I have the inventor of Ordinals and Runes, Casey Rodarmor, on this podcast. We talk about how Casey, even though Ordinals may be down, how Casey is going to improve and his new ideas for Ordinals.
We also talk about things such as state sycophantism, Bitcoin going forward, how Casey likes to think about Bitcoin as a more application-focused developer. This is one of the more spicy and fun conversations I've had.
Casey is a wonderful conversation. [upbeat music] This conversation was recorded live at the Inscribing Conference at Bitcoin Vegas, a Bitcoin culture and arts conference. Shout out Inscribing.
Go to inscribing.com or @ordevents on X. Um, you're the Ordinals and Runes guy, but you're -- [laughs] Are you tired of talking about Ordinals and Runes by now? No, honestly, I'm very happy to talk about them.
Um, you know, they're, they're my babies. There are things I love about them. They're great. Uh, I'm still... I still th-think they're fun.
Every day I go to ordinals.com, and I see what's kind of like been landing in blocks out of the mempool. Um, Runes, I think is interesting. I think everybody's sleeping on Runes.
Uh, it has this built-in four-year hype cycle where, you know, in three years, these like one-letter legendary names are gonna start dropping, and people are gonna realize, like, "Oh, shit," you know.
It's like the ha- like Runes has the halving too, except it's like the names. Is it every three months or so?
Over the course of every three months, I believe the next length, the next shortest length of names starts to become available.
So it started at, like twelve characters, and over the first three months, eleven-character names, and then it'll be ten, nine, eight, seven, three, two, one, and the final bloody battle over three months for the twenty-six one-character names.
The Z rune. Who's gonna get the Z rune, Charlie? Don't you have, like, the thirteen Z rune? The sleepy- Yeah, the sleepiest rune. The sleepiest rune. Yeah, that unlocks for minting, uh, in four years, you know.
Um, I always blame the failure, I always blame the lack of wild success of Runes on the degens. I don't think that they're creative enough.
I think I've given them a gift that requires some creativity to take advantage of with, like, clever names and clever memes, and they're just not, they're just not good at it. They're just not good at it, you know.
We need a new crop of degens. Yeah, I mean, I think, and I also think there's a lot to be done with, like, Sats cards, for example, the Ordinal Sats card.
Um, like, you know, get, like, the rune on a, runes on a Sats card, you know, trade them around, um, treat runes like trading cards, you know. Um, it's annoying because there's -- For me, it's really annoying.
There's all this obvious stuff that can be done from my point of view, like this low-hanging fruit, like just do X, just do Y. It's so easy. But I'm like one dude, and I can't do it all myself.
And even when I tell people on Twitter like, "Hey, you should do this," like, they don't do it, you know.
And also everybody is so, like, short-sighted and, like, you know, trying to make money, and it's like, "Guys, you're just gonna be losers and not make money." Just don't make money and be cool.
That's much better than being a loser and not making money, you know. [laughs] Uh, being cool pays dividends, whereas being, uh, not cool and not making money doesn't pay dividends. Yeah.
Isn't it all about the friends we make along the way? [laughs] That's certainly what I tell myself.
And so then, like, if you're cool and you have friends, you know, you'll be pretty happy with things, even if your stupid coin, like, just goes to zero. So maybe let's entertain a little bit of, uh, bull tard comment.
I, I rarely do price talk, but like- Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah. We're at a hundred and ten fucking K right now. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah.
[laughs] Um, it, it's, it's surreal, but also at the same time, like, Bitcoin is starting to feel kinda foreign to me. Mm. Do you get this sense as well? Not even a little bit. How so?
Yeah, no, it's just to me, it's all the same Bitcoin it's always been. Um, number go up, number go down, adoption slowly, slowly, slowly happening. Like, yeah, no, it doesn't feel foreign to me.
It, it literally feels like the same Bitcoin it's always been.
And it's like it's just more number go up, it's more people get adopted, and, and things are kind of happening the way that I mostly would expect that they would happen, you know.
