Bitcoin Network Fees Halved, and I downloaded a BTC Runes Printing Press. Did you?
We can't all be Casey Rodarmor, but we can all play an essential role in the BTC network. Here is what I know.
Another Bitcoin halving happened on 4/20/2024, just after 12:10 AM. The 840,000th block was mined. Successful miners earn 3.125BTC for each block mined, which is 6.25BTC. Before the 6.25BTC, successful miners earned 12.5BTC. See how that works? This situation would also reduce costs to use the network. The fees were just cut in half!
I used to mine BTC with 4 ASICS Miners in my house paying .14/kwh. That was not a sustainable operation, but I had to know what mining crypto meant. The amount of computational energy used to solve the complexity of the BTC Block is extremely high. When I closed my eyes when those miners were on a block, I’d believe I was at an airstrip with a jet plane about to take off. Then the heat these things put off! They could have heated our home if we had run them in the winter. It wasn’t winter when we ran them. We ran them in the middle of July. I had high Energy prices, so I ran them for a week and then sold the miners on eBay at a wash. It was a pretty cool experience. One of the guys I do jiu-jitsu with works at a BTC mining operation. He came to my house to put in the proper breaker and hook the miners to the slushpool mining network. I got my ledger BTC hooked up to my Miners Push account. It was all surreal and all done on chain.
After going through that, I knew I couldn’t mine BTC at my house. The way to mine BTC is to find cheap and reliable energy. Cheap is good, but reliable is better. If the miner loses power halfway through a block, that is a waste. I was spending more than I was making. I justified my spending by saying I was earning BTC, which in the long run would outweigh the energy costs up front. I was using a calculator like this one.
Ever since the halving of BTC talks started getting hype again, the subject of miners has been hot. The most recent event sparked talks about full nodes. I reached out to my friend GirlInTheVerse because she is my resident BTC guru. She runs a program that teaches her followers all about BTC. In the literature, she has a tutorial for downloading the BTC Full Node Software. Yes, please!
It took 2 days to download the last 14 years of the blockchain onto my SSD (Solid State Drive), aka external hard drive. Now I am online as part of the BTC system. I have an old gaming laptop that I’ve made my crypto computer. I don't know why it's cool, but I think being a full-node operator is cool.
I am also told we can create our own Runes with this full node. If that is the case, we have a Runes Deployer, which is incredible and also the reason why there will be so many scam Runes on BTC. Runes are on chain and will require BTC to deploy the BRC20 fungible token. We will see how much it is to deploy a token and also what happens to BTC macro as Runes Standard went live in conjunction with the halving event. This is yet another use case for BTC as a fungible asset. I’m excited for this!
I've been working on a numbering scheme for satoshis that allows tracking and transferring individual sats. These numbers are called ordinals, and constitute a numeric namespace for Bitcoin.
2022 Quote from Casey Rodarmor, BTC Developer