A lot of the fun and novelty has left ordinals culture, a lot of it sucked away by the Siren Song of Runes Riches. Should Runes never have been created? @rodarmor came up with the idea for runes on an airplane over the Pacific Ocean on his return flight from Token 2049. It was largely a response to the toxic effect that BRC20s had on Bitcoin's UTXO set and potential objective harm that could pose to the network, as well as the scheme an absolutely ridiculous technical design. What's wild is that it worked. The unchecked UTXO set growth immediately plateaued the month of Runes launch and has started to decline as rock bottom feerates incentivize dust output reclaiming. Casey actually did it 💪 Runes is one of the most sane technical implementations of a token standard if you believe there should even be tokens on Bitcoin (imo still up for debate, I personally just consider it inevitable and not worth hand wringing over). Because so much of adoption in tech & protocols is path-dependent I would consider us incredibly lucky that Casey was the one to conceive Runes and the consideration he took when building the reference client has stalled much of the malincentive of heterogenous assets on a blockchain. Maybe this malincentive will always be kept at bay due to the genesis of the protocol. But what about tokens in general, regardless of their technical design? Additionally, we saw Runes emerge at the peak of token nihilism -- "real" infrastructure crypto tokens have been massively disappointing, rejected by both savvy investors and retail. Left curve retail temporarily purified itself of Low Float High FDV extraction and embraced memecoin nihilism. This temporarily allowed a period of rapid wealth creation as everyone admitted that we were just trading vibes. But nihilism also leads to destruction as we fast track the cultural ackowledgement that memecoins are meaningless. The "Believe in something" strat has been obliterated by the "Flip everything" strat. Now, reader, you understand why the Bitcoin maxis are so narrow minded and insular. Maybe you yourself are becoming one. "The world of fungible tokens is a near totally irredeemable pit of deceit and avarice, so it might be a wash" One of the few token advocates that I find interesting is @BackTheBunny who I would recommend a follow. What do y'all think?