Original author: Sharon,Jaleel，BlockBeats
Original editor: Jack, BlockBeats
The former minimalists of the Bitcoin ecology may be changing their outdated concepts with this round of Bitcoin ecology boom, and choosing to embrace the larger Bitcoin ecology.
On November 23, Bitcoin developer and former AWS chief engineer Rijndael (@rot 13 maxi) announced that he will join the Bitcoin Ordinals project Taproot Wizards as CTO.
It is worth noting that the Bitcoin OG has previously deployed a BRC-20 token sniper robot named Sophon and also spoke highly of Taproot Wizards.
Bitcoin OG chooses to “stay in the revolution”
Posted in RijndaeldynamicIn it, he not only introduced his past work experience in detail, but also expressed his confidence in the future development of the Ordinals ecosystem and believed that Taproot Wizards will be able to create a new future.
Rijndael has been working on distributed systems, infrastructure, and applied cryptography for the past 15 years, and has since become the technical lead of the Amazon NFT project. Rijndael has become really interested in Bitcoin in recent years, and has worked on self-hosting on Bitkey, the wallet launched by Block.
At the beginning, Rijndael believed that for Bitcoin to truly achieve Mass Adoption, the biggest problem that needed to be solved was the autonomous custody of Bitcoin. But after Ordinals appeared in the first half of this year, everything seemed to be different.
The transition from Bitcoin self-custody to Ordinals
When Ordinals first emerged, Rijndael met Eric Wall, co-founder of Taproot Wizards (@ercwl) and Udi Wertheimer (@udiWertheimer), and Taproot Wizards became popular earlier than Ordinals.
Rijndael highly recognizes their team and technology, and firmly believes that currency that is not controlled by the government is a powerful revolution, and Bitcoin is also interesting and strange.
Left: Eric Wall; Right: Udi Wertheimer
He pointed out that when Ordinals appeared, people who had only a passing interest in Bitcoin, or had never used it, joined Discord to learn how to set up a Bitcoin full node. Some people also started to set up a lightning wallet for the first time and understand how Bitcoin works. Principles, read the origin and story of Bitcoin, etc.
Ordinals is the ideal place to try out new cutting-edge technologies.
At the same time, Rijndael is not shy about talking about the speculation behind Ordinals. Instead, he 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, in turn, attract more users, creating a virtuous cycle.”
At this point, Rijndael has chosen to temporarily put aside the issue of self-custody of Bitcoin, and has chosen to fully embrace the Ordinals ecosystem, hoping to experience NgU and stay for the revolution. He also hopes that those Bitcoin holders who are not so dogmatic can To actually hold Bitcoin and experience Bitcoin without having to accept a very specific set of purist values.
The reason given by Rijndael for choosing Taproot Wizards is that Taproot Wizards is the best choice to make this change happen at a cultural and technical level.
Previously deployed the BRC-20 token sniper robot “Sophon”
It is worth noting that before joining Taproot Wizards, Rijndael publicly deployed a BRC-20 token sniper robot named Sophon on October 3.
Related Reading:Are there not many BRC-20 left for retail investors? Bitcoin MEV is sniping the inscription market》
The operating rule of BRC-20 tokens is that whether it is deployment (Deploy), mint (Mint) or transfer (Transfer), it follows the first-come-first-served rule. Sophon uses the rules of first come, first served and transaction disclosure to allow robots to monitor the mempool.
In this way, whenever a new BRC-20 token is discovered to be deployed, the robot will pay a high gas fee to deploy the token with the same name first, and set the supply to 1 so that others cannot obtain the newly deployed token. , and the supply of tokens deployed by the robot is only 1, which cannot be circulated in the market.
However, Sophon was shut down by Rijndael after less than a month of operation because it spent too much gas. Subsequently, Rijndael also donated the bitcoins in UTXO to opensats, and recently open sourced the Sophon code. During this period, BlockBeats observed that Sophon briefly caused a depression in the deployment of BRC-20 tokens.
According to Dune dashboard data, after Sophon was activated on October 3, the number of text-based inscriptions plummeted from 49,000 the previous day to 13,700, a drop of 72%. On October 23, the day after Sophon ran out of funds, the number rose from 11,500 to 74,300, a 540% increase.
The gap is the Sophon deployment stage picture source:Dune
Ordinals Hub maintainer cbspears (@cbspears) to thisCommentPointed out: “Since the deployment of Sophon, the number of UTXOs has decreased by more than 10 million, and the moment he shut down Sophon, the number of UTXOs began to increase. Rijndael is actually saving Bitcoin.”
Interestingly, Rijndaels answer to Why deploy Sophon is - for culture.
Capital is interested in “Wizard Culture”, but VCs have no say
Taproot Wizards, which is favored by Rijndael, just completed financing last week. According to BlockBeats observation, Taproot Wizards is an NFT project created on the Bitcoin chain, initiated by Udi Wertheimer, to commemorate the Taproot upgrade of Bitcoin, and a classic image of the Bitcoin community - the Bitcoin Wizard.
