BTC Walked so that ORE can Run I love Bitcoin. I was introduced to crypto through Bitcoin in 2012 and it’s changed the trajectory of my life in several ways. However, Bitcoin’s development has been stagnant for years. Besides price, almost every other KPI has been in decline over the past 7 years. And I haven’t seen any evidence that the current spectrum of technologies (from lightning to L2s) will scale the network meaningfully. So why has BTC’s price continued to increase? 1. Bitcoin’s fair launch origin story, liquidity network effect from time in market, institutional ownership, global community, and strong censorship resistance guarantees are all key factors. 2. Bitcoin’s paradigm-shifting North Star. The market for a verifiably scarce, robust, and non-sovereign SoV asset is becoming the world’s most important market, and this narrative has resonated incredibly. 3. Lack of viable alternative assets to compete with Bitcoin. The only 2 contenders within crypto, ETH and SOL, have structural deficiencies when it comes to becoming SoV assets in their own right (although this doesn’t mean they won’t perform well as they garner more economic activity). Due to those reasons and despite Bitcoin’s lack of technological progress, I didn’t believe it was possible for another asset to fill the role of “digital gold.” This was until I learned about @ore. Ore is the next digital gold. Ore is still in its infancy and there are many risk vectors to address. And I believe Bitcoin's price will continue to climb on it's current adoption path. But, Ore has unique structural advantages that open a different, faster adoption path. 1. A vast majority of people who own Bitcoin will hold BTC on a centralized exchange or through an ETF (also centralized custody). I think this somewhat undermines one of the core values of Bitcoin and is a result of not needing self-custodied Bitcoin to interact with native smart contracts or DeFi. Ore, on the other hand, is natively issued on Solana where you need to self-custody in order to use it within the growing DeFi ecosystem. I think this is very important for the long-term defense against government interference. There are multiple efforts to bring BTC back onchain to use in DeFi, but the problem is similar to what happened with Ethereum and its L2s, where there is growing liquidity fragmentation between cbBTC, wBTC, sBTC, etc. 2. Again since Ore is natively built on Solana, it inherits excellent non-custodial wallets like @Phantom and a very scalable underlying payment/exchange network that is getting faster and more robust each day. Also, unlike Bitcoin, Ore's developer community does not have the overhead of dealing with the complexities of other layers of the stack (consensus, networking, etc). 3. While Bitcoin launched fairly and Satoshi's stockpile of BTC is probably lost forever, the original distribution was too skewed to early miners/adopters. By just the fact of not being first, Ore has learned from Bitcoin’s 15 year history. This has allowed the core team to smooth out the issuance curve, upgrade the algorithm to be more ASIC resistant, and expand the time horizon to participate in fair launch mining (even from your phone soon). 4. There is an argument to be made that Ore could become "harder" than Bitcoin. This is due to the fact that Ore is a program/contract on Solana, which means that contract could be frozen forever, which the core team has indicated. I know it would be very difficult to change Bitcoin's core properties (21 million coins, etc.), but the growing BTC on centralized services, centralization of mining, lack of transactions fees, etc. does potentially pose that risk long-term. 5. Ore's final structural advantage will be controversial (even more controversial that this post has been already). In addition to a cult-like grassroots community, Ore has a dedicated core team (@hardhatchad, @bigtimetapin, @neil_shahani) sprinting on development and building products to boost adoption. This is very different than the more "decentralized" approach by Bitcoin after Satoshi left the project. But, having a front row seat to what has happened between Ethereum vs Solana, I believe having a strong, product-focused organization pushing the ecosystem forward is critical in the early years of the project. Concluding thoughts for now. There is much more to say regarding Ore's strategic use of its Boost mechanism to increase liquidity on key trading pairs, amongst other advantages. But this post is already too long. So in summary, BTC will continue to march upwards as TradFi and nation states integrate it further into the centralized financial system and global capital markets. However, while Bitcoin is the first non-sovereign, store-of-value asset to reach escape velocity, it will not be the last. Despite being valued at around a $10 million market cap today, we at @Colosseum believe $Ore will be the next digital gold to reach escape velocity over the coming decade by carrying forward the original principles of p2p/self-custody and growing in lockstep with the onchain decentralized financial system. See you in the mines.

> When Bitcoin miners fail to mine a Bitcoin in a block, their computational credits don't go to other miners, it gets spent. Correct. And thus when those miners *do* eventually win a block, they're *forced* to sell the crypto reward to make up for their fiat losses and continue mining. The capital paid to electricity companies ultimately gets withdrawn from the value the token via miner sales. Buyers have to offset that selling just to neutralize the downward price pressure from miners. It's not an ideal setup for a "store of value". The big idea behind this ORE redesign was to invert that value flow and redirect miner expenses into the token rather than away from it.

A ORE whale just bought $4.98K of $ORE at $80.95M MC 🐳

Fundamentally, liquidity is the only thing that matters. It is what makes a thing money. Everything else (memes, priests, distribution, yield, lindyness, etc) are simply a bootstrapping mechanisms for liquidity. Despite its flaws, the dollar remains the most powerful currency in history because it has virtually infinite liquidity. It solves all other problems.

#1 or bust

Degen Dojo is now Solana’s first NFT marketplace built around $ORE. Collectors can list programmable NFTs (pNFTs) for ORE with 0% marketplace fees, while NFTs stay in their wallets until sold. The platform also supports one-click SOL-to-ORE swaps, making ORE central to the NFT trading experience.

A ZCAT whale just bought $49.44K of $ORE at $67.09M MC 🐳

The goal of ORE is not to "replace" bitcoin. The goal is to revive the original vision on a network that can actually scale for payments and financial applications. Scale and smart-contracts are critical to preserving individual freedom.

Fresh capital is flowing into ORE. This only happens all the time.