Cherry Pickers

When you make an argument for or against something, some people like to take liberties with the timelines, or the timing of their statements.

If you zoom out and take the full ~15-year perspective of Bitcoin’s existence, this is what you get instead.

But why let longer term numbers get in the way of a deceptive post!

Now, let’s turn to another example that is more related to Bitcoin’s useability. Most Bitcoiners today understand it as a final settlement layer for value, where the price to get your transaction confirmed into a Bitcoin block is based on a market for blockspace. If there are lots of other people competing to get their transaction into a block, you will naturally have to pay more to get your transaction in that block.

We have recently seen a lot more transactions of the spammy kind (inscriptions, BRC-20, Stamps) etc, and as of the recent halving, a new protocol, Runes. Runes is essentially a new ‘altcoin-on-Bitcoin’ meta-protocol that operates on top of Bitcoin and is intended as a replacement for BRC-20. One silver lining here is that Runes is a more UTXO-efficient protocol than BRC-20, which creates a lot of extra UTXOs. But the downside here is that as the halving occurred, there was a big spike in on-chain transactions as the Rune degens were playing their games in Bitcoin’s mempool. Many of them wanted to be first or at least early to mint new Runes, which they could then hope to dump on other people as is a tradition in the non-Bitcoin ‘Crypto’ world.

This caused a temporary spike up in the prices to get a Bitcoin on-chain transaction confirmed. Of course, big blockers who are still salty about the events of the block size war in 2017 chose this precise moment to run ‘victory laps’ on social media. They would post things like, “Oh, look at how much it costs, Bitcoin has failed as a Medium of Exchange and it’s all over!”.

As an example, see Aaron Day’s post straight after the halving on April 20th: 

Or, of course, if he’d waited a few days until April 25th, and he’d see that it had already dropped down to much more reasonable levels:

And as I write this now, on April 30th, it’s even lower:

So what’s the lesson? We should learn that we shouldn’t just take cherry-picked statistics or numbers; we should zoom out and look at longer-term averages.

This is why the intelligent way to do smaller transactions is to make use of Bull Bitcoin Fee Multiple Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. You can use it either custodially (for beginners or people who’d rather not use the chain as often) or self-custodial (for those who want increased sovereignty and manual control and are prepared to incur the associated cost of running an always-on node).

For those users who use Lightning self-custodially, they are able to use tools such as Mutiny Wallet or Zeus Wallet in the USA, or Phoenix from outside the USA to easily ‘compress’ the number of times they have to use on-chain transactions. It’s also quite feasible to open Lightning channels when Bitcoin main chain fees are lower and then subsequently do most of your commerce off-chain. So, as an example, I could do one or two on-chain transactions per month but do dozens or even hundreds of off-chain transactions per month. This minimizes the chain fees required while still enabling me to do coffee or other smaller-value transactions instantly.

While quick ‘drive-by’ analyses can be inflammatory and make it look like Bitcoin is failing, proper analysis requires ‘zooming out’ and understanding the reasoning at a deeper level.

Goldbugs who are salty about how Bitcoin does what they hoped gold would do often resort to cherry-picking timelines to make gold look good. Likewise, big blockers who do not understand the reason for Bitcoin’s current status resort to cherry-picking specific fees to paint a narrative that Bitcoin has failed from a fee perspective. Zooming out and understanding why Bitcoin is the way it is is crucial to seeing the bigger picture.  

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