Um, I-I've always thought that adoption would be very, very slow. Um, or maybe not always, I shouldn't say. Maybe when I first got into Bitcoin for, like, a year or two, I was like, "Oh, yeah, adoption any day now."
But then as you sort of start to think about it, um, adoption for use as money is really slow.
Basically, if you wanna use Bitcoin as an investment or a store of value, there just needs to be some people all around the world who are willing to buy it and sell it.
And then when you want to buy or to sell it, you get on the internet, you get on some exchange, you get connected to those totally random people around the world that you buy and sell from.
But if you wanna use it as a, as a money, like, listen, you have people that you like buying groceries from, that you like getting haircuts from.
So it's not just you need anybody to use Bitcoin, it's you need those specific people to use Bitcoin. So in that way, I think it's just a much harder problem to solve for, for Bitcoin to become money.
Um, but yeah, and right now, you know, the-- some of the stuff which might feel foreign to people is adoption by nation-states and Bitcoin starting to get sort of globally political, which I have been expecting, like, forever, you know.
I don't have any predictition, prediction on the outcome and exactly how it would go. You know, you could see, um, sort of rogue nations like Russia, China- North Korea.
North Korea, yeah, adapting, adopting it because they, they want to, like, oppose the United States.
You could see United States adopting it because they want to, you know, uh, get control of it, or they want to, um, I mean, like some like super five head stuff, like they want to use it to back the dollar, or they know that these, you know, uh, authoritarian regimes are very heavily censorious of data and money.
And so by making the rest of the world adopt Bitcoin, like, dude, like, China starts to have a lot of trouble controlling its economy if you can move money in like a global way, in a, in a, in a way that's recognized worldwide.
Well, I mean, that- Over the internet. If you wanna call back history, like when, when China banned Bitcoin mining back in twenty one-Which twenty? Twenty, twenty twenty-one- Twenty-one... when they actually banned it.
Okay. Um, and, and I, the precursor to that was they would, like, fake ban it and- Yeah... um, but I understand that a lot of that was just really due to capital flight. Chinese
were pulling their wealth out of China- Yeah... through Bitcoin. As like th-that was the real reason, not the smoke and mirrors on Bitcoin mining. Um- Right... so your, your point
has been demonstrated historically, and I think it continues- Yeah... to this day. Um, at the conference, we have a who's, a who's who of politicians. Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, this time last year,
uh, and, and that's not, that's not surprising. Like, we got a pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto, whatever. Mm-hmm. He's a pro-something president. [chuckles] Yeah, he's pro-something.
When, when you figure out what it is, let me know. Yeah. You know? I, I don't think he's anti-Bitcoin. [chuckles] Mm-hmm. Try to figure out what he's for.
Um, uh, it does not surprise me we have abundant political representation. Mm-hmm. But this time last year, you had a kickass line. What did I say?
You said, uh, on the main stage, quote, in response to Bitcoiners appearing to start to, to feel a bit sycophantic- Uh-huh...
you said, well, we're like, yeah, just the Bitcoiners are like, "Oh, well I'll, like, spit in my mouth daddy." Yeah, yeah. It's a good line. Thank you, thank you.
It was like this time last year, I invite you to reflect- Mm... on and, and, and peel apart this little thought which you interjected a year ago. Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think, um, you know, ultimately I think politics is very stupid.
Um, like, this is just something that's come up over and over in my own life in, like, navigating politics and navigating the internet, navigating... And the internet is a space where people do politics.
I actually think paying attention to politics is really stupid as an individual. I think it's a waste of time and energy because you can't actually affect it.
Like, the way that you vote doesn't matter, um, unless you, like, stuff the ballot box and vote, like, a hundred thousand times. Your vote just literally does not matter.
If I, if you ask me, if, if, if you know that I voted, there's no way for you to tell how I voted, whether I voted for candidate A, candidate B, or I didn't vote, and that's the hallmark of something that didn't matter.
