🚨 🚨 Please check out this special Op-Ed by our valued contributor #[0]

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NONCE POPULI

#[1]

Yesterday, #[2] announced the launch of “Bitcoin Magazine Historic Covers”, a 1/1 Ordinal NFT collection of its first 23 covers. These digital images of the covers, inscribed on the timechain, will be sold today (April 15th) via a Dutch auction. The choice of auction style is presumably to leverage partially signed bitcoin transactions (PSBT) that allow for a trust-minimized process which would not be possible with a traditional English auction.

The NFT auction is a disappointing decision by Bitcoin Magazine, in my opinion. While the winners will also receive a physical copy of the corresponding magazine, the auction itself is not explicitly for a physical object, but rather a digital representation of it.

The concerns a lot of Bitcoiners have about NFTs on other chains is that value is somehow being ascribed to an infinitely replicable digital object (and in many cases, just a hyperlink to the object). It takes a strong leap of faith to accept this premise, a leap that in my opinion is not compatible with the bitcoin philosophy of value stemming from a scarce, tamper-proof supply of the underlying asset.

Ordinals and inscriptions have brought the ability to do this on the bitcoin timechain. When we started the #gorillawarfare campaign on nostr in February, the motivation wasn’t to tell people what they can or cannot do on an open, free-speech protocol. The motivation was to appeal to their better judgement through good natured humor and memes and make them question what they *ought* and *ought not* do, despite having the ability to do so, on the greatest tool individuals have today to reclaim their sovereignty.

Segwit paved the way for blocks to effectively be 4MB in size. Most assumed that if there was a way to fill up all the blocks, they would be full. Inscriptions are certainly one way of filling up blocks, but so are monetary transactions that liberate users from the fiat system. The question is, which one should a major publication and arguably one of the most powerful voices in the space be promoting?

I would like to believe most of us bitcoiners have a shared mission to make the world a happier, more abundant and peaceful place. Empowering users to use bitcoin as a medium-of-exchange and driving adoption does that. Monke jpegs don’t.

I am appealing to the better judgement of my friends at Bitcoin Magazine to reconsider their decision to launch an NFT collection. Inscriptions are not a good use of blockspace in my opinion and are already attracting charlatans from the broader crypto world to peddle their scams on bitcoin. You have a responsibility to not encourage that.