, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our number one recommended crypto exchange and maybe the place in the future you can buy your Bitcoin tokens. That is Kraken. Go create an account.

• 1:21David Hoffman?

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• 2:06David Hoffman?

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• 2:47David Hoffman?

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• 3:29David Hoffman?

  can elevate to generational wealth for your kids and your loved ones who don't know anything about crypto with casa you won't lose your private keys and you won't accidentally take them to the grave either click the link in the description to get started securing your generational wealth bankless nation Casey rotemore is the creator of the ordinals protocol a harmless protocol that simply allows for arbitrary data to be inscribed into individual bitcoin utxos creating what we call bitcoin nfts he is now also the creator of runes a second protocol working to bring fungible tokens to bitcoin Casey welcome back to bankless what's up good to be with you guys yeah it's been like a year since the launch year year and change since the launch of ordinals

• 4:09David Hoffman?

  that we did this David called it harmless dude why'd you say harmless are there protocols that are like more harmful well all that really is an allusion to is just like it is within the consensus rules of bitcoin to do this so of course by definition it works in bitcoin so therefore it's harmless right Casey

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think they're I think they're both pretty harmless protocols. I wouldn't have done them if I thought that they were bad for Bitcoin. I think that they're probably good for Bitcoin. And actually, I do not do things that I do think are harmful. In particular, whenever I think of some idea that I think might lead to some sort of like MEV extraction being available on Bitcoin, I will not do it. The haters probably think that I don't I don't give a shit and I'll do anything. But yeah, I'm generally pretty careful, actually.

• 5:02David Hoffman?

  MEV on Bitcoin is, I think, where like this conversation logically concludes at. But maybe that it might have to be a podcast for a different day. The way I want to start this one, Casey, is kind of just going back to Bitcoin as this concept, right? So Bitcoin is known as this protocol that no one can change. That's why Bitcoin is what it is. You can't change the hard cap. You can't change people's account balances. No one can change Bitcoin. However, I would also say, at the same time, you have unequivocally, undoubtedly changed Bitcoin through the addition of ordinals into the Bitcoin block space. So it's on a new path that I would also say is holistically inclusive of its old path. But now the future of what Bitcoin is, what people are imagining for Bitcoin is now entirely

• 5:46David Hoffman?

  different post-introduction of articles. And like we said, you have done this all from inside the consensus rules of Bitcoin. How does it feel to be the guy that changed Bitcoin?

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Feels good, I guess. I don't know. It's nice. I mean, if you look at the Bitcoins sort of graph chart of Bitcoin fees over the last, I don't know, if you go to like mempool.space and you look at it, I think the maximum is like six years or seven years or something. You can see that there's like long period with very low fees and then a short period of high fees and then another long period of no fees and then a short period of high fees and then another period of low fees. And then we get to like January, February of last year and the fees just spike. The fees just spike and take off and they've been, except for one brief moment where the mempool actually did clear for like a few days, there's been a back Clog of quite a few blocks of transactions since then.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  And I think that's really good. Bitcoin, as the subsidy declines, every four years, there's a halving and the subsidy of the subsidy, i.e. the new Bitcoin created in each block, which are rewarded to the miners, gets cut in half. So Bitcoin's destiny is relying on transaction fees. And those transaction fees must be high and they must be persistent to secure the network. So although, of course, I do think that the most important use case of Bitcoin is Bitcoin, the monetary asset. Like, I think Bitcoin is enough. Bitcoin, the asset, and transferring that asset and be able to save in Bitcoin and pay people in Bitcoin is like enough of a justification for the network to exist.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  I think that having sources of fees from as many different sources as possible is good. So I think it's, I'm very happy to have contributed to that. And I don't, you know, Bitcoin's halving is really precipitous, right? Cutting in half every four years is a really substantial drop. Like, we're going down to 0.16 Bitcoin after this next halving in like four days. And then after that, it's even less, right? So in a couple halvings, we'll really be down to not very much at all. And so I think that the fee market needs to get jump-started sooner or later. There will be other sources of demand for block space, but it's very good to get those sources of block space, even if they're from unsavory things as, you know, monkey JPEGs

• 8:10Speaker 02

  and shitcoins.

• 8:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Unsavory but harmless, right, Casey? It's just harmless right here.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  I mean, I think a lot of it is unsavory and harmful, right? I mean, the vast majority of NFTs, I think, are like stupid, ugly, like waste of time and space.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Same with fungible tokens. I think, actually, fungible tokens are probably even worse than NFTs. But ultimately, I think that they are essentially a form of gambling, a form of speculation, right? Like, I think that if you zoom out, cryptocurrency is actually just this big MMO that people play together with all these different shiny currencies that You can exchange for money. And they provide a sort of like this online digital casino that people like like to play. And there's there's different levels of harm, right? Like, so I think that the worst things are like outright scams where there's like some, you know, token and then there's some rug pull. I think the next worst thing are things which I would say are like, I kind of call them like structural scams.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Where you have founders who are very well intentioned. But the things that they're building are never going to come to fruition. And I think that's like 90, maybe 99% of everything out there, right? So even if they're not scams, even if there's no dishonesty in the heart of the creators. They're making all these promises that are never going to come true. They mint a token. It never goes anywhere. It has a classic like pump and dump, you know, fall off. Maybe least harmful is like meme coins. Where everybody kind of knows like, okay, this is not going to be the future of finance or whatever. But they still, you know, go up and down. So yeah, people lose money, people make money. I don't think it overall, it's a great

• 9:55Speaker 02

  activity. I don't think a lot of it is, provides really much benefit, much like net benefit.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  But I'm sort of glad to move people onto Bitcoin, hopefully, and move people towards the meme coin kind of direction of that activity and not thinking that, you know, there's going to be a like a what you call it, a metaverse like that that some token is going to get you access to, you know?

• 10:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I guess your your comment is most of the use cases of the the stuff that you're building or enabling on top of Bitcoin are kind of like, like scams or like not great? This is kind of a question. So so Casey, why are you doing it then?

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Well, so I'm I'm not a huge fan of most of cryptocurrency outside of Bitcoin. I think that it's like.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Pretty useless. A lot of it is pretty broken. And if people want to do those things, I would prefer them to be paying those fees to Bitcoin and securing Bitcoin, the network. I think it's also kind of unfortunate if people sort of get into cryptocurrency into like NFTs or fungible tokens or whatever, and they land in some random part of the ecosystem. And then they stay there and they never get to like Bitcoin, the asset, right? They, you know, land on some other chain like, you know, Tron or Ethereum or something, and they get huge bags on that chain. And I don't think like the, I don't think those chains are super decentralized.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Like, I'm not super confident that Ethereum, for example, could withstand like a nation-state attacker just due to its complexity and its fragility. So I think it's unfortunate if they do those things and they land in these other parts of the ecosystems and they never like make it to Bitcoin. So I'd sort of like to redirect a lot of the D gens just directly towards Bitcoin. So yeah, even though a lot of these activities, I think, are sort of like net negative. I think that the moving those activities onto Bitcoin is a net positive.

• 12:10David Hoffman?

  Okay, so there's nothing about like ordinals or what we're going to get to runes that's like fixing the humans that build on top of shitcoins and NFTs like that all, that's all saying the same. You're just saying this is a means to an end to produce that same kind of activity, not fix that activity, but at least move that activity towards a place where at least will actually help sustain Bitcoin, which you see as like is a noble pursuit. Bitcoin is a noble pursuit. And so at least like the exhaust from NFT speculation and meme coin speculation can at least be funneled into the Bitcoin system and also bring a bunch of users much more proximate to BTC, the asset. That's, that's your perspective?

