There’s been a massive cultural shift in the Bitcoin ecosystem lately.
To understand this shift, let’s take a quick look at the past. After Bitcoin was released in 2009, many developers tried to build things like color coins and naming services on top of Bitcoin. However, a lot of the Bitcoin community was against this development and mainly focused on Bitcoin’s money narrative. This led to the creation of other blockchains like Ethereum (Vitalik was also part of color coin) and most of the developers in Bitcoin moved to the Ethereum ecosystem. The only people left in the Bitcoin ecosystem were the Bitcoin maxis who understood the store of value narrative but failed to understand the value of having a general programmable layer of the internet. Since then, there have been very few updates to the Bitcoin network.
But, that’s about to change now!
Some recent applications have been built on Bitcoin, mainly stacks and ordinals.
- Ordinals are basically NFTs on top of Bitcoin, where all the data related to the NFTs are stored on Bitcoin itself. website https://ordinals.com/
- Stacks is an application layer built on top of Bitcoin that allows developers to write smart contracts similar to other blockchains. website https://www.stacks.co/
Now, here’s the interesting part — ordinals and stacks solve a major problem in the Bitcoin ecosystem, which is the lower demand for block space in Bitcoin, resulting in lower earnings for miners. But, with ordinals and stacks bringing in more users to Bitcoin, this will increase the transaction fee, which is good for miners. Additionally, it will increase the overall security of the Bitcoin network since new miners will be willing to join the network because of the potential earnings.
So, some of the second-order effects of ordinals and stacks include
- The transaction fee on the Bitcoin network increases,
- The memory requirements to run Bitcoin increasing steadily
- Developers moving from other ecosystems to Bitcoin. Pretty cool, right?
What are your thought will you use stack and ordinals?
