Author: jolestar, Rooch Source: X, @jolestar
In the past few days, I have been saying at various conferences that inscriptions are the key to large-scale users and an independent world. Let’s talk about it here.
Inscription mode is friendly to newcomers
The 17-year ICO bull market and the 20-year DeFi bull market, They are all marked by a large number of users directly using the blockchain, and this bull market will follow the same logic. How to attract users to the chain has always been a dilemma in the industry. ICO allows users to directly participate in the early fundraising of projects, and DeFi can benefit from liquidity mining, but their participation thresholds are too high and it is difficult to attract large-scale users to enter.
The threshold for participating in ICO is to identify the cost. I remember that in 2017, there was a widely circulated project white paper cloud disk, which included nearly a thousand projects, each of which The background is bright and the blueprint is grand. I was stunned for a moment. Can this thing be realized? For newcomers who do not understand technology, it is more difficult to identify, so they can only pursue hot spots and create a wave of bubbles.
The threshold for participation in DeFi is initial capital. Without initial capital and security identification capabilities, not only will you not be able to make money, but you may also be rug. Or got hacked.
Inscription has the lowest threshold for participation. Users can participate as long as they can afford the gas fee, which is beneficial to user groups with lower risk preferences. And users are naturally close to the community and can take the initiative. As long as they adhere to one principle and only participate in mint or the early stages, they will basically lose the gas fee.
From this perspective, the inscription model is similar to Pinduoduo’s tens of billions of subsidies to attract new customers. In the post-Internet era, it is difficult to migrate users from one application to another on a large scale purely by relying on application features. Especially for new types of applications such as Web3, the experience is lower than that of old applications and the threshold is higher than that of old applications. The promised value requires users to form a network effect before it can be realized. How to achieve cold start has always been a dilemma. To directly distribute future assets within the application through inscriptions and attract users to join the chain, one way is to first start the user community through asset construction.
Is Inscription a sustainable track?
I have told many people about the above conclusion, and most of them can agree with it. But many people wonder if Inscription is a sustainable track? At first, everyone regarded it as an alternative meme. After all, its application form has not yet appeared. Veterans in the industry who have experienced previous bubbles have dismissed this short-cycle hype and are just waiting for the bubble to burst. Many people will ask why Bitcoin can grow from a meme to the present for a long time, but others cannot? Veterans will think this is wrong, but it will be difficult to refute.
If we think of it as a group game, the problem can be simplified.
Players will have several options when entering this game:
Everyone will predict other people's judgments to make decisions. If there are many people who predict that they will take a long time, this is everyone As mentioned in (3,3), it will encourage more people to participate, making this game system more durable and winning for a long time. But this is a prisoner's dilemma, and those who want to sell will guess the highest point and run away. Some people are smarter and will run ahead of time, which may result in them not even reaching the highest point. If you continue to deduce this way, it will become a game of running fast.
Therefore, to break the prisoner's dilemma, we must turn this finite game into a long-term or even sustainable game. In the scenario of a sustainable game, (3,3) is the optimal solution. And how can players believe that this game is a sustainable game? This is a process of game between the two parties.
First, holders will send signals to express their holding beliefs and build consensus. But this kind of verbal expression is not very credible, because he may shout and sell at the same time.
As the game reaches the second stage, it is necessary to send out more credible signals and build infrastructure. Building infrastructure around an ecosystem is equivalent to a method of pledging to gain trust. If this game cannot be sustained, the investment in infrastructure will be wasted.
When the game reaches the third stage, a derivative ecology will emerge on top of the infrastructure, forming an ecological cycle, and it becomes a sustainable game.
The most critical point of this game system is:
It must be a decentralized system, eliminating single points of risk in the system, ensuring openness, and anyone can participate.
Only in this way can we ensure that the participants of this game (including players and builders), exiting and switching will not affect the game. continue.
And the inscription game has reached the second stage. When a group game system enters the second stage, it will generate positive externalities, so it has the potential to become a long-term sustainable track.
The evolution path of inscriptions
The previous article explained the possibility of inscriptions becoming a As a sustainable track, how will it develop besides being engraved on Bitcoin? There are several main directions in this regard:
New asset protocol on Bitcoin. Whether it is based on the Ordinals Inscription protocol extension or a new inscription method, it can all be classified in this perspective.
The infrastructure that spawned the expansion of Bitcoin. Nowadays, many Bitcoin Layer2s are popping up, which is actually the result of the evolution in this direction. But the market differs on whether the inscription is a main course or an appetizer. Many people think of Inscription as an appetizer and the main course as Layer2. But from the perspective of the evolution of inscriptions, inscriptions are actually the main course, and Bitcoin Layer2 must serve them. Only the Layer 2 expansion path in Indexer mode can continue the expansion scenarios of inscriptions. This topic is relatively large and will be discussed in a separate article later.
The combination of inscriptions and smart contracts is Smart Inscription. Many of the ecology and application scenarios envisioned by Inscription need to be implemented at the Indexer layer. If the Indexer layer wants to provide third-party extensions, the natural idea is to have a built-in smart contract virtual machine, so inscriptions and smart contracts are combined. Inscriptions express assets, and smart contracts create usage scenarios, which naturally opens up the imagination of inscription application scenarios.
What will be the derivative ecology of inscriptions?
Through the previous examples, you can actually feel that Inscription is actually a rudimentary autonomous world group game, and it is trying to achieve sustainability. Inscriptions are the assets and props in this autonomous world, and inscription protocols are the rules about assets. This is exactly the concept expressed in the autonomous world. The issuance method of inscriptions is constantly evolving and becoming gamified. In the future, its issuance will be embedded in various application scenarios and naturally integrated into every corner of this autonomous world.
From the perspective of asset expression, Inscription is a semi-homogenized asset (SFT), but it also contains the asset issuance method, a new The asset issuance method represents a new incentive model, and different incentive models will derive different ecologies. The last wave of DeFi used liquidity mining to stimulate on-chain assets and TVL, completing the blockchain financial infrastructure. This wave of inscriptions, although it has not yet had its DeFi moment, can already feel many differences.
The target it inspires is users, communities, and applications. Applications require a large number of small and medium-sized teams to explore and try in various directions, and the SFT characteristics of Inscription make its liquidity between FT and NFT, making it more suitable for small start-up teams to issue assets. When the market finds replicable incentives and application construction models, and a large number of small and medium-sized teams begin to build applications, it heralds the arrival of a real bull market.
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