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of other things like as far as the NFTs go, I do think that there are some things about inscriptions that are better than NFTs on other chains. So for example, inscriptions are not arbitrary smart contracts, right? They are, there is a single implementation of inscriptions, and that is that which is in the org client and the rules for how inscriptions are created and transferred. And there's only way to, one way to store inscription data, which is on-chain. And so I do think that those things are better. I think it's bad if somebody winds up buying a NFT on another chain and eventually what they wind up owning is they own a, you know, link to a JPEG on a Amazon server.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  Or if they own a hash that points in IPFS and they don't understand that when the last computer seeding that data to IPFS goes away, their asset, you know, becomes worthless. Or they don't understand that, you know, each NFT, each ERC 721 is a different smart contract that can have its own bugs, its own backdoors, its own, you know, upgrade keys or whatever. I don't think any NFT purchaser does, you know, quote unquote, due diligence. So I think it's good to, I think those aspects of inscriptions are good, that they're all on-chain, that there's only one smart contract, that there's sort of this uniformity that people sort of, just from the sort of consumer protection angle.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  And then with runes, I think it's good, I'm very like shitcoin forward, I'm, or like, I'm unapologetic about this. I'm not telling people that this is the future of finance. I'm not telling people that this is going to, you know, we're gonna have like pharmaceutical research on the blockchain or whatever. I'm saying like, no, this is for like memes and shitcoins. And the biggest tokens, I mean, people have been pre-degenning on runes, which is pretty insane, like it hasn't launched yet and there's all these people saying like, oh, like buy our inscription, we're gonna airdrop you like runes or like whatever. But they're like all meme coins. And so I think it's, I would rather there to be more meme coins, because I actually think that even though meme coins are like, yeah, obviously they're just, you know, pure speculation. I think it's worse than projects that say

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Oh, we're going to do something that's like really revolutionary. And whether they believe it or not, whether they're being honest or not, that pitch, I think, is a lot more likely to confuse people and cause people to think that they're investing in some sort of like, like a tech stock, right, that has this chance of going to the moon. When in reality, like, almost none of those have paid off. So I think that there is that advantage to inscriptions and to runes, that they sort of, in some ways, are better, either structurally or due to the technology or due to just the sort of, the zeitgeist around them. And the same thing about there only one being one implementation of inscriptions also applies to runes.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Runes are not a arbitrary smart contract. They're not, each one is an arbitrary smart contract. Each one has a small number of parameters that are set when the rune is created and are unchangeable after that. And so it's literally just like five numbers that determine the parameters of the rune, including a literal like premine. Like, if you want to premine your rune, runes have an open mint mechanic similar to BRC 20. And you don't have to, but you can, when you create your rune, have this open mint, and you can also have a pre-allocation to yourself. That is called the premine. And if you go to the page of the rune on ordinals.com or any other Block Explorer, it will say premine

• 16:37Speaker 02

  and will tell you the amount of the premine.

• 16:40David Hoffman?

  You're printing premines into the Bitcoin protocol.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, into the Bitcoin protocol, right in there, just right in there.

• 16:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Casey, I, you know, I almost was tempted to ask you a little bit about like whether you think stablecoins are a shitcoin, whether that's possible in the infrastructure you're building. But we'll save that, you know, like for later. I want to, you like, ask the broader context of this. So the way David introduced you, and you seem to partially accept this, as somebody who has changed Bitcoin. And what's interesting is you could totally see the stuff that you're building with ordinals and now later runes is definitely changed the fee, the fee market of Bitcoin, right? We've seen that. And by the way, from like, you know, I consider myself a Bitcoiner. I don't know if they'd accept me. I accept Bitcoiners and Bitcoin culture and all of this. One of my big concerns, longstanding concerns with Bitcoin was didn't have a sustainable

• 17:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  security defense fund, right? Once block subsidies run out. And now this has really ameliorated that concern for me. Like, I'm seeing block space being sold for other use cases. And so like, that's great from my perspective. But when David says you've changed things, I think he's talking about the fee market and you'd acknowledge that. And that's part of the value proposition of what you're bringing. But also, you've sort of changed the social layer, I would say. Like, it's now, it's within the overton window of acceptance to like, build on Bitcoin again. Not with everybody, but I would say with like, with generally like crypto participants. And maybe like generally inside like Bitcoin culture. Building is a thing once again.

• 18:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so I guess I'm curious from your perspective. How, what has been the effect of like ordinals on Bitcoin in generally, maybe from a cultural, you know, like perspective? Has it, has it brought this Renaissance that we've been talking about? And like, you know, is that significant? Because some Bitcoiners we talked to is just like, they don't even acknowledge that Bitcoin culture is kind of like a thing. You know, like, tell us about that.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, before inscriptions, I would say that Bitcoin culture was in pretty rough shape. It was sort of this very boring and very insular culture, right? Where everybody has this like, I mean, everybody has this like pet rock and like number go up, right? And the rock gets more and more valuable. And that's not bad. Like, that's Bitcoin's value proposition. But that is not a very interesting thing to build a culture around. And it had gotten very ideological, I'd say, where people were.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Sort of putting this like very boring, very annoying like moral spin on it where Bitcoin was like the savior to like the poisonous like fiat world. And to be clear, I do believe that. I do believe that Bitcoin is the savior to the poisonous fiat fiat world. But it'd just gotten very boring, very insular. Everybody was listening to the same like six podcasts and going to the same six like circle jerk conferences. And so Ordinals brought in a huge mass of just like degens who like just wanted to play and like have fun and make money and pump their like Pepe bags. And overall, I think that's good. I mean, it's just a whole bunch of new people with new ideas. I don't remember when we started hearing this idea of like a Bitcoin Renaissance. It was probably like a couple of months after

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Ordinals and inscriptions started taking off. And at first, I was really skeptical. I was like, what are you talking about? These are like JPEGs of the blockchain. Like, there's there's no Renaissance. Like, what are you talking about, guys? Like, these are NFTs? Like, that's just what they are. Like, this is not a Renaissance. But overall, I think, like, as time went on, I became more and more convinced that that was actually the case, right? We actually saw a lot of investment, a lot of people who like wanted to build, smart people like Reindall, who were all of a sudden prominent on the scene, being like, oh, look, there are these like interesting things we can do with this. I still think that inscriptions are like, not gonna, you know, be the basis of some sort of, you know, like technological Renaissance. But I do think that that new culture and that new

• 20:41Speaker 02

  energy and all those new people have, to some extent, led to some kind of Bitcoin Renaissance, much to the consternation of the, a lot of the OG Bitcoiners, who, some of them have really like dug in their heels and they're like actively trying to fight all of it. And they're gonna lose, right? The same thing that makes Bitcoin a good, uncensorable digital money also makes it a very good platform for, you know, your not being able to censor other people's preposterous ideas. So they kind of can't win. And like, once you had inscriptions, and once you had big markets for inscriptions, then you started seeing effort being put towards building all these other things. So for example, the ability

• 21:25Speaker 02

  to borrow Bitcoin against your inscriptions, because you want to get some liquidity so you can degen on other inscriptions. So people built that. That's kind of DeFi, I guess. That's kind of DeFi. And there had been no demand for such things. That's why such things didn't exist. And then with BRC 20, BRC 20 is a fungible token standard, which is a meta-protocol on top of inscriptions, like inscriptions are a meta-protocol on top of Bitcoin. And then BRC 20 is a medical protocol on top of inscriptions to make fungible tokens. And with that, there was all this like B-Fi or Bitcoin-Fi or whatever, using inscription, using BRC 20 is to do god knows what.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  BRC 20 is a really terrible standard that runes improves on in a lot of different ways. And I'm sure that once we have a robust, you know, market for runes, we'll then see a lot of DeFi constructs on top of runes. So it's, it's sort of like a demand-led Renaissance, right? The D gens want these things. They want to trade. They want to borrow. They want to do whatever preposterous things they want to do. And once enough people want that and are willing to pay for it, then we start to get development of those things.

• 22:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, definitely in this conversation, I want to open up like, what is composability look like in the DeFi, the Bitcoin DeFi space? Because like, like you said, first we have ordinals, now we have runes. Maybe, and I really want to start to get to into the runes conversation, kind of unpack the construction of runes. But maybe we could actually do that by starting with the ordinals protocol first. So of course, ordinals introduced non-fungible assets. I don't know if you would call them tokens, but at least non-fungible assets into the Bitcoin network, complete with like arbitrary data. Not unlike leveraging Bitcoin block space in the way that Ethereum layer twos leverage Ethereum blob space. For those Ethereum listeners who only speak Ethereum. So like an ordinal, it creates a single UTXO in the Bitcoin.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Just, just to be clear, like the terminology is often mixed up. Ordinals or like ordinal theory, quote unquote, is this, actually very simple protocol for tracking sats, for tracking individual satoshis, for assigning them individual identity and then tracking them across transactions. So you can sort of. Pretend that each Satoshi, which is 1 100 millionth of a Bitcoin, can actually move between transactions and quote-unquote "lives" in a specific Bitcoin UTXO. And then an inscription is assigning digital content, inscribing that Satoshi with content that's been included on a Bitcoin transaction. And then that SAT is an inscription which becomes this NFT. I call them digital artifacts for weird reasons, but token is totally fair.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  They're NFTs.

