Pausing in the middle of your hours long tirade about how much money 4x higher fees are costing you every year, as a North American businessman, to brag about how little you paid your local farmer in a much poorer LatAm country is a choice. It’s not a good choice, but it is certainly a choice. 9,300 sats. I’ve sent bigger zaps for mediocre dick jokes for fuck’s sake.

If your business depends on a low fee rate environment you might not have a long term viable business model. Adapt or die, just quit whining.

The first time I programmed a computer in 1986 I felt like a wizard. This week I’ve felt that feeling again for the first time since about 2007. Thanks to ChatGPT. It’s like having a chess computer for anything you can learn about on the internet. Prediction: Humans+AI will beat either the best AI or the best human alone for the foreseeable future. Kasparov (an insufferable Neocon on most topics) has been talking about this for decades. 4 billion years of evolution is a lot of computational irreducibility to overcome. Now, once I get my inscriptions stats project done I need to spend time getting a local LLM model running so I can do some custom model training. It’s an exciting time, even with all the chaos of 🤡🌎.

3,923 sats/vB, people are losing their damn minds. 🤣

My first full time job as an adult was as a Qualified Mental Retardation Professional Assistant (nurses aide at a facility for the mentally retarded). We had one autistic patient named Bill who loved trains and had a colostomy bag. He would throw his colostomy bag across the room and nail someone with his shit any time someone pissed him off for the slightest offense. He liked me so I never got hit with it, but I had to clean up the mess a few times. The smell was something else. Some of the autists on Bitcoin Twitter remind me of Bill. Bitcoin is their train and they are quick to fling shit like an unhinged monkey over anything.

For last week, inscriptions were way less likely to pay more than 50 sats/vB than non-inscription transactions. (This is just early text based R&D, I plan to create much prettier charts once I figure out how I want to see the data.)

I now have data for last week. Now I just need to create some visualizations for it. That should be fun. But first I’m going to drink a few beers and smoke a cigar or two to celebrate.

A US Senator admitted on live TV what everyone who has ever watched and understood It’s a Wonderful Life already knew. Fractional reserve banks are Ponzis.

X (formerly Twitter)

Dylan LeClair (@DylanLeClair) on X

You’re not supposed to say the quiet part out loud.

When ChatGPT loses its “mind” and starts making things up you know you’ve reached the end of the internet’s documented understanding of a subject and you are in true R&D territory. The top 10% of knowledge workers have always lived in that niche. 🌎👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀

This BRC-20/ORC-20 shit is an IQ test and anyone spending sats on it deserves to HFSP. I now have data about all the inscription reveal transactions for all of last week. Tomorrow I’m going to do some testing to see how long it will take to collect data for the commit transactions too. That should go a lot faster, but I don’t have a good feel for how fast it will go. I suspect the commit transactions are much less consequential than the reveal transactions, but I’d like to cover them too just for completeness. Then I can work on creating some charts to make it easy to understand what actually happened with inscriptions over an entire week while I wait for my code to churn through this week’s data too. https://docs.orc20.org

If you look at the transactions bidding up the fees during the day they mostly aren’t inscriptions. They are the sorts of transactions that the fee discount was designed to encourage. Lots of inputs consolidating into a few outputs. The degens are mostly not bidding fees up except in fairly rare cases where someone clearly wants to move their shitcoinery on chain. I hope to have a way to visualize this much better but it’s slow going because there is a ton of data to churn through. The big expensive transactions at the bottom of this block are good examples of this.

The Mempool Open Source Project®

Explore the full Bitcoin ecosystem with The Mempool Open Source Project®. See the real-time status of your transactions, get network info, and more.

In my mempool right now, about 12% of the pending transactions have inscriptions. But the total fees offered for those transactions represents only 4% of the total fees offered for all pending transactions. Some of the very high total fee transactions I’ve come across and spot checked look to be coming from centralized custodians where they are consolidating hundreds of inputs into a few outputs. Many of those have 60-150 sat/vB and they are huge because of the many inputs and their witness data. I suspect the ongoing banking drama is causing more of the mempool congestion than inscriptions are. Lots of onchain activity on a day like today seems like a good thing. 🤷‍♂️

This meme I shamelessly downloaded from Twitter is going to be useful 🤣

Software developers never took Richard Stallman’s communism seriously. Open source has primarily been a way for software developers to commoditize their complements. Instead of paying rent seekers for fundamental building blocks, it made more strategic sense to build dependencies in an open way so nobody could be leveraged while building more specialized software. 15 years ago I swore I’d never again build software I own on proprietary platforms I have no control over. The 15 years prior to that I had been rugged at least 3 different times by a vendor deciding the proprietary platform I built on was no longer worth supporting. Luckily, enough open source software existed by that time to make my new open source only strategy viable. Linus Torvalds did more good for the world than Bill Gates ever will.

And now I wait about 3 days for my script to churn through the last 21,000 blocks to gather stats on inscriptions. Thinking about creating a #nostr bot to summarize what the degens are doing each day and how many sats they are burning to do it, but this is the first step.

It’s a 2 cigar kind of day.

Test driving the new ashtray. 🤌

Looks like there were 75,424 inscriptions written yesterday. They used 29.3 MB of space and it cost 1.870485 BTC to write them (≈$54,886). I need to group them by content type to see the breakdown by type. Looks like many are now just “text/plain;charset=utf-8” with JSON contents. I’m curious if many images are still getting written. ChatGPT helps eliminate the most tedious parts of writing this kind of code. Instead of wasting time researching the options for doing various tasks, which always results in spending time weeding through many unhelpful search results, ChatGPT just presents options that can work and you can focus on the overall goals.

Hourly DCA is even better because it shows you what you are actually saving out of every hour. If the median 35yo in the US makes ≈$28/hour, that’s equivalent to $6.67/hour when looking at every hour of their lives not just the 40 hours they are working. ($28/working hour * 40 hours/week) / (7 days * 24 hours/day) = $6.67/hour If that median 35yo can DCA $1.00/hour, every hour of every day, they are saving about 15% of their gross income. That’s a pretty standard recommended retirement savings rate. Save $1/hour and you’ll be stacking $672/month. That’s ≈2,444,000 sats/month at current prices. How many 35yos in the US do you think are saving $1 per hour in sats? The nice thing about hourly DCA is that you get to buy every dip automatically. Any time you see the price go down you know you got some sats on sale. Salt to taste and adjust for your situation and income and you’ll be tracking your savings progress every hour and you’ll get to experience how that helps lower your time preference. View quoted note →

The complete lack of deference for Ursula von der Leyen and the European Commission is genius. This is the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Uganda, Dzeje Odongo. If you look at Wikipedia, it says this: “On 18 February 2022 he participated in the European Union - African Union Summit in Brussels. A controversy arose when he greeted President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, only after an intervention by Emmanuel Macron, which was considered a misogynistic attitude.” This was after “Sofagate” in Turkey and before her recent treatment in China. The western propaganda outlets desperately want you to believe she’s being mistreated because she’s a woman. Forbes has even claimed she is the most powerful woman in the world (after placing her well behind even Kamala Harris multiple times 🤣). The reality is she’s the unelected leader of an impotent criminal organization and anyone holding that office should be treated like the used toilet paper they are. I hope this trend continues.