From the Armistice to the Methane Revolution: The Battle for Bitcoin’s Soul and Future

In the clamor of the crypto world, market attention is always drawn to the instantaneous price fluctuations. However, recently, a joint letter quietly circulating on the Bitcoin Core developer forum is like a stone thrown into a deep lake, which may not have immediately caused a massive wave but could be profoundly changing the current direction of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. This letter does not directly discuss wealth but may determine where future wealth will be born. It is more like a "ceasefire agreement" attempting to draw a pause to a prolonged "internal war" concerning the soul of Bitcoin. The core of this "war" is the "Inscriptions" and the Ordinals theory that have recently ignited the Bitcoin network. When developer Casey Rodarmor cleverly utilized a long-ignored corner of Bitcoin transactions - Witness Data - to permanently engrave non-financial data like images and text onto the smallest unit of Bitcoin, "Satoshi", in early 2023, he might not have anticipated releasing a Pandora's box filled with opportunities and controversies. Inscriptions ignited the Bitcoin ecosystem in an unprecedented way. Suddenly, numerous "BRC-20" tokens and Non-Fungible Tokens emerged on this chain known for its "purity", creating astonishing wealth effects and bringing a lifeline to increasingly depleted miner income - transaction fees once soared, even exceeding fixed block rewards. Supporters cheered this as a "Bitcoin Renaissance", believing it proved that the Bitcoin network could build a rich application ecosystem without complex smart contract virtual machines, thus attracting massive users and funds. However, the other side of the coin is the anger and concern of Bitcoin fundamentalists and some core developers. In their eyes, these Inscriptions, viewed as "financial graffiti", are a serious abuse of the Bitcoin blockchain's precious block space. The most famous opponent, senior Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr, denounced Inscriptions as a "spam attack" exploiting a "loophole" in the Bitcoin Core client. His logic is solid and clear: Bitcoin's original design was a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, and every byte of its blockchain should serve this core objective. Inscriptions permanently etch large amounts of irrelevant data onto the ledger, causing the blockchain to expand at an unprecedented rate, which not only increases the hardware threshold for running full nodes but will ultimately damage the decentralized foundation on which Bitcoin survives. He believes this behavior seriously deviates from Bitcoin's ultimate vision as a stable currency. This debate quickly evolved into a profound philosophical and directional conflict, splitting the Bitcoin community into two camps: "Minimalists" who believe Bitcoin should maintain its most concise and pure form, focusing on being digital gold and the ultimate value storage method, and "Expansionists" who see Bitcoin as humanity's most secure computing and consensus platform. The joint letter's appearance brought a turning point to the tense situation. The signatories list is compelling, including Ordinals theory founder Casey Rodarmor, core developers like b10c, and influential project teams in the Inscription ecosystem. The letter's core argument skillfully avoids the subjective value judgment of "whether Inscriptions are useful" and instead directly addresses Bitcoin's most core, indisputable principle: Censorship Resistance. The letter emphasizes that Bitcoin's greatness lies in being a permissionless, neutral platform. This is less a defense and more a higher-dimensional "checkmate", throwing the challenge back to developers trying to "fix" the loophole: Are you willing to sacrifice Bitcoin's fundamental anti-censorship principle to maintain your vision of "purity"? Furthermore, the letter candidly points out an unavoidable reality: Bitcoin's economic security model. As block rewards halve every four years, miners' income will increasingly depend on transaction fees. An inactive Bitcoin network with few transfer transactions cannot support a security budget worth trillions of dollars. This joint letter's profound significance is that it marks the Bitcoin community's internal conflicts moving from "confrontation" to "integration", from simple "blockage" to more intelligent "guidance". It hasn't ended the debate but has drawn a healthy bottom line. The wave of innovation surges on this ancient river of Bitcoin, with the evolution of Metaprotocols becoming the most noteworthy three-act play in this current.

Act One: Genesis - The Groundbreaking Ordinals The Ordinals theory and inscriptions are the starting point of this evolution, serving as a powerful "proof of concept" that roughly yet forcefully demonstrated the feasibility of issuing Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) and fungible tokens (BRC-20) on BTC. Despite issues like UTXO set inflation, it ignited the first first spark, revealing another side of BTC that had long been dormant. However However, its limitations were equally apparent: its functions primarily remained at token issuance and simple point-to-point transfers, lacking broader programmability. This led to an innovation bottleneck in the ecosystem after the initial hype subsided.