• 24:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, perfect. Yeah, that was a perfect explanation of ordinals. So I don't actually think we need to go even into more than that. I think that was great. How, as we get into the actual, the architecture of runes, like, is anything carried over from ordinals? It's a brand-new protocol, straight from scratch? How do you, when you open up the rune explanation, how do you start it?

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so yeah, it is a brand-new protocol, started from scratch. One of the things that I didn't like about BRC20 is that because it's a meta-protocol on top of inscriptions and ordinals, it's very complicated because it inherits the full complexity of ordinals and inscriptions and then adds this new layer on top of it. So runes is a totally separate protocol. It doesn't store data in the same place as inscriptions. It uses op returns, which are... The benefit of op returns is that you only have to make one transaction to put data in an op return, as opposed to an inscription where you actually have to make two transactions. One transaction to commit to the data that you want to include, and then another transaction to reveal that data,

• 25:16Speaker 02

  which is just because of the way that Bitcoin signatures work and the way that the witness data is stored. The rune protocol messages, which are whimsically titled rune stones, are stored in op returns, which are just these kind of dummy outputs of a Bitcoin transaction that say, "Hey, this transaction, this output is never spendable, so you don't need to track it in the UTXO set." And here's like a script, which would normally be the locking script of this output, but instead we just use it to carry arbitrary data. So the runes extend UTXOs to not just have a balance in SATs,

• 26:00Speaker 02

  but to have a balance in any number of different runes. So your UTXO, which is worth 1,000 SATs, can also have, you know, 100 of the foo rune and a million of the bar rune. And... When a, yeah, we're gonna have the bar runes soon. So when you spend a transaction output, like outputs are created by transactions. And then when you spend them as inputs to other transactions, they're destroyed. They go away, they're deleted. This is sort of one of the differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ethereum has an account model where every wallet has a public key. That public key doesn't change and all of the state that you have with Ethereum,

• 26:44Speaker 02

  your token balances are all associated with that one account. And so when you spend Ethereum, you debit and credit that account. Bitcoin has this odd model of the UTXO set, the UTXO set model, unspent transaction output set, where your wallet has a discrete number of these little piles of satoshis. And when you send somebody Bitcoin, what you're doing is you're taking some of those piles you own, putting them into a transaction, which destroys them, like takes them off the table, and creating a new output with some balance of sats that that other person owns. And so inscriptions, you know, ride these sats through these outputs. And similarly, runes also augment UTXOs with balances of different runes.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  So in the absence of a rune protocol message, if you have a transaction that just spends inputs that contain runes, by default, all of the runes and all of the inputs go to the first non-op return output of that transaction. So sort of the default is to consolidate to one output. And then if you want a different allocation, you know, you don't want all of your runes to go to the first output. You include a rune stone, which contains things called edicts. And edicts are just instructions that say which amount of which runes should go to which output. So that way you can get like an arbitrary distribution of runes between those different outputs.

• 28:10David Hoffman?

  Okay, so let me try and summarize this to the best of my ability and maybe you'll have to actually check me on something. We don't actually talk about UTXOs too much on the Bankless Podcast, surprise, surprise, because it just doesn't come up that much in Ethereum land. I think the only system on Ethereum that uses UTXOs is the Aztec network and it does that for privacy purposes. And the interesting thing about the account model universe and the UTXO universe is, I'm pretty sure those are like kind of the only two like digital accounting systems that we've really come up with. It's either account models or UTXO models. And like, for Bankless listeners who are unfamiliar with UTXOs, think about like a UTXO as like an arbitrary denomination of like a bill. Typically in

• 28:51David Hoffman?

  fiat land, we're used to like 1 and 5 and 10 and 20 bills. A UTXO transaction is like a specific bill that's denominated in a specific number of satoshis. So like you would have like a 26.72 like dollar bill, but that's a UTXO. But then you have another UTXO that's like $13.42. And then you, as the owner of a private key that has both of these UTXOs, you can make a transaction that combines these UTXOs together and all of a sudden they like, I can't remember the numbers, but like you would add those two UTXOs together to make a third UTXO, which then you would send to someone for when you're sending them Bitcoins. And then you would actually get another UTXO back, back to your own private

• 29:35David Hoffman?

  key as like the rest of what's left over that you didn't send to that person. So Bitcoin has a system for like tracking and spending UTXOs. And Casey, what you're talking about is that Runes also has a system for tracking individual satoshis through the UTXO set that permeates, no?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Runes doesn't track individual satoshis. So Runes don't exist on a single satoshi in a UTXO. They just exist on the UTXO as a whole. So there's no sat tracking involved. So when you spend, like, you know, for example, like the same example, like, let's say you have a UTXO that has 10 foo runes and another UTXO that has 10 bar runes. Those aren't on any particular sat in the UTXO. And then when you spend them, you know, by default, you have your like, your output, let's say your first output is not an opera turn, that output will get both, all of those runes. So it'll have however many sats and it'll have 10 foo runes and 10 bar runes.

• 30:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so if I want to transfer just runes, how does that, how does that process happen?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  So you create a transaction, you, you, let's say you have like, um, you want to send like me, like 50 foo runes. And let's say you have one UTXO that's worth 40, um, foo runes and another UTXO that's worth 20 foo runes. So you don't have an exact amount to send, spend, send me. So you'll create a transaction that spends both of those two UTXOs. And then you'll create, uh, one output. You'll, you'll create two outputs. Let's say the first output is going to you and the second output is going to me. They have your address and my address respectively. And then you'll include in an op return, what's called an edict. And in that edict, you'll say, send 50 of the foo rune

• 31:29Speaker 02

  to the second UTXO and send the remaining 10 to the first UTXO. So it's all UTXO based. There's no substructure like within UTXOs.

• 31:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Casey, I just have a whole bunch of dumb questions. I feel like I just want to ask these dumb questions.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Go for it, go for it. Everybody has these dumb questions.

• 31:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Super, super dumb then for, for a minute. Ordinals for NFTs, runes for tokens? Is that sort of how you think about it?

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 31:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so ordinals is, is more optimized for NFTs and, and runes more for tokens. And when, when you say like, when something like ordinals or like runes, you know, like comes to Bitcoin, was actually being deployed? Cause we're, we're not talking about like a Bitcoin hard work, of course. And we're certainly not talking about a smart contract. But like you're somehow storing data inside of Bitcoin blocks. Are you kind of like proposing a, a standard? Or is there some code that lives, you know, somewhere? Does that question even make sense?

• 32:23Speaker 02

  No, it totally makes sense. And I think it's, it's just, it's a very different model from other, other chains, right? Like when you want to do something on Ethereum, you just sit down and you write a smart contract that implements it. And then you deploy that smart contract to Ethereum. And then the Ethereum consensus rules enforce the rules of your smart contract.

• 32:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. Or, and also you can just set a standard, right? So you say the ERC 20 standard, that's not a specific, that's not one single smart contract. That's just sort of all of Ethereum coordinating and saying, oh yeah, when we deploy tokens, we're going to use this particular like code template set of, of smart contract.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah. So ordinals, inscriptions and runes are all implemented in Ord. Ord is the reference implementation of ordinals, inscriptions and runes. If you go to ordinals.com, what you're talking to is a instance of Ord running on one of our servers. And you can go to github.com/ordinals/ord and download Ord. So Ord is essentially a, it's a, it's a piece of code that runs. It connects to a Bitcoin Core node and it downloads blocks from Bitcoin Core.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  And it looks for, it essentially processes each Bitcoin transaction and figures out what it's doing according to ordinals, inscriptions or runes. It sees where the SATs are going from the inputs to the outputs. If there's inscriptions being created, it records that those inscriptions are created and then tracks them as they move. And then if runes are being etched, that's the term for creating a rune. If runes are being etched, it notes that and also records the, the transfers. So there's no change to Bitcoin either, there's no change to the Bitcoin software. There's no change to Bitcoin Core. There's no change to the consensus rules.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  This is just a piece of software that people can run on the side alongside their own Bitcoin Core node. And then it will tell them all about ordinals and inscriptions and runes and those balances. It also comes with a wallet so that they can make their own transactions. So essentially it is a standard that you can run alongside Bitcoin. And if you follow the standard, Bitcoin transactions now have this additional meaning that they didn't have before related to the creation of fungible and non-fungible tokens. So the term that's kind of developed is that it's a meta-protocol, that it is a protocol that runs on top of this other protocol. Bitcoin is completely agnostic to ordinals and inscriptions and runes.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  It doesn't know anything about them, but people who are interested in this meta-protocol, run it, run this additional piece of code that then processes Bitcoin transactions according to the rules of that meta-protocol and then tells them what the state of that meta-protocol is.