If you can't tell the way that the world is after it happened, it, it doesn't matter.
So this is the first thing that I wanna tell people is politics is stupid, and you should do more important things, and you should not, like, let it give you any head space.
Your head space should be about your hobbies, your work, your friends, your family, um, all those things. And the, the less I pay attention to politics, the happier I am.
Now, okay, fine, I'll get, I'll get, like, political.
Yeah, I mean, the state, the state, the state has a lot of power, and that power both corrupts the organs of the state as well as the people who come close to the state, right?
Because it's really unappealing to work hard and make an honest living when you can just get cozy in the halls of power and try to get yourself close to the money printer, right?
Or get close to the people who are making the laws and get laws made that, um, that favor you.
And so I think that, you know, uh, the state and the state's power corrupts individuals, and as Bit-Bitcoin gets bigger and bigger onto this sort of, like, global stage and of global importance, politicians, regulators, regulations start to take notice of indi- of, of Bitcoin, and that will corrupt existing Bitcoiners as viewing their, their easiest path to success as via the state.
And the problem is a lot of w-them will convince themselves that they're, like, doing the right thing. But it also will make a lot of new Bitcoiners who were already sycophants of the state.
Normies who are sycophants of the state or, um, you know, politicians will become Bitcoiners, and obviously they're, like, the most cucked of any of us.
Like, they're spending one hundred percent of their time thinking about politics, which is one hundred percent too much. So, uh, yeah, I mean, it's only gonna get worse from here. [upbeat music] Hey.
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Do you think we'll have more or less politics, um, in Bitcoin in ten years? Probably more. I mean, I think
the thing, I think a lot of Bitcoiners are a little bit over-optimistic about this next phase that we're going into. Like, they sort of view Bitcoin as being this, um, unstoppable thing, this unstoppable power.
You know, nobody can stop it, nobody can censor the chain. But we're talking about, like, governments, right? And governments are really, really powerful. Um, if,
if for some reason US politicians started to really sour on Bitcoin and they got, you know, European governments, like, going with them, and even, even if they could get authoritarian governments with them because, um, you know,
e-every government stands to lose by losing control of the money printer, right? I think we could see a kind of suppression of Bitcoin like s- like the war on drugs, right?
Where, you know, the, the, the government can't totally eradicate drugs, but it can actually make it very unpleasant for the average person to use, you know, at great cost, at great expense.
Or they'll prescribe you their particular brand of drugs- Sure... uh, and create a whole new systemic issue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And also, I mean, we see stable coins being incredibly, um- What do you think about stable coins? Um, I mean, I think stable coins are good.
I mean, like, m- good money is useful.And I don't like the dollar in a lot of ways, but the dollar is clearly better than a lot of other currencies, and it's not even close.
I mean, you look at a lot, lot of other currencies, they're just absolutely terrible. Um, and so I am greatly in favor of people in, you know,
underdeveloped countries being able to bypass their own shitty financial system and get access to the dollar, which is way, way better than their existing currencies.
And I just, you know, I just understand the reality is that they don't want volatility.
And okay, the dollar inflates at like, you know, two to ten percent annually, like whatever it is, but their currency inflates at like ten to fifty percent annually. You know what I mean?
So it's good, and, uh, it expands like demand for dollars. It does mean that the dollar-- I feel like the more expansion of dollars there are, the, the, the riskier the dollar becomes.
Like it becomes the larger the s- For itself or just systemically? It becomes-- I worry about these like systemic problems.
Like for example, you know, there's all this external demand for dollars and, and the United States is kind of just, um, taking it as a given that they can keep, uh, printing money or printing treasuries, um,
to sate this demand abroad, right? And if all of a sudden that demand like drives up, dries up, you know, let's say that, you know, all of a sudden they're all like on the lightning network, you know, that...
I mean, obviously it'd be great, but like- Well, they're going, the tether's going on the lightning network- Right. -I suppose. Yeah.