Act Two: Refinement - Runes' Elegant Turn Against this backdrop, the Runes protocol, personally crafted by Ordinals founder Casey Rodarmor, emerged. Like a meticulous engineer, it precisely optimized the drawbacks of BRC-20's generation of numerous "garbage" UTXOs. Through a more efficient, more "BTC-native UTXO model, provided an elegant fungible token issuance solution. represents the logical evolution of meta-protocols, moving from "feasible" to "more optimal". It made asset issuance cleaner and more efficient, but fundamentally, it remained within the "asset issuance" framework without touching deeper transformations.

Act Three: Paradigm Revolution - Alkanes' Stunning Leap However, whetherInals orUnes, rthey were still answering the question How to assets issue assets on on BBTC. real breakthrough lies in answering a more fundamental question: "BTC become a decentralized computer that carries complex applications?" The "Methane Protocol" (Alkanes) is to this stunning leap, pushing the entire narrative to a new height.

Alkanes no longer settles for patching existing protocols but ambitiously introduces a complete, WASM (WebAssembly)-based smart contract environment on BTC's foundation. WASM is an efficient binary instruction format that allows developers to write complex applications using multiple high-level languages (such as Rust, C++) and) execute them safely on the BTC network. Theoretically, this is equivalent to directly embedding an "operating system" at BTC's core.

This leap is disruptive. It means developers can for the first time build truly autonomous decentralized applications (Don's main chain, such as automated market makers (AMM) decentralized exchanges, trustless lending protocols, on-chain derivatives, and complex yield aggregators. This is no longer about issuing a "small picture" or an "on-chain meme coin", but about building a complete, composable DLego world.

Since its launch in In January 2025, Alkanes has begun to gain momentum after months of silence. Data shows that in just three months from March to May, transaction fees generated by exchanges interacting with the Alkanes protocol reached 11.5 BTC. Although this figure is not yet comparable to Runes (41.7 BTC) and BRC-20 (35.2 BTC), it has significantly exceeded Ordinals NFT (6.2 BTC) in the same period, period demonstrating strong growth momentum.

Alkanes' true killer feature lies in its upcoming native AMM DEX. Once launched, it will completely transform the trading experience of native BTC assets. Users will no longer need to go through the tedious process of manual order placement and and waiting for counterparty matching, but can liquidity pools driven by smart contracts, achieving instant and smooth and smooth transactions. This is not only a massive leap in in user experience but also a fundamental breakthrough in functionality. It means the BTC ecosystem can finally bridge the gap with modern smartContract contract ethereum laying the foundation for more expressive and D. The emergence of Alkanes represents the next evolution of BTC meta-protocols, static pushing the narrative from static "asset issuance" to dynamic "application deployment".". The world behind the is full of imagination.

Evolution, Never Stops

The story of BTC, from its birth, has never been a perfect script written by a single "god",", but an evolutionary epic co-authored by countless miners, and users through debates compromise,. From the early "Block size war" to today's "Inscription controversy", every major disagreement has ultimately became a catalyst for pushing forTC's seemingly unremarkable joint letter is another key chapter in this epic.

It reminds us that BTC's most powerful strength is not's rigid immutability, but its consensus mechanism's robust resilience and self truly dec-entralsystem will ultimately find a path of inclusiveness and perpetual vitality. From Ordinals' groundbreaking creation, to Runes' refined improvement, to Alkanes' revolutionary leap opening the smart contract era, we, are witnessing the acceleration of this evolution.

For those focusing on this field, it might be time to shift some attention away from K-lines and spend more time contemplating this ancient yet yet young public public chain. Because in those seemingly seemingly dry codes and forum debates in protocols like Alkthe seeds of the next paradigm shift are brewing. TheTC future be broader than.，保留且不翻译<>中的内容，其他部分一定要全部�Human�成英语。

如> 在加密货币领域，个新土狗正在崛起。这来,这个名为为"ordi"的代币正成在比特币生态系统中引发轰动。作为一个于Ordinals协议的的代币,ORDI比特币铜上的同质代币(NF)带来了新的可能性。 。