• 35:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, maybe one way to explain this is like, ord is like a special pair of glasses that let you see things that the actual Bitcoin core clients don't actually see, according to particular rules, like, you know, some birds can see in ultraviolet that like humans can't see, something like this, where there's, there is data happening, it's just not Bitcoin.

• 35:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like an interpreter of some sort.

• 35:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, it's an interpreter of a specific universe, which you would call like the ord, ordinal universe, ord universe.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Yep, that's right. And this is like, I have worked on Bitcoin, or I've been into Bitcoin for a long time. I was briefly a Bitcoin core contributor, not a very good one. But I was never interested in changing Bitcoin. Like, I would see the process, the political process of proposing soft forks and endless bike shedding, and finally getting them through, maybe if you were incredibly lucky, and I just would rather like drink poison and jump off a bridge. So, I, when I started thinking about ordinals and inscriptions in like, early 2022, I knew that I didn't want to change Bitcoin. I just wanted to try to figure out a way of like, where in Bitcoin is there a little

• 36:31Speaker 02

  bit of space that I can then fit this meta-protocol in? And the space that ordinals fits into, the sat tracking, like, how do people say where they want their sats to transfer? The way that they, the place that they say this is in the order of the, a number of the inputs and outputs. When they want their sats to transfer to a certain, to a certain destination, they create these transactions that, the only thing that matters from the point of view of the ordinal protocol is the number of inputs, the number of outputs, their value, and their order. And so by changing them, they can transfer these sats to any place, right? So that's kind of the space that is, is free to the user, right?

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Because Bitcoin Core, the protocol, allows you to create these transactions with any number of inputs and outputs in any order. So. That's where ordinals fit in and inscriptions, the data for inscriptions, that fits into the witness, which is a essentially a signature, but it's a little bit more complicated because it's a Bitcoin script. And that signature also allows you to push data, which might be a signature, it might be a public key, it might be any number of things. And it allows you to, that is where I sneak in the data for inscriptions in this signature space, sort of using this trick that fences them off in a way that they're just ignored by the Bitcoin script interpreter.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  And then runes, opera turns are kind of like the pub keys. There are these special public keys that just say this public key is invalid. They're actually scripts and then they contain some additional data after they say that they're invalid that just gets ignored by Bitcoin Core. So it's in all of these little nooks and crannies that my weird little protocols fit into. There's sort of these places in the Bitcoin protocol where they're there for the user to make the kind of transactions that they want, to have whatever kind of input and order of the inputs and outputs, whatever kind of locking scripts and unlocking scripts they have. And then that data is just used for these higher level protocols that interpret it in different ways.

• 38:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so I think I understand this. So like the, what ordinals and runes are built on is like partially kind of like a specification, which is sort of like ord. And then there's also, so you got the specification that everyone agrees to, this is how we're going to do this. And then you have some interpreter code that somebody who's running a Bitcoin client kind of like runs in parallel if they want to interpret it. But all of the data itself to make ordinals and runes possible is actually stored within a Bitcoin block. And you're being creative about this. So you're shoving it in all of these like weird locations where-

• 39:16Speaker 02

  I've become an expert at shoving weird things into Bitcoin blocks.

• 39:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah. And you just shove this and like, it doesn't really matter like, because even if it looks like ugly inside of the block itself, it doesn't really matter.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  It is ugly.

• 39:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's very ugly. Okay. So you're just like, you know, you're shoving- Wherever you can find some space in this kind of like container that wasn't really built for this type of expressivity, let's say. But the result of that is you get NFTs and you get tokens. And the reason runes is an improvement on using ordinals and BRC 20 for tokens is because runes is like tailor made for tokens. You don't have to go through like multiple steps of the protocol. And, and, okay, so I'm understanding the picture here. Let me just validate that last piece. So it is the case that you, all of the data to like reassemble a runes token or a like ordinals NFT. That's all inside of the Bitcoin block space itself, right?

• 40:10Speaker 02

  That's correct. Yep.

• 40:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's no other, there's no third party dependency here. You're not storing like the data somewhere else. It's inside of a Bitcoin block.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  And that, yeah, it is. And that has some nice properties. For example, everybody could stop running their ord nodes for like a week. And a week later, everybody starts them up again. And in the meantime, all the data and all the transactions are still there on the Bitcoin blockchain. And so then they can just, you know, boot up again, read the data that they've missed or start up from scratch and get all of the data that they missed. There's no, there's no real sort of, I mean, there's no real like consensus process that the nodes have to engage in. They just read these messages off of the Bitcoin blockchain.

• 40:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which I would say is very aligned with Bitcoin or philosophy of everything is backwards compatible. There's no extra trust assumptions going on here. This is just Bitcoin. This is just Bitcoin.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  And I know, at this point, I know all about the, the pain of backwards compatibility. The first version of ord, it had all these, sometimes just omissions, sometimes outright bugs that meant that a lot of inscriptions that you would want to accept, you would want there to be, were not recognized by the ord client. And

• 41:30Speaker 02

  In the meantime, people got really attached to their inscription numbers, which was just the number of the inscription in the order it had been mined in a block. So they started from zero and they went up. And we had to do this really hideous thing, like to kind of keep with the backwards compatibility mindset of creating these like negative inscription numbers that were called cursed inscriptions, which were these sort of new ways of making inscriptions that were desirable to make, but which weren't recognized by the first version of the protocol. And in order to allow those to happen without disrupting the existing inscription numbers, they were given negative inscription numbers up to the so-called jubilee, where from that

• 42:11Speaker 02

  point forward, cursed inscriptions and blessed inscriptions alike, all got positive inscription numbers. So this very silly protocol, like I've kind of taken the Bitcoiner like backwards compatibility thing to heart, and it sucks. It sucks. I understand why people like to do hard forks, right? You do some hard fork, you're like, whatever, I'm changing the rules. You don't need to think about backwards compatibility. It's kind of good for devs. Sometimes it can be good for users. But yeah, it's all like very backwards compatibility, no matter how disgusting that makes the code.

• 42:44David Hoffman?

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• 43:28David Hoffman?

  provides milestone-based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first DAO-led Layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyz and follow them on Twitter at ZeroXMantle. Cello is the mobile-first, EVM-compatible, carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world, driving real-world use cases like mobile payments and mobile DeFi. And with Opera MiniPay as one of the fastest-growing Web3 wallets, Cello is seeing a meteoric rise with over 300 million transactions and 1.5 million monthly active addresses. And now, Cello is looking to come home to Ethereum as a Layer 2. Optimism, Polygon, Matter Labs, and Arbitrum have all thrown their hats in the ring for the Cello Layer 2 to build upon their stacks. Why the competition?

• 44:12David Hoffman?

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• 44:56David Hoffman?

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• 45:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so another basic question here, Casey, is how much can we fit inside of a Bitcoin block? So obviously, there's going to be the vanilla Bitcoin-type transactions that have been with us since the beginning of Bitcoin. And then there's the Ordinals activity and the Runes activity, but the Bitcoin block isn't getting any larger, right? Like, quite famously.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, how much of this stuff can we actually fit inside of a block?

