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4MB Tuya raised US$7.5 million. Why is capital interested in Bitcoin’s “Wizard Culture”?

Sharonand others3Authors

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The Bitcoin Wizard appeared when Bitcoin was only $287 apiece and was chosen as the official promotional image for the /r/Bitcoin forum

Author: Sharon, Jaleel, BlockBeats

Editor: Jack, BlockBeats

Former Bitcoin minimalists may be changing their "stale ideas" and choosing to embrace a larger Bitcoin ecosystem amidst the current Bitcoin ecosystem boom.

11 月 23 日, Bitcoin developer and former AWS Chief Engineer Rijndael (@rot13maxi) announced that he will join the Bitcoin Ordinals project Taproot Wizards as CTO.

It is worth noting that this Bitcoin OG had previously deployed a BRC-20 token sniper robot called "Zhi Zi", and also gave high praise to Taproot Wizards.

Bitcoin OG chooses to "stay and revolutionize"

In the dynamic released by Rijndael, not only did he provide a detailed introduction of his past work experience, but also expressed confidence in the future development of the Ordinals ecosystem, and believed that Taproot Wizards will be able to create a new future. The content can be found in the link.

Over the past 15 years, Rijndael has been working on distributed systems, infrastructure, and applied cryptography, and later became the technical lead for Amazon's NFT project. In recent years, Rijndael has become truly interested in Bitcoin and has worked on self-custody on the Bitkey wallet launched by Block.

At the beginning, Rijndael believed that the biggest problem to achieve Mass Adoption of Bitcoin was the self-custody of Bitcoin. However, in the first half of this year, everything seems to have changed with the emergence of Ordinals.

Transition from Bitcoin Self-Custody to Ordinals

When Ordinals first emerged, Rijndael met Eric Wall (@ercwl) and Udi Wertheimer (@udiWertheimer), co-founders of Taproot Wizards, who were already more popular than Ordinals.

Rijndael highly recognizes their team and technology, and firmly believes that "non-government-controlled currency is a powerful revolution, and Bitcoin is also interesting and peculiar."

Left: Eric Wall; Right: Udi Wertheimer

He pointed out that when Ordinals appeared, those who only had a passing interest in Bitcoin or had never used it before joined Discord to learn how to set up a Bitcoin full node. Some also started setting up Lightning wallets for the first time, learning about the workings of Bitcoin, and reading about the origins and stories of Bitcoin.

"Ordinals is an ideal place to try out new cutting-edge technologies."

Meanwhile, Rijndael does not shy away from discussing the speculation behind Ordinals, but instead believes that 99% of Bitcoin adoption is achieved through speculation: "This speculation on Ordinals attracts users, developers, and capital to build new tools and services, which in turn attracts more users, creating a virtuous cycle."

At this point, Rijndael has chosen to temporarily "set aside" the issue of self-custody of Bitcoin, and instead fully embrace the Ordinals ecosystem, hoping to "experience NgU, stay for the revolution". They also hope that less dogmatic Bitcoin holders can truly hold and experience Bitcoin without having to accept a very specific purist value system.

And the reason for choosing Taproot Wizards, as given by Rijndael, is that Taproot Wizards is "the best choice to make this transition happen culturally and technically."

This previously deployed BRC-20 token sniper robot "Zhi Zi"

It is worth noting that Rijndael, before joining Taproot Wizards, had publicly deployed a BRC-20 token sniper robot called "Sophon" on October 3.

The operation rules of BRC-20 tokens are based on the principle of first come, first served, whether it is deployment, minting, or transfer. Sophon utilizes the "first come, first served" principle and the transparency of transactions to allow robots to monitor the mempool.

In this way, whenever a new BRC-20 token deployment is discovered, the robot will pay a high gas fee to deploy a token with the same name and set the supply to 1. This prevents others from obtaining the newly deployed token, and the supply of the token deployed by the robot is only 1, making it unable to circulate in the market.

However, Sophon was shut down by Rijndael after running for less than a month due to "spending too much gas fees". Afterwards, Rijndael donated the bitcoins in the UTXO to opensats and recently open-sourced the Sophon code. During this period, BlockBeats observed that Sophon briefly caused a deployment bottleneck for BRC-20 tokens.

According to data from the Dune bulletin board, after Sophon was activated on October 3rd, the number of text-based inscriptions dropped from 49,000 the previous day to 13,700, a decrease of 72%. On October 23rd, the day after Sophon's funds were depleted, the number increased from 11,500 to 74,300, an increase of 540%.

The gap is where Sophon is deployed in the deployment phase. Image source: Dune

Ordinals Hub maintainer cbspears (@cbspears) pointed out in this comment: "Since the deployment of Sophon, the number of UTXOs has decreased by more than 10 million, and at the moment he turned off Sophon, the number of UTXOs began to increase. Rijndael is actually saving Bitcoin."

It is interesting that Rijndael's answer to "why deploy Sophon" is "for culture".

Capital is interested in "Wizard Culture", but VCs have no say

Taproot Wizards, highly favored by Rijndael, completed its financing last week. According to BlockBeats, Taproot Wizards is an NFT project created on the Bitcoin chain, initiated by Udi Wertheimer, aimed at commemorating the Taproot upgrade of Bitcoin and a classic image of the Bitcoin community - the Bitcoin wizard.