But like, but like if all of a sudden that demand went away, well, okay, if you're, if you're, if you're banking on a million dollars of demand a year, that's not so bad, you just kind of absorb it.
If you're banking on multiple tens of billions of dollars a year of external demand, all of a sudden your, your debt is like that you were relying on being able to service by, you know, being by ful-- by, by fulfilling this demand goes away.
It seems like it just becomes a bigger, much bigger and bigger systemic risk, basically. Let's switch gears. Hmm. I want to have kind of a hilariously meta conversation. Mm-hmm.
[laughs] Uh, I'm gonna this-- let's talk about your podcast on my podcast. Hell yeah. [laughs] Uh-huh. Yeah. The Hell Money podcast wherever. Hell Money pod. Fine podcasts are sold. Hell.money is the domain.
[laughs] They're sold in one fewer place than they used to be. Oh, really? [laughs] Well, all right, you're not on Patreon again, are you? No, no. Booted off of Patreon. You got de, depate. Depatreon. We got... We did.
We did. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Too much, too much. We shitcoin too close to the sun. Yeah. [laughs] Too much alpha. Yeah, too much alpha. That's right. They had to, uh, um...
What's funny is I feel that, uh, '20, '23, and '24 were very much Hell Money pod season two. Mm-hmm.
But since then, you guys have finally been able to, you and Erin, have finally been able to extricate yourselves from talking about ordinals and runes all the time. Hmm.
You've branched into what I'll ca-call more interesting esoteric, uh, topics. Yeah. We're going down the esoteric wisdom route. I mean, Er-Erin is a spiritual lunatic- [laughs] -I would describe.
But I find her beliefs very like fun and like charming and like fun to riff on.
So like I don't have my normal like atheist, like Reddit atheist like- [laughs] -whoa, like I don't even think there is a yoni chakra or whatever. Um, so yeah, it's fun.
And I've also been, um, I'm working on, uh, numerology for the sets. Chinese numerology and, and fortune telling. I was hoping you'd bring this up, which is the cool, the wildest thing ever. Yeah.
I'm, I don't even know what kind of question to ask. Explain to the listener and to the ordinals legions who all tuned in at this very moment- Yeah -what's going on.
So I mean, this actually was a thought that I had a long time ago, right in the earliest versions of Ord.
I don't remember if I had this or some other sat tribute, but I had other sat attributes based on the num- You had like a beauty component, or it was like aesthetic.
[sighs] Or you said like vi- pleasing sy- I don't even remember. I don't remember. But I did, I did think of this a long time ago.
I would sum up the number of eights and subtract the number of fours, and that would get you a Chinese numerology luck score because eights are generally lucky in Chinese culture. Fours are generally unlucky.
But I started to do research on this. I was like, okay, I'm just gonna figure out blah, blah, blah, do the select score. And, uh, what I found out is that Chinese numerology and fortune telling is incredibly complicated.
Like you don't get like this whole fucking giant fucking country, like stewing on fortune telling for six thousand years and like not get a bunch of really crazy, really complicated systems.
So I-- my original idea was do the simple luck score. I've actually pulled back from that because I wanna make sure that what I do is objective.
So instead of create this like subjective thing that, you know, Chinese people or masters of Chinese, like different kinds of numerology will be like, "Uh, actually, that's bullshit."
I wanna find the objective things and bring those to the surface so people can do their subjective interpretations. So one thing I'm gonna do is,
actually the thing I'm most interested at the moment is sort of a sat-based fortune telling, that you ask a question and you have to...
It's gonna be answered by a sat in your possession, and you wait for the next block, and the next block provides the randomness. And from that, it uses, uh, probably, uh, the I Ching, which is a system of like hexagrams.
Which is where binary comes from or something. I don't know. I don't know if binary came from the I Ching exactly. Yeah. [laughs] They both use things that are look like binary. Yeah. And then you get a, um,
you get a series of hexagrams, and then you interpret those hexagrams according to the I Ching. So it gives you the objective part, the list of hexagrams, and then you interpret it.