• 45:57Speaker 02

  I don't know, not a ton. I mean, so a Bitcoin block is kind of weird at this point in terms of how big it can be. There's a limit of... 1 million virtual bytes, which is, again, this is like a weird Bitcoin backwards compatibility, like Clouge or Hack. So Bitcoin blocks originally were 1 million bytes. And there was a desire to do a block size increase at the same time that there was a desire to move some data called the witness, which you can think of as being signature data,

• 46:38Speaker 02

  outside of the transaction, to put it in a different place that is not the transaction. And this is for like a lot of technical reasons. The main reason being that the signature, you could change it, you could malleate a signature and take somebody's signature, create a new valid signature that had different bytes in it. And if that signature affects the transaction hash, that meant that the transaction ID would change. So somebody would broadcast the transaction, somebody malleates the signature, and then it gets mined in a block with a different transaction ID, still doing the same thing. It's not like anybody's funds were taken, but like not good at all. So these two things, upgrading, increasing

• 47:20Speaker 02

  the block size and moving the signature data outside of the transaction were done at the same time in an upgrade called SegWit. And so now, all of the old bytes that include everything in a transaction that isn't a signature, those count towards the 1 megabyte block limit. And then the signature data gets this 75% discount. So if you only have signature data, nothing else, you actually get a 4 million byte block. And so Bitcoin blocks these days, sort of normal Bitcoin blocks are like 2 something megabytes. That's the average when you get these transactions and signatures and how the discount all plays out. So obviously,

• 48:02Speaker 02

  this is not a lot. 2 megs every 10 minutes is not a ton. So not a lot can we fit inside of Bitcoin blocks.

• 48:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what are the implications of that? Are the NFTs that are birthed on top of this, the tokens birthed on top of this, are they going to be like relatively scarce? Like not very, very plentiful? Or will they just be instantiated and then they'll have to kind of like trade on other chains and like exchanges and it'll happen on side chains and that sort of thing? Or like, what are the downstream implications of this scarcity?

• 48:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think, Ryan, I think you're also kind of just asking, just like, what are the transactional constraints of tokens? As like, if we're going to be trading and sending around a bunch of tokens, like, how much activity can the Bitcoin Layer 1 support? Is that kind of a big question?

• 48:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'm just, yeah, what are the downstream implications, most broadly, Casey, in having this limit? This very much like a block space limit here?

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so everything you said, the blocks are going to be full, fees are going to be high, and people are trying to figure out how to do things on L2s. So for just moving Bitcoin, there's the Lightning Network, which has positives and negatives. And there's also a whole bunch of activity now on L2s for Bitcoin. So different, you know, ways of making L2s for Bitcoin. Sort of the investment in rollups on Bitcoin has increased enormously. A lot of people are trying to explore how to do rollups on Bitcoin. And just like ordinals and inscriptions and runes,

• 49:36Speaker 02

  all the people who are trying to deploy these things on Bitcoin have to figure out clever ways to make them fit on top of Bitcoin. They can't just sit down and do like, you know, vim rollup.soul, right? They have to kind of trick Bitcoin into doing it. So like, as an example, there's something called BitVM, which is a way of tricking Bitcoin into doing arbitrary computation. I'm not super good on how the details work, but basically you have this like, big tree of computation, like where each leaf of the tree is a step in that computation. And you have some people who are like the BitVM validators, who are running this kind of rollup,

• 50:20Speaker 02

  who are committing to executing this computation faithfully.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  And Bitcoin can't, cannot do that computation. But if they do it wrong, somebody can say, can post a proof to the chain where they point to one step of this computation and they say, look, this one step of this computation was done wrong. And then the validator of the Bitcoin, of the BitVM rollup gets slashed, or I don't exactly know how that happens. These are like fraud proofs, optimistic rollups for Ethereum folks might come to mind. Yep, exactly. And then other people are, want something called opcat, which is a simple op code that just concatenates two pieces of data. This is the stone age that Bitcoin is living in, all right?

• 51:03Speaker 02

  There is a huge, there's a huge debate about whether we should create an op code which sticks two pieces of data together, a fierce debate, right? And with something like that, I think that actually allows you to do pretty hefty computation and maybe you could do like a very expensive ZK verifier on Bitcoin and maybe do something like a zero knowledge rollup. But all this stuff is in the early phases. So yeah, the, the answer is fees are super high. They are pretty scarce, like large inscriptions, like large byte wise inscriptions are more expensive and more scarce. There's like, sometimes people will pay to have an entire block mined that is only a

• 51:48Speaker 02

  single four megabyte inscription. They call that ripping a four meger. Wow. Yeah. Wait, has that been done more than once? I know that, I know it was done once. No, it was done a few times. Yeah, it was done, the Teprut Wizards did one.

• 52:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  It costs like hundreds of thousands of dollars?

• 52:04Speaker 02

  You need to have a proprietary relationship with the miner, right?

• 52:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tens of thousands.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Although there is a, the, the need for proprietary relationship is starting to become less so. Although that one, yeah, you do need a proprietary relationship. And then there is, um, French Montana released a song. He's like a rapper. He released an MP3 as a four meger. No way.

• 52:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  A whole MP3 is on the Bitcoin.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  This must piss a lot of people off.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  Oh, it does. They're mad. They mad, bro.

• 52:37David Hoffman?

  With all these Bitcoin Layer 2s, which are like one of the more exciting things in the Bitcoin landscape, at least from my perspective, will runes be like composable? Or can they be composable and interoperable with some of these? Like, a lot of the Layer 2s I've seen are like, you know, EVM, optimistic rollup, OP stack forks. Uh, will, will, maybe, is it, maybe it's up to the bridge contract? I don't know how it works, but like, will runes be able to go up to the Layer 2s?

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, presumably, yeah. I mean, um, the way that runes transfer is very similar to the way that Bitcoin transfers, right? You, you put them in UTXOs and then spending that UTXO lets you spend the runes. So any rollup which is, um, designed for Bitcoin or any L2 or any sort of wrapping protocol or anything, um, you should be able to use it to, um, transfer runes. And I kind of expect that runes will become the de facto fungible token protocol on Bitcoin. Um, kind of much to my own surprise, there are, I, I didn't set out to, you know, make a fungible token protocol. It wasn't really a goal. It was really because of BRC20s, which were very, very popular on Bitcoin.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  The reason they were popular is because they have this open mint mechanic where you say, anybody can mint this token and just create a transaction to get some of that token. Um, so there became fabulously popular. I mean, the chain was clogged for months with BRC20 transactions. It has a lot of downsides. Um, each operation requires making an inscription, which takes two Bitcoin transactions minimum. You have to commit to this JSON blob, which is where BRC20s, uh, store their messages in an inscription and then create another transaction that actually reveals the inscription. So that's because it's based on the inscription protocol, it's two transactions minimum to create an inscription.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  And then transferring your BRC20 takes a third transaction, actually transfer that inscription according to the rules of ordinals to send those BRC20s to their destination. So runes, you know, improves on this, it's just one transaction for everything. It's very compact, it's binary, the spec is very clear. It comes with a reference implementation. One of the big problems with BRC 20 is that the creator, Domo, he just released it as a spec, like a Git book, like sort of markdown spec that just described how it worked, and then left it up to other people to implement it, which led to a situation where one exchange, Unisat, makes the canonical BRC 20 indexer.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  I don't think it's open source. And so the protocol has a hard time evolving. There is not a really good open source reference implementation that everybody uses, and everybody sort of follows for upgrades. So Runes only takes one transaction to do everything. It comes with a very, very detailed spec and a full reference implementation. So I kind of expected to become the de facto fungible token standard on Bitcoin. There are some other sort of like serious projects to do, non-fungible tokens on Bitcoin. There's a project called RGB, which is doing it in a completely different way. And then there's also a project called Taproot Assets.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  RGB and Taproot Assets are much, much more complicated than Runes, like much more complicated than Runes. And they also store their data off-chain. So if you want to build up the state of where those tokens are, you need to access all of this off-chain data, which I think has just terrible consequences for UI and UX and the complexity of the protocol. So they've been going for a while, and I actually was really hoping that Taproot Assets would like take off and become the dominant fungible token standard. They started a long time ago and like made their public announcement before, way before I started working on Runes. But development has been super slow, and the protocols are very, very complex, and not seeing a whole lot of uptake.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  And also, they're not really designing for DGENs, which I think is really important. I think the reality is, is that like degenerate speculators are where the first users come from. So Runes, it has this open mint mechanic. It has these nice long ticker symbols, so you can have ridiculous ticker symbols. It has unique names like BRC 20, but it's much more efficient than BRC 20. So I kind of expect that it's going to become the dominant fungible token standard. And then it will also become the dominant fungible token standard, I think, for all of these Bitcoin L2s.

• 57:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I could, I totally see that happening. Like, once, once a dominant token standard is kind of like, you know, cemented, or it just gets the network effect early on, then it's like, no one, you could design a different version of an ERC 20 if you want, right? But like, getting everyone to coordinate on that and what improvements are you going to make? It's very hard. So once something gets cemented here, I expect it to.

• 57:24Speaker 02

  Has anybody ever done that? Has there ever been?

