RunesCC and PukeCastCN interviewed Casey at 10am on May 27th. Casey was as honest and candid as ever. I have compiled the highlights of the interview for you. If you want to know the full content, you can listen to the replay.
Replay link:
https://x.com/i/spaces/1rmxPMYAzwnKN
1. How did you feel after attending the Hong Kong Bitcoin Week in May?
Casey: Hong Kong Bitcoin Week was crazy! I feel like there is a big difference between Eastern and Western degen, Eastern degen is more honest and pure, they have a lot of passion for runes and shitcoins, they like gambling, but they don’t pretend like Western degen is the future of finance, which I think is great.
2. Runes Protocol has been online for a month. Looking back on this month, can you tell us about your feelings? What are the things that you did not expect? What did not meet your expectations?
Casey：At first I was very worried about protocol-level bugs, but fortunately there were none, only a small bug was found in ord, which we fixed in time. Runes was hyped up before it was launched, and everyone thought these things would take off, but that was not the case. When a technology is first launched, that's when it's at its worst, with the worst ecosystem support, incomplete tools, and not many exchanges. So I think it's normal for people to be a little disappointed after it's launched. What makes me happy is that many people told me that they had a much easier time integrating Runes than integrating BRC20. The Runes protocol is much simpler, for example, a BRC20 transfer requires three transactions, while a Runes transfer only requires one transaction. So I think the technical advantages of Runes in terms of simplicity and efficiency have been revealed. Overall, everything went according to plan in the first month of Runes' launch, which is good.
I have absolutely no predictions about the future of Runes. There are DEXs on Ethereum where people can trade on-chain. Solana has almost zero-second transaction times. Bitcoin doesn’t have any of these. So it remains to be seen what kind of market position Runes will find in the long run.
3. What is the next upgrade plan for Runes Protocol?
In fact, we haven't made too many system plans at the moment, but there are some small functions I can mention, such as adding a function that only allows the Etcher of the Rune Token to mint the Rune Token.
Protocol development is a very tricky thing. For example, everyone wants to have a DEX like Uniswap that can be traded on Bitcoin. The problem is that if the protocol is not designed properly, it will introduce so-called MEV. On Ethereum, miners or validators can insert their own transactions and reorder them to profit from user transactions. The problem with this is not only that miners make money at the expense of users, but also that it makes mining centralized. Because miners need to invest in very complex infrastructure to remain competitive, it means that miners are no longer in the business of just plugging in hardware to start mining, they have to do other work, which makes mining centralized and goes against the core value proposition of Bitcoin's decentralization. So my premise for improving the protocol is that under no circumstances will it bring about something that leads to the centralization of Bitcoin mining. This is a very tricky balance.
So I personally rely on L2 developers. When people create L2 on Bitcoin, they can add any features they want on L2, and if they are careful enough, it will not lead to the centralization of MEV or the base layer. So I hope L2 can develop, and if L2 has features such as transactions, people can transfer Runes to L2, operate on L2, and then settle back to the main chain. This is the direction I hope future features will develop.
4. So you are very optimistic about Bitcoin Layer2, right?
Casey: Actually, I don't know if I can say that I am optimistic about Bitcoin Layer 2. As far as I know, no one has developed a truly viable Layer 2 yet. Although there are many people with various ideas, even if they have a good white paper, 99.999% of them are garbage. You really need to wait until someone builds something that works before you can see the actual properties of the system. For example, I like the Lightning Network very much, but it has some practical shortcomings and operational troubles. It is difficult to keep channels open, and there are all kinds of strange and complex attacks to worry about. And we have not seen widespread Lightning Network mobile wallets that can peer with anyone and open channels. Existing mobile Lightning wallets all open channels with specific Lightning service providers. If you only read the Lightning Network white paper, it is difficult to predict these various difficulties. So my attitude towards L2 is to believe it after seeing the actual effect. I am still optimistic that BTC Layer2 can appear with good trade-offs in all aspects.
5. What suggestions do you have for developers of the Runes ecosystem?
Casey: My advice to people building projects on Runes is that you have to make things fun. If you don't have a decentralized exchange (DEX) like Ethereum, or a second-level transaction confirmation like Solana, then you have to focus on making things fun, which is a high bar and hard to do. You need to make your interface fun, make your community fun, and make any mechanisms you introduce fun. I think developers should really focus on this, focus on fun, and think about how to build the best "casino".
6. Stablecoins are crucial to the development of the Defi ecosystem. What do you think about using the Runes protocol to create stablecoins?
Casey: While Runes is essentially built to support memecoins and shitcoins, it is a good protocol. There is nothing stopping people from doing "serious" things at the protocol level. While I am skeptical of so-called "serious" projects, I would not be surprised to see a lot of "serious" projects emerge, such as stablecoins and the like. I don't know if these ideas are all good ideas, but they will emerge.
There are several types of stablecoins. One is a pure algorithmic stablecoin, which tries to issue two tokens, one is a stablecoin and the other is a utility token of the protocol, and then tries to use this utility token to support the stablecoin. This scheme always ends badly and always collapses in the end. I saw a similar project, and I read their white paper and thought it was too complicated and was not very optimistic.