Um, another idea I'm, I'm thinking about doing is, um, every block will have a permutation of the tarot deck. Okay. I'm, I'm conceptually familiar. Yeah.
So that every block you'll get a new permutation of a tarot deck, and so you can give yourself a reading.
So you can think about what you wanna ask, and then you get the deck, and then you can give, give, give the reading.Is not s- like creating transactions or getting sats back, isn't that not kind of deterministic, though?
Um, so the, the randomness would be ba-based on the, um, the block hash, the block hash. Okay, so it would be block hash based. Okay. Yeah, yeah.
But it would be in combination using either no sat as a seed or a sat in your possession of the seed. And the idea is that, um, the sat in your possession is a little bit more personalized. Interesting. Yeah.
So you could ask me maybe questions ab- uh, uh, not related to you. That's right. I mean, for that you might wanna use the, um, you might wanna use the pure block-based fortune telling method. Yeah.
I mean, my goal with this is I think actually like s- expanding the cultural sphere is very interesting.
Like people -- If Bitcoin is gonna be around for hundreds of years, which we all hope it will be, people will integrate it into their like spiritual and religious practices, spiritual, religious, and cultural practices, um, in the same way that they've integrated money into their spiritual, religious, and cultural practices.
Hell money. Yeah. And hell money is this paper money that is burned in, uh, Chinese ancestor veneration to provide money to their spirits in the afterlife. And so people always want me to do like tech things.
They're like, "Oh, Casey, like create some new protocol," or, "Casey add some like degeneracy to- I need to gamble more. Yeah. I, I still have money I need to give away. Exactly.
Or like, "Oh, add some feature to Runes that like makes it more degenerate. Like, let us mint Runes on demand," or weird bullshit. But I'm like, I, I don't know.
I actually think that maybe I can do, I can do some interesting work trying to expand Bitcoin in the cultural sphere.
Like, imagine if like every fucking like astro ho out there was like dying to get a sat, like a semi-personal sat. Think how many nodes we could spin up because of that. Yeah.
And they want it because they wanna be able to do sat-based divination. You know, imagine if you get a sats card with some lucky sats on it and a red en- a red envelope for your... Oh. Yeah.
I mean these are like such powerful things, you know? And they don't require any, they don't require any technical design. I mean, a little bit of technical design.
Really what it requires like research into different spiritual cultures, and then me trying to faithfully like create code that, that implements those things in a way. Like, my goal is so that
like an I Ching master can look at the way that the math derives the hexagrams to perform the sort of interpretation on, and go like, "Yeah, that makes sense." You know what I mean?
It's really interesting 'cause divination, like, this might be oversimplification, but divination like implies you have some kind of external determinism that when you interact with it, it, it tells you something back to you.
Mm-hmm. Bitcoin has that interesting like external level determinism because if you wanna get down to it, it's down to the, the electrons in the silicone- Yeah... that produce that nonce within the field and in the hash.
Mm-hmm. And, uh, from that we can derive all sorts of wild, uh, divination schemes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Do you think you'll ever like-- Do you, I mean, do you, is this still just concept based?
Do you think you'll ever ship something like this? Oh, the divination stuff? Yeah, like, like yeah, actually like- Oh, yeah, no, I wanna put it in Ord. Yeah. Yeah, I don't see why not.
I mean, the only, actually literally the only problem is I don't know how much I wanna clutter the sat page. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Um, but yeah, I don't think there's any reason not to add this.
Or I can just add like, you know, some little show me the esoteric spirituality button, and then you see this bullshit, you know? But yeah, I don't see why not.
Um, and also, you know, of course, like there's so many, there's already so much fluff. Like there's the sat number, there's the decimal representation, there's the percentage representation.
The Teleburn address which is now hidden behind, uh- I unhid it. Oh, you did? Yeah, I don't know if we put it back. I mean, my plan was to put other things in there.