• 57:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  There have been. There's tons.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and even different ERC standards that kind of like change. ERC is a 721 that just modify a few different things. But like, 1155 has made a go of it for NFTs, for example. But it's just really hard to unseat the, just a simple, the maximally simple protocol design.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  That just works. I guess a broader context question I want to ask you, Casey, as we look at this landscape. And I feel like you've opened the flood, floodgates with ordinals to, more than just building on Bitcoin, right? And more than kind of the social layer to just like what Bitcoin block space can do and how it can be expressed. All right? And so we're going to have NFTs, we have NFTs on Bitcoin. We're going to have more tokens on Bitcoin. We're going to have an entire, entire layer two ecosystems being built to leverage Bitcoin block space. What do you think the implications of this are for the Bitcoin network? Because like, we've seen some of that play out in Ethereum, right? So like, you mentioned earlier, eh, this is, you know, joking, like Bitcoin's Stone Age, right?

• 58:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it could get to like Bronze Age and then like Industrial Era really quickly. And that's going to have some implications because Bitcoin transactions, transfers, aren't going to be the only game in town when it comes to, it's going to have to compete against all the Layer 2s and all of the NFTs and all of the tokens for block space sales. And like, how does this, how do you think this is? Because this is almost like a zero to one moment for Bitcoin. It hasn't been used quite in this way. And like, what do you think the implications are going to be?

• 59:05Speaker 02

  I mean, my answer is probably going to be really boring. Like, I think fees are going to get really high. I think it's launching on the halving, so we'll probably see like 1,000 sat per V byte fees, which are like insane. If you look at what really has product market fit in cryptocurrency, I would say that the answer is fungible tokens, non-fungible tokens. A big subset of those fungible tokens, like the subset of this fungible tokens is like memes and, you know, scams. And then also stable coins. Stable coins are a huge subset. And then also DeFi, which more or less DeFi is like borrowing against your tokens and NFTs.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  And ways of doing like, you know, more or less decentralized trading of those NFTs, like Uniswap. So I think we'll probably see all of those things on Bitcoin. I think that's the end game is like a really crazy, robust, quote unquote, Bitcoin finance ecosystem.

• 1:00:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  But Casey, you're also going to see MEV, like kind of like front running type of activity, I would expect. You're also going to see like people complaining that it costs too much to send Bitcoin. And I wish it was the good old days when it was like, you're going to see some of the like other things that you're seeing in more expressive blockchain networks, like Ethereum today, I would expect.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  So I don't necessarily see that we'll see, think that we'll see much MEV. The MEV on Ethereum happens not just because people are using,

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  doing some kind of DeFi on Ethereum. It's also happening because of the way that Ethereum DEXs work. So when you go to execute a trade on Uniswap, You are not executing that trade at a particular price, right? You're sending that transaction to the mempool and you're saying like, you know, whatever price I get, I want to trade these two assets, whatever price I get, I'll take. Now, obviously, there are ways that you can limit your slippage and stuff like that. But more or less, that's how it works. And then this gives the miner the opportunity to insert new transactions or reorder transactions relative to your transactions, like a sandwich attack where they buy the asset before you

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  want to buy it and then they sell it directly to you in your transaction. So I think it's going to be really hard to build a DEX like that on Bitcoin. I don't know if it's possible. And if you have DeFi on Bitcoin, but it's in the UTXO model where you're actually specifying the specific price you want to get and it's sort of fill or kill at that price, that doesn't necessarily mean that we just sort of open the gates towards arbitrary MEV, right? The, let's say somebody's offering in a UTXO some amount of runes for sale and you make a transaction trying to buy those runes.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  If the miner creates a transaction that buys that UTXO, those runes, and gets it into the block before you, your transaction is just invalid. It won't be mined and you won't pay any fees for it. So there are some specific mechanisms to the way that DEXs work on Ethereum that are the source of MEV. And I think it would be hard to reproduce those mechanisms on Bitcoin. Currently, I don't see a lot of opportunities for MEV on Bitcoin with runes. I could be wrong, but we might not, we might not ever see them in the same way that we do on Ethereum.

• 1:02:43David Hoffman?

  I want to make sure that we pin down some of the parameters that make runes work. You talked about like, I think, five or maybe six, just very low number of parameters that make a rune a rune. Can you talk about what those parameters are? What are when like some deployer of a rune comes and they are presented with choices? What choices are they presented with?

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  So they pick the rune name, which is the uppercase characters A through Z between 1 and 26. There's actually a schedule where the short names are not available initially. From the having to the next having, so over the course of those four years, the 12 character names and the 11th character names and the 10 character names all the way down to the one character names slowly unlock. I just kind of didn't want them to all get Minted out. Yeah, exactly. Yep. So they start at 13 character names. So aside from that, you can set the spacers, which are not, don't change the uniqueness of a token, but let you put a little

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  bullet character between spacers to make your ticker more readable. So if you want to have like Pepe Rune, you put a little spacer between Pepe and Rune. Then there is the divisibility. So how many places after the decimal point? Do you have a subunits of this rune? Then there is a currency symbol, which is a single character. It can be any character, even like an emoji or whatever. That's the character that gets rendered after amounts of this rune. Let's see what else. Then there is the premine. So how much you're allocating in the initial transaction? Then a rune may have terms.

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  Terms specify the terms of the open mint. Let me actually get the code out. So I made sure that I don't

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  miss anything. Rune stone, etching.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Divisibility, premine, rune spacer, symbol, terms. Yeah, then you have terms. And then the terms are the amount that can be minted in every mint transaction. So every transaction after that can mint, you know, 1,000 or 100 or whatever the amount may be. It has a cap, which is the number of mint transactions that can happen. So if you want supply of a million and you want 1,000 permit transaction, you would have a 1,000 cap.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Then there is a absolute block height start and end for the mint. So you can say the mint starts at this block, you know, block 1 million and goes to block 2 million. And then there is a relative block height start and end, which is relative to when the etching transaction is included. So you can say, I want this to be mintable for, um, you know, 100 blocks. To start minting after 100 blocks after it's etched and end 200 blocks after it's etched. So you can have a start and an end. Uh, and then there's, there's a turbo flag, which you can set on the etching, which there's some features that we might want to add eventually

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  that we don't think everybody is going to want. So things that, for example, increase like client validation costs, or simply things that are super degenerate. But we haven't, we didn't get them done in time for the protocol to launch. So if you set this turbo flag, you're opting in in the future to whatever preposterous ideas we have. So one is to have this like global lottery of runes where every two weeks, everybody can buy lottery tickets with runes and then get rewarded, uh, in their, in their rune. Uh, so one, one lucky lottery winner at the end of the two weeks will win all of the runes. Like a lot of DeFi is just gambling with extra steps.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  So it seems like it would be a good idea to just do that at the protocol level. Just like, yo, bro, you can just roll the dice in the protocol. Um, but we didn't have that done initially. So the turbo flag is just opting into whatever non-specific weird upgrades we have in the future. And that's a rune. That's everything that goes into a rune.

• 1:06:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. So Casey, let's say I am Jeremy Alair from Circle. Okay. So he's the CEO of Circle, which has the stablecoin USDC. I want to, uh, have USDC, uh, as a rune token on Bitcoin. Uh, like, how do I do that? What do I go do? How much does it cost?

• 1:07:08Speaker 02

  Oh, it's it's cheap. And I would say, you know, I made this protocol for meme coins, but I think it's a really good protocol. It's very simple.

• 1:07:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I was trying to legitimize our podcast here for, you know, for a second, Casey.

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, Jeremy Allaire, I would say, bro, it's a great choice. Welcome to, welcome to runes. So yeah, he would download Bitcoin Core on his laptop. And then he would download Ord on his laptop and he'd let them both sync. And then he would, he would create a new Ord wallet. He'd get some Bitcoin in that wallet and he would do Ord Wallet batch. And then the path to a YAML file. He'd write this YAML file with all the properties of the rune. Probably if you're doing a stablecoin, what you would do is you can't go back and create new tokens in a rune later. The issuer, it's one and done. So he should just create more tokens than he'll ever need, which he certainly can, like,

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  you know, 2 to the 26 or whatever ridiculous amount of tokens. Mint that to a wallet and then have a service where people can deposit Bitcoin or deposit dollars with him. And he'll just send their Bitcoin address, the amount of runes backing those dollars. Like he gives them, he gets $10, he sends them, sends them 10 runes. And then a redemption process where people can send him runes. And he'll send them that number of dollars to their bank account. And then he's, he's good. And he can reuse a lot of existing Bitcoin infrastructure for all of that. The, the process of creating these transactions and signing these transactions and constructing these transactions is very similar to that of Bitcoin. Cause they use normal Bitcoin transactions.

