History always rhymes What is the utility of BTC inscriptions from gold?

Source: Blockchain Knights

I have to say that BTC inscription has become the well-deserved king of traffic in the Web3 industry in the past month, but fortunately, it is now a little “calmer” because of changes in the market, so the author chooses to share a little thinking about the inscription in the past few months at this time. It may seem like an afterthought now, but this idea was first put forward in the first half of the year, and shared with friends around it on a small scale, which also prompted them to get a little market reward, and is now combed into a document for everyone to corroborate.

First of all, let’s talk about gold, a precious metal that has been passed down for thousands of years, and was first discovered in Asia Minor (Turkey) around 6000 BC. But the ancient Egyptians were the first civilization to discover and mine gold, and they mined it in Nubia around 2450 BC.

Ancient Egypt believed that gold was the skin of the sun god Ra, and often used it to make items of spiritual significance, such as solid gold belisks, idols of gods, and death masks, and later began to derive some gold ornaments. And from the Old Kingdom in the history of ancient Egypt, gold was stored in the temple, both for trade and to manifest status.

Around 550 BC, the Lydian king Croesus (now part of Turkey) minted gold coins for the first time, which was also the first time that gold was circulated in monetary form. Thousands of years later, there was a “gold standard” around gold and became a necessity in many industrial manufacturing or electronics (20%), and more than 40% of gold is still used in jewellery.

BTC, known as “digital gold”, has played more of a gold-like store of value in the past few decades, and is subject to technical limitations, but does not have the same industrial and jewelry attributes as gold.

But it is precisely because of the key upgrade of BTC Taproot last year that this attribute has undergone subtle changes, and the BTC ecology has been concerned again, so later we saw the birth of Ordinals, the discussion of Drivechain, BitVM and Taproot Asset, and the emergence of these new protocols laid an important foundation for BTC to break through from financial attributes to adopt attributes.

The value embodied in the BTC inscription is more like the jewelry in the gold attribute, which can be used to display and condense the “aesthetic consensus” split out of the part, of course, the similarity here is not completely equivalent, but the similarity of the value form, if you understand this layer of logic, you will probably understand why the inscription seems to be short-lived in March this year, and it will bloom with new vitality in the near future.

The particularity of the inscription lies not only in the various pictures or a few characters currently carried, but also in the fact that more information may be carried in the future, and the value of these information will be far greater than BTC itself, because they may be new value anchors, just like the bowl used by Qin Shi Huang, this bowl is not the other bowl.

Secondly, BTC L2, which is still in the pipeline, is more like an extension of gold’s industrial attributes, if it is only good looking and value storage can not fully reflect the utility of gold, only when it enters production and life, can the remaining 20% of the value be played. Of course, the application of BTC may have just begun, which is why the BTC ecosystem has returned to the mainstream vision.

However, I don’t want to dwell on the value of BTC here, after all, it has been more than a decade to prove its existence to the mainstream public, and how to review these new things that have emerged in the BTC ecosystem needs to be supported by some old propositions. But there is no doubt that gold has only become an important part of people’s production and life after thousands of years of development, and young BTC seems to have a long way to go.

Finally, the discussion of the BTC inscription itself in this article, the author does not want readers to use it as a reference for value judgments, but hopes that it will be a brainstorming to explore the origin, and perhaps more whimsical ideas can be mined, after all, isn’t the consensus shaped, how can there be right or wrong.