As of last night 'cause I was actually- Yeah, we haven't deployed the latest version of Ord. Okay. But we unhid that. We're like, whatever, just put it out there. Put it on there. Yeah.
We need, we need every little bit to get more people to burn in penance- Yeah... their Ethereum NFTs. The better. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But yeah, and also like I think there's, there's no reason there shouldn't be this like fun stuff, you know. Um, yeah, like Tarot is interesting.
Um, there's probably other, other spiritual practices that could be involved. Yeah. So I wanna keep this brief, and so you can get back out to, uh, shaking babies and throwing baseballs. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Um,
throwing babies and shaking baseballs. [laughs] That's right. Yeah. Um, uh, uh, general Bitcoin question. Um,
what is something interesting happening in Bitcoin that someone else is working on that you, uh, find really interesting? Uh, um, man, I don't know. I've been kinda checked out recently. Which is okay. Yeah. Thank you.
Um, I don't know. Any ideas? Give me some... Bro, I don't know. Um, uh, I don't wanna, so I don't want to-- This is not about filters, but there's a little mini game happening- Mm-hmm...
in the filters debate, which is, um, Chris Gita, if, are you familiar? He's a Lightning developer. He loves filters, and he's pil- he's put together a version of a config of Libre Relay- Mm-hmm...
which pr- which is called Garbage Man- Mm-hmm... which pretends to be a Libre node- Mm-hmm... and instead captures and does not relay your transaction. Uh-huh. Um, the idea being, oh, I can...
It, it's a fun little game- Yeah... which I think doesn't- Yeah, it messes up the preferential peering that- Yeah... Libre Relay does to try to find other Libre Relay nodes.
So there's another guy, he's also at this conference- Yeah... Stu, um, who has put together a counter Libre config which peers like to a bunch of nodes and tries to snuff out which ones are theGarbage man- Uh-huh.
Uh-huh... capture nodes. And there is a [chuckles] little goofy, uh, it's an incredibly indie niche war that maybe fifty people are paying attention to- Mm-hmm...
where, uh, they're just trying to, uh, identify each other's nodes. That shit is so boring to me.
I mean, like the- [laughs] The ultimate issue is that, like, listen, [coughs] people are paying miners to get certain kinds of non-standard transaction miners, transactions mined, and this makes those miners more profitable than other miners and reduces Bitcoin centralization.
And how you feel about this, how you feel about the nature of those particular transactions is, like, super irrelevant. That's, that's all that matters, right? And it's like just start relaying them.
Like, give me a break, you know? And then also, you know, we haven't had the on-chain demand that we all want, so why shouldn't we pay the miners to secure the chain?
Sh-why shouldn't the degenerates pay the miners to secure the chain? Like, that's not a problem. That's good, right? Yeah. So yeah, like, I don't know. I mean, God bless.
God bless their little hearts with their little game of cat and mouse. Yeah. I don't want to dwell on Opportunit. It's an exhausted tort- Mm... fraught subject now. Yeah.
Um, I, I like to say, uh, please, please press out my JPEGs. I don't want to have to be putting JPEGs on Bitcoin, uh, as the base economic security- Uh-huh... for the rest of time. Yeah.
I would like it to become more money-like. Yeah, just use it as money, and then it'll price out the JPEGs. Yeah. Like, easy. Yeah. That's like, really it's that simple. Yeah. Um, any final thoughts?
You don't, you're not on many podcasts. Yeah, dude, I don't know. I mean, uh, I, I-- everybody should, uh, log off Twitter and touch grass, and all the cool people in this space, they have lives outside of this space.
Oh, yeah. And all the people in the space who are, like, the worst, they think the space is all there is. It fills up their entire day, their, their entire life.
So just, like, chill out, go talk to some people, go take a walk, read a book, get into a hobby, you know. Like, that's, that's my advice. Read a book that's not about Bitcoin. Yeah, very much so. Yep, definitely.
Yeah, yeah. Casey Rodarmor, thank you so much. Thank you for having me, bro. [outro music]