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  So a lot of the, you know, any sort of Bitcoin signature hardware wallets, et cetera, can all be used to, to do this stuff.

• 1:08:55David Hoffman?

  In a, just a world of hyper Bitcoinization, I think there's, we're setting ourselves up for the perfect headline of Jeremy Allaire minted 10 quadrillion tokens of Bitcoin ordinals in order to do USDC on, on top of Bitcoin. But due to, due to dollar hyperinflation, he ran out of ordinals to actually issue dollars. And has to deploy a new contract.

• 1:09:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Casey, is he gonna have a fight to try to get his ticker? Like, they're gonna be like squatters that are trying to get the USDC some derivative ticker?

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, there'll be squatters. He's not gonna get the USDC ticker. You can, you can also create, like, I actually think that for things like USDC, there's a way of, of minting a rune where you don't actually pick a name, and the name is just assigned to you, sort of based on the block height and the transaction index, where you, where you created the rune. And so then the name just winds up being this 27-character-long thing that is really just like a, is like a random identifier, right? So if you don't care about like the meme value of your rune name, you can create this, these nameless runes that just get a name assigned by the system. And presumably, he would do that.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  He could try to get some other name, like USDC, you know, Jeremy Aler, USDC.

• 1:10:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Real USDC. Yeah, I guess it doesn't matter so much, because it's just like a pointer in the database, right? And like, maybe a front end will decide to render that differently. Like, this is, you know, it's called whatever, like, transaction ID, but it's actually USDC.

• 1:10:27Speaker 02

  Yep, that's right. Yeah, yeah. This was a huge contentious debate early when I was designing the protocol, is should these ticker names be unique or not? And so this was sort of the compromised position, that, look, the names are unique. People are gonna squat these names. People are saying to me, like, oh, like, what happens when somebody gets the Google rune, and it's not Google? And I was like, bro, this is not like NASDAQ, okay? Like, it doesn't matter if somebody gets the, the Google rune. Google can just, like, if Google wants to rune-ize their stock, they can just pick whatever ticker and then tell people that they got their, their ticker. People, people don't even get their ticker names on the stock market. They have to do things like AAPL and like GOGL.

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  So, but what they can also do is they can get a token without a name that just has this long, sort of, system-generated name, and just tell everybody, yeah, that's, that's my rune.

• 1:11:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the one, right?

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, right. So what are gonna be the, the first runes? I believe 10 runes have already been selected as the first 10 runes in the, the system. Can you tell us about this?

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I was originally gonna select 10. The main reason being is that people have just been coming up with the most lame names. And I would be really upset if the first rune had a lame name. So I had this plan to hard code 10 runes in the protocol. After much going back and forth and juggling of spreadsheets, I was like, okay, I don't actually have 10 good ideas for names.

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  So I am just hard coding the first one.

• 1:11:58David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  So that rune zero will be hardcoded, because I just don't want that to have a bad name, or have it be fully pre-mined. So the first rune is uncommon goods, like uncommon, and then a bullet, and then goods. It has no divisibility, so there's no like subunits of this rune.

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  You can mint one per transaction, so every time you mint it, you can get one unit of uncommon goods. And it is mintable between the halving block and the next halving block. So for four years, anybody can mint it. So for four years, the ceiling price should be that of making a Bitcoin transaction. Because if the price got above that, then you would just do a Bitcoin transaction, and mint more, and then sell them. And then after that, I don't know.

• 1:12:47David Hoffman?

  In theory, unless there's more demand than what can be minted per 10 minutes. So one token per 10 minutes, right?

• 1:12:53Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, no, no. One per transaction.

• 1:12:56David Hoffman?

  Oh, per transaction.

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  And there can be any number of transactions per block. So I think you could fit like...

• 1:12:59David Hoffman?

  You could fit a lot, okay.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, you could probably fit like 1,000 or 10,000 per block, yeah. So this...

• 1:13:05David Hoffman?

  With no total cap, no constraint?

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  No total cap, no...

• 1:13:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's almost like a test, right? It's almost like an OG meme coin. So it's like, what is uncommon goods? What does that mean? Like, what...

• 1:13:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, what's the reference?

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  Nothing in particular. The ordinals, the trackable sats, they have rarity tiers. So the first sat of... If it's not the first sat of the block, it's common, or it's a trash sat. If it's the first sat of the block, it's uncommon. If it's the first sat of the first block of the difficulty adjustment, then it's rare. If it's the first sat of the first block of the halving every four years, it's epic. And if it's the first sat of the first block of a conjunction, which is every six halvings, the halving and the difficulty adjustment happen on the same block, it's legendary. So I just chose uncommon goods because people are already, you know, trading uncommon stats. So I thought that would be a good sort of call back to that.

• 1:14:01David Hoffman?

  I love how this is like perfectly emblematic of Bitcoin culture of just like the longest term time horizons. What's the phrase, Ryan?

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  Low time preference.

• 1:14:12David Hoffman?

  Where like Bitcoiners are making the number one tiered legendary rarity thing, something that happens once every six years.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  Thirty-six years.

• 1:14:21David Hoffman?

  Thirty-six years. Thirty-six years.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, the rarity curve is pretty brutal.

• 1:14:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  You guys are scarce. You guys do scarcity well, Casey.

• 1:14:31David Hoffman?

  You guys love scarcity.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  You love scarcity.

• 1:14:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, what's the timeline for this, Casey? So when is runes going to be available for Jeremy Lair to go get his USDC shitcoin?

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  I assume he'll be first in line. So yeah, Jeremy Lair can start etching the USDC rune on April 19th, I think is the projected date of the Bitcoin halving.

• 1:14:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 1:14:57David Hoffman?

  Going live on the happening, yeah.

• 1:14:58Speaker 02

  Going live on the happening. Yep, that's right. Yep. Yeah, and then he can go mint some uncommon goods. I'm very curious what the dynamic with uncommon goods is. If people are just gonna like every transaction, they're just gonna mint one because like, why not? Yeah.

• 1:15:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, so let's say, again, I'm back to kind of dumb questions because that's mostly all I have, Casey. So, okay, so these tokens get minted. Let's say, like, post-happening, there's, you know, hundreds of tokens. We expect kind of like meme coin pickup because that's like your pure product market fit for crypto these days for sure, right? So then, where do I go to like trade these things? What's kind of the ecosystem that you expect?

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  Oh, it's not good, bro. It's not good. It's rough.

• 1:15:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right.

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  So I think there are some mostly like ordinals and inscriptions platforms that are setting up to do this. So I think it is Xverse is one, and I think Magic Eden, I think, is another. So there are these ordinals and inscriptions, like trading services, and I think they're also gearing up to start doing runes as well. So yeah, I think that's where you're gonna buy and sell your spicy meme coins.

• 1:16:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  And am I going to be doing that on chain primarily? Or will there be like, is there centralized? Is there like a Coinbase for runes? I guess Coinbase would have to sort of just support rune tokens later, right? But when you're talking about like me using Magic Eden to do a trade, that's all like kind of an on-chain transaction?

• 1:16:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that Magic Eden and Xverse are both non-custodial. You have like a, usually like a browser wallet that has your private keys. And then you can offer bundles of runes for sale and then accept these via those wallets. There's something called the PSBT, which is a partially signed Bitcoin transaction. So you, the seller, sort of create this partial transaction where you're saying, I want to sell these assets for this amount of Bitcoin. And they provide signatures for that, but it's not a complete transaction because it doesn't have enough Bitcoin on the inputs. And then the seller takes that, the buyer, sorry, takes that partially signed transaction, completes it with their own transaction, with their own signatures and however many Bitcoin the seller is asking for,

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  and broadcast that to the mempool.

• 1:17:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Casey, let's fast forward a year here. So runes has launched, people have digested them. There's been some sort of like equilibrium has been emerged. What does this, what does runes look like a year from now? Let's make some hypotheses about the future.

• 1:17:30Speaker 02

  I think probably between now and one year, some sort of like Skynet thing will have gone live on runes and we'll all be like fighting for our lives against killer robots. That's really the only way that I can see this.