On November 16, Taproot Wizards announced the completion of US$7.5 million in financing, led by Standard Crypto, with participation from Geometry, Collider Ventures, StarkWare, UTXO Management, Bitcoin Frontier Fund, Masterkey and Newman Capital.
Bitcoin Frontier Fund Partner @TO shared his previous letter of intent to invest in Taproot Wizards on social media, This is what I sent to Taproot Wizards on April 5, 2023.@udiWertheimerand@ercwlTerm sheet for investing in Taproot Wizards. After reading the blurb (of Taproot Wizards), I only wrote for 5 minutes to make sure it was early.
Just like that, @TO completed a basic term sheet on a section of toilet paper.
An abstract blank check has achieved actual investment intentions.
What better reflects the rebellious art of Taproot Wizards is that @TO expressed on social media that he was happy that the Bitcoin Frontier Fund participated in this round of investment in Taproot Wizards, but his team still did not receive an NFT.
Unlike the voice that VCs have in the traditional Crypto circle, Udi Wertheimer did not give him special treatment. He just replied to @TOs comment: Thank you for your support! If you want a wizard, just go take a shower!
It is reported that Taproot Wizards’ goal is to reawaken the culture of building and innovating on Bitcoin. The project has issued a limited number of 2,121 Wizard NFTs. Currently, less than 1% of Taproot Wizards Ordinals have been minted. In fact, long before this round of Bitcoin ecological narrative, Taproot Wizards had already set off a wave at the beginning of the year.
In March of this year, Taproot Wizard officially shared the journey of founder Udi Wertheimer on social media: After Silicon Valley Bank announced its collapse and USDC panic day, I decided to launch the Taproot Wizard NFT project today and let people record themselves wearing wizard costumes. Bathing video.
Making bitcoin magical again has also become one of the main narratives of Taproot Wizard.
One of the oldest memes about Bitcoin
Bitcoins wizard image first emerged in February 2013, when /r/Bitcoin moderator theymos solicited ideas for community advertising. Within an hour, a friend named /u/mavensbot submitted this work called Magic Internet Money Wizard.
With its creative painting style, eye-catching picture design, and simple and direct cultural slogans, this work quickly became the most popular answer in the forum. The image was later selected as the official promotional image for the /r/Bitcoin forum and ran on Reddit for a while.
The simple brainwashing design brought a lot of traffic to the /r/Bitcoin forum, and more and more people clicked in to see what this advertisement that doesnt look like an advertisement wanted to express and represent. Many people also know, understand, buy, and spread Bitcoin.
It is worth mentioning that one Bitcoin at that time was only $287.
Related Reading:An article analyzing the Bitcoin memeNFT, what does the bald wizard Taproot Wizard pay tribute to and express?》
As a result, this image quickly became an iconic symbol in the Bitcoin community, representing the mystery and charm of Bitcoin. Taproot Wizard is an NFT created based on this image and adding elements related to Taproot upgrade.
With the concept of Bitcoin Wizards, Taproot Wizards has gradually become popular. The reason why many people in the community support Taproot Wizard is that they believe that this meme is inseparable from the rise of Bitcoin and is the most original and pure meme of Bitcoin.
The largest blocks and transactions in Bitcoin history
Interestingly, the largest block and transaction in the history of Bitcoin also succeeded in making Taproot Wizards known as the largest Bitcoin block in history and further fueled the popularity of Taproot Wizards.
Udi posted on social media earlier this year, confirming that Taproot Wizards mined the largest block and largest transaction in Bitcoin history. The block size was 3.96 MB, slightly lower than Bitcoins 4 MB. restrictions, the block contains an NFT based on the original magic internet money meme, named Taproot Wizards.
This incident has caused great shock in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Blockstream CEO Adam Back, Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr and others believe that Taproot Wizards’ move has caused the size of the Bitcoin blockchain to rapidly expand, and may also cause abnormalities in some facilities, and even Showing that this is an attack on Bitcoin rather than an innovation.
But Udi disagrees. Instead, he feels that Bitcoin should not only be used for simple transactions, but can also achieve more functions through technological upgrades, and NFT is just one of them. And through disruption, community building, and rebuilding BTCs long-standing rebellious spirit, a new wave of interest and innovation in Bitcoin can be stimulated.
To do this, Udi believes Bitcoin maximalists need to put aside their high points and prejudices. In fact, this also reveals to a certain extent the reason why Rijndael chose to join Taproot Wizards. After all, as Bitcoin OGs, the concepts and ideas promoted by the two are also very similar.
For example, Rijndael is not against speculators, but believes that 99% of Bitcoin adoption is achieved through speculation; and Udi also believes that Bitcoin maximalists should not continue to hold inner biases, but should be more tolerant degree, only in this way can the real Bitcoin Mass Adoption be realized.
In fact, both Rijndael and Udi may have gone through the process of questioning, understanding, and embracing speculative behavior in the Bitcoin ecosystem and seemingly meaningless so-called uses. And it is precisely this process that also affects the future development direction of the Bitcoin ecosystem to a certain extent.