The other type is something like Tether and USDC, which is probably the safest type of stablecoin. I haven't heard of anyone trying to build this type of stablecoin on Runes. This is usually a very complex project that requires a banking relationship. Another type is a stablecoin that achieves stability through delta neutral hedging. I have heard of several projects trying to build stablecoins based on this model. This model is not as crazy as a fully synthetic stablecoin, they are not trying to create value out of nothing. These are some of the projects I know of so far, and I believe we will see more projects emerge in the next year or so, both good and bad.
7. What is your attitude towards OPCAT?
Casey: I like OPCAT a lot. OPCAT looks like a very powerful opcode that could add a lot of missing functionality to Bitcoin. In general, I'm open to adding reasonable opcodes. I personally would like to see OPCAT implemented, and I'd also like to see OPCTV (a covenant opcode). Even crazier things like script recovery, I think are cool. But I think it's too early to predict what will ultimately happen. I like OPCAT, but some people talk about OPCAT as if it's inevitable, like some people on Twitter will say OPCAT is going to happen whether you like it or not, etc. But the reality is that it's actually very uncertain and you won't know until people actually try to activate something, which hasn't happened yet. So I'm still on the sidelines.
8. Can you share with us the FUN! Ordinials series that you frequently retweet? Do you have any plans to release it?
Casey: FUN! is a series of photos taken by my friend Parker, and we have been working together. She started this project two years ago. When she started shooting and doing the actual work, I was working on Ordinals. We didn't know how to sell these photos at the time, but over time, Ordinals and Inscriptions became very popular, and we finally decided to put the photos on Bitcoin as Inscriptions. It is a series of 1,000 photos, all shot on film, without the use of Photoshop. All the effects are done with makeup and hair, no special effects.
I know this style of art isn't to everyone's taste, but it's Parker's style. She came to prominence in 2017 with a portrait series called Icons, which has a similar style. I feel like this series is closest to what PFP photos like BoardApe Yacht Club or CryptoPunks look like in real life. They're colorful and very grotesque. I think if they weren't grotesque, they'd be a bit boring and not worth doing. I would encourage people who think "oh my god, this is too much" to take a closer look at these images. There are a lot of weird little details in these images. Of course, some may not be to their taste, but there are also some that will appeal to the average person. There are some beautiful girls, some not-so-grotesque people, and cats, like Parker's cat Butternut appears in a few photos. So, give these photos a second chance and see if there's anything you like. I like this style. It's not bad if used as a PFP. Everyone is a character like this, a bit like a bust.
I wrote a program to inscribe the photos when the fees are low. Today, I finally finished inscribing all 1000 photos, the total size is almost 100 megabytes, equivalent to 25 full blocks. I am very happy with this series, because it is very expensive to produce, all shot on film, with models, makeup and hair. And, it is probably the most expensive series to inscribe, 97 megabytes of data is no joke. All in all, it is a good series. I would not give investment advice, but the artistic quality is very high. There are no specific sales plans at the moment, but we will find a way to sell them.
9. You mentioned in a tweet before that you would rather invest in some centralized service projects rather than some Layer2. I would like to ask you about your views on decentralization. Is decentralization really that important in all these ecosystems?
Casey: First of all, to be clear, decentralization is best, followed by centralized services that deliver on their promises. If you can't be decentralized, then centralized services are acceptable if they work. In the market competition, good services will survive and bad services will be eliminated. Even in the competition among centralized services, this is true. The worst case is the services that claim to be decentralized but are actually either centralized or simply don't work. My comments are actually directed at those who invest in decentralized projects that don't work at all or are just an excuse to issue tokens and then sell them to people. So I prefer to invest in decentralized projects that actually work, but a lot of the investment I see today goes to decentralized projects that have no chance of success.
If people have to choose between a decentralized project that is doomed to fail and a centralized service that provides a useful service, I would rather people invest in a centralized service that actually delivers on its promise. For example, in the US, the best centralized service to buy Bitcoin is probably River. It's a very simple Bitcoin financial service platform where you can buy Bitcoin, transfer money, and so on. I think it would be great if every country had one or two companies like River that provide people with a safe and easy way to get Bitcoin. I would rather see that than a bunch of L2s that will never work. So this is not about centralization vs. decentralization, it's about centralization vs. fake decentralization. In this case, I will always choose the functional centralized alternative. I would like to see some very good centralized exchanges that focus only on Bitcoin or Runes, listing every Runes. I think that would be very interesting and fill a gap in the ecosystem.
10. Is there anything final you would like to share?
Casey: In the end, the only thing I would say is: buy Bitcoin. Runes and Ordinals are fun ways to speculate, but nothing really compares to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the most "hard" money we've ever had. If you look at the history of fiat currencies, fiat currencies tend to only have a lifespan of about 100 years at most, they all die, get devalued, and collapse. We can see that even the dollar, which seems so strong, has an increasing rate of inflation. So, I would say buy Bitcoin, and then use a small portion of your funds to play with Ordinals and Runes, or whatever else you want to do. Don't buy the shit coin mined by VCs, there's no reason to buy those pre-mined coins. Especially Runes, it's too easy to make, you just click a button. So, don't buy the shit coin mined by VCs, use a small portion of your funds to play, but the rest of your funds are still in Bitcoin. As I said, this is the only investment I've made money with, and I still have a lot of confidence in it. Bitcoin's market value still has about 10 times the growth to reach the market value of gold, which I think may happen. Bitcoin is much better than gold, and you can transfer it to the other side of the world in 10 minutes. So, my final words are: have fun and buy Bitcoin.