• 1:17:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a great Bitcoin answer, too.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  I don't know, I mean, like, I'm very, I was really surprised by the uptake of inscriptions, right? I had no idea what that would look like or how big that it would be or that there would be some sort of Bitcoin Renaissance because of that.

• 1:17:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about that. So what did you think would happen with inscriptions and ordinals? And like, what did happen?

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  I mean, easily nothing, right? Like, I was like, okay, this is like NFTs. I think this is a good, good NFT protocol. But will anybody use it? Like, I had no idea. I had no idea. And then, you know, I think one of the things that did happen, one of the reasons it made it so popular is because all of a sudden it changed the fee market. Like, fees went from being, like, blocks were not full, and so fees were the minimum of one sat per V byte. And they suddenly got full. That served as this, like, advertisement for ordinals and inscriptions. Everybody was like, why are the fees high? And this was the answer. They're like, oh, ordinals and inscriptions. And then it also made a lot of Maxies really mad, like, really, really mad.

• 1:18:44Speaker 02

  And they went on their podcasts and shook their fists at the heavens and talked about how mad they were. And then everybody was like, oh, shit, I guess I gotta make some ordinals and inscriptions. So it could easily be the same with runes, or not. Like, it could be that, you know, okay, whatever. We just have a little bit of BRC 20-like mania, and then it sort of goes away. Or it could be, like, in a year, it could be like, okay, like, people, somebody built a real roll-up on Bitcoin that works well. And now we have these crazy off-chain, you know, DeFi markets for meme coins and stablecoins on Bitcoin. It could really be anywhere between those, those two possibilities.

• 1:19:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and the beautiful, beautiful thing about both ordinals and runes is that everything is on-chain, right? Which is kind of like the first hurdle that must be overcome in order to be composable with other things that are also on-chain.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  That's right. And to be composable with things that are off-chain, right? If you want to move something from one L2 to another L2, it needs to be able to settle to the intermediate base layer, right? Yeah.

• 1:19:49David Hoffman?

  Totally. And going on in the Bitcoin world is this whole, like, Bitcoin Renaissance, where a lot of it is focused on Layer 2s, I'd say, but there's also Layer 1 smart contract projects, optimistic roll-ups, ZK roll-ups that are, you know, still in development. But overall, like, for the first time, you're seeing a lot of parallel development, where like, one person in Bitcoin is going one way, you know, Casey Rode more in runes is going a different way. But it's all recomposed back down to the Layer 1. It's all happening in parallel. What about this whole movement around Bitcoin Renaissance? Have you enjoyed the most? Like, which corners of it are you paying attention to? Which are any corners of it more exciting to you than others? Just overall, what do you like about the Bitcoin Renaissance movement?

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  I just like that a lot of, I like the fact that there are a lot of soft fork proposals on deck that are kind of getting a lot of renewed attention. The sort of big soft fork proposals are op cat, which is, you know, pushing two bits of data together, op CTV, op check template verify, which lets you sort of put conditions on how a UTXO is spent in the future, which actually winds up being really useful for a lot of L2s. What else? There's APO, any preb out, which lets you sort of rebind signatures to different transactions, which enables a potentially better lightning network.

• 1:21:10Speaker 02

  So I think maybe within a year, I think within a year, we'll either have a soft fork activated or a soft fork that's really going through the final stages of being activated. And I think that's maybe my favorite, my favorite part about it is that there's a lot of renewed interest in improving Bitcoin, the base layer, and it's, it's looking like more realistic, like there's a lot of discussion about it. Yeah, I think that's my favorite.

• 1:21:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Casey, I'm wondering if maybe as we close this, you could, you could give sort of like, maybe I'll try to articulate the pitch and I'd love to hear your pitch, but it sounds like to Bitcoiners, to people who care about the Bitcoin network, it's decentralization, sustainability and Bitcoin, the asset, your pitch to them for like why ordinals, why runes is you like get to fix the fee market. So fee, fee revenue goes up, that's makes it more sustainable. It's also the gateway drug to buying, you know, Bitcoin, right? So they start with the Dgen coins and they kind of like, oh, you know, I lost 90% that cycle and their low time preference kicks in and next time they buy Bitcoin. And then I guess you're making building on Bitcoin cool, cool again, right?

• 1:22:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  And like you've brought, I think through this, this entrance point, a lot of capital to the space. I guess for the, for the rest of crypto, you're sort of saying like, hey, Bitcoin can be a settlement layer as well for valuable, like, you know, transactions, right? And it's one way that Ethereum has been. Do you have any pitch to kind of the maxi crowd or are they like, do you even need to win the over? Do they even matter?

• 1:22:42Speaker 02

  They don't. I really wish that they would. I don't want them to like inscriptions or runes. But I do think that they shouldn't care. I think that Bitcoin is money for enemies, right? It's not a system so that everybody can hold their hands and then go in a circle and sing kumbaya. It's a system so that everybody can transact and do what they want and not be interfered with by anybody else. And so I'd say that, you know, the really the consistent attitude to being a Bitcoin maxi and inscriptions and ordinals and runes is like, I think it's dumb,

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  but it doesn't matter and it's it doesn't change the security properties of Bitcoin. So whatever, like people can just do these stupid things and that's totally fine. That's where I would like to see the Bitcoin maxis get.

• 1:23:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the Bitcoin protocol is indifferent to ordinals and runes and therefore so should the maxis.

• 1:23:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that says it says it great.

• 1:23:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, see, this has been great. Thank you so much. Very excited about the the launch on the happening day, which is hopefully this week. And yeah, we'll see where this goes. Maybe.

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  Before we end, I've got to I've got to show my podcast because my co-host would absolutely murder me.

• 1:24:05Speaker 02

  I have a podcast that's called the Hell Money Podcast. Hell.money is the URL. It's on YouTube and whatever fine podcasts are sold. It's on.

• 1:24:15David Hoffman?

  What's discussed?

• 1:24:16Speaker 02

  Bitcoin, inscriptions, ordinals, runes, politics, technology, lots of like Bitcoin 101 type content. I my my co-host, her name is Erin. We also dress up in fabulous costumes. So the last one, you can see we dressed up in Viking costumes.

• 1:24:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, wait, on the flavor of like Bitcoiner costumes to Ethereum costumes, where are we on this spectrum?

• 1:24:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not unicorns, more Vikings, I think.

• 1:24:41David Hoffman?

  Not unicorns and animals.

• 1:24:43Speaker 02

  I like I like I like the costumes that are the stupidest, you know, like I like looking dumb because I think it's funny.

• 1:24:49David Hoffman?

  All right, so pretty far into the Ethereum.

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, very much. Erin, she likes looking hot, so she's not into that. But I like looking dumb. Yeah, she's on the Bitcoin side. I'm on the Ethereum side.

• 1:25:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, well, including link to that, guys, so make sure you check that out. It sounds incredibly entertaining. And like the broader context, Casey, is like you haven't launched. This is not like a big VC backed, you know, $10 million thing.

• 1:25:14Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:25:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of you plus another guy, is that?

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's me and me and Rafjaf. We wrote all of it.

• 1:25:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  You getting paid for this?

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  Me? No. Raf gets paid.

• 1:25:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  No one's paying Casey. He's doing it.

• 1:25:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So Raf gets paid. We set up a nonprofit that all it does is funds Raf and funds the servers. I don't get paid. Yeah, so it's no VC back. There's no VC money. VCs come to me crying, begging.

• 1:25:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  What can I best please?

• 1:25:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the real reason I don't is that there's no good way to monetize it without making it worse. You know, there's, there's no native token. There's no way that I collect fees on anything. It makes it very low friction. You know, you don't need to interact. You need Bitcoin in your wallet to use it, and that's it. So.

• 1:26:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  All of those reasons haven't stopped other people, though, Casey.

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  They sure haven't. Boy, haven't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. Maybe one day I'll turn evil and like the hex guy will pay me like a fancy watch. And I'll be like, all right, it's runes Bitcoin hex now. We've rebranded on the Tron network or something. But today is not that day.

• 1:26:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not today. All right. Well, that's very Bitcoiner of you, Casey, and I mean that in the best of ways. This has been an absolute blast. Thank you so much.

• 1:26:36Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, guys. It was great.

• 1:26:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, got to end with this, of course. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier, and we're on the frontier of the frontier with Bitcoin. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us in the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.