Bitcoin Dev’s Bot Bucks BRC-20s – Can Now Share ‘Sophone’ With World

A bot designed to suppress the creation of new BRC-20s has re-emerged on the Bitcoin blockchain. The creator of the pseudonym, @rot13maxi, said on Twitter that he had not decrypted it. But yesterday he shared the code with someone else.

Dubbed Sophon, the bot looks for Bitcoin transactions that involve formalities and “cuts” some of them off before they're fully processed. Effectively paying a fee to jump the queue in the Bitcoin queue, the bot discourages new BRC-20s by promoting their ticker names.

@rot13maxi “I think there's a copy of Sophon running there, and it's not me, it's pretty cool,” he said, sharing the bot code publicly, “going back and forth.”

Launched earlier this year, Ordinals is a protocol that “writes” NFT-like assets to Bitcoin in individual satoshis, which is equivalent to 1/100,000,000 of the total Bitcoin. That information so far includes art, profile pictures, and text.

As pioneered by on-chain analyst Domo in March, BRC-20s are signs of a bullish trend on Bitcoin.

BRC-20s are created using text-based scripts that contain JSON code. As demand for BRC-20 tokens surged in May, Bitcoin transaction fees hit a multi-year high as hundreds of thousands of text-based transactions flooded the Bitcoin Mempool daily.

Short for memory pool, the Bitcoin memory pool is a backlog of transactions waiting to be confirmed by miners and added to the next block of the Bitcoin network. In addition to Bitcoin block rewards, miners receive transaction fees associated with each transaction. If a user submits a higher payout, miners are encouraged to work faster.

How does a sofa work?

@rot13maxi says Sophon will destroy new BRC-20s using this mechanic. In order for BRC-20 to exist, it must first be deployed using text-based text. The bot looks for these transactions, copies the token's registry name, and stops the BRC-20 dead in its tracks by paying a high fee and setting up the entire supply for one second.

“It was a proof of concept to show this design flaw,” @rot13maxi said of the Sophon. “If you want to have a global namespace, this is to serve first. […]- Then you have to consider the fact that anyone can see that you are in Mempool and anyone can come and take it. [a token’s name] from you.”

Sofone was activated on October 3, and text messages dropped 72% to 13,700 from 49,000 the day before, according to the popular Dune dashboard. And a day after the bot funds ran out on October 23, posts on the text jumped 540% to 74,300 from 11,500.

In total, @rot13maxi says Sofone has derailed the deployment of around 275 fledgling BRC-20s with a 75% success rate. He said he spent 0.013 bitcoins ($500 at today's prices) to keep the bot running for a few weeks in October.

@rot13maxi “When I ran out of money, I decided I'm not going to keep pouring money into this if no one cares,” said @rot13maxi. “So I turned it off. And now everyone is clamoring to return.

Among those calling for SOPHON's return on Twitter was @raphjaph, the anonymous lead custodian of Ordinals, who took over day-to-day control of the protocol in May after creator Casey Rodermore confirmed he was taking a step back. Return from the project.

Although the figures seem small, a single transaction of BRC-20 can result in thousands and thousands more, as speculators rush to grab the predetermined supply, Bitcoin mining company Luxor Technologies Charlie Spears told Decrypt.

“If you look at the main driver of BRC-20 volume […]The majority of BRC-20 events are mint activities,” Spears said, estimating that 80% to 90% of BRC-20 transactions involve people claiming to be minted tokens or “creating and speculating on the price.

At the time of writing, Spears said 20 BRC-20s had been deployed with one supply the previous day, suggesting that some type of Sophon was back online on Wednesday.

Monsters in Mempul

Sci-fi fans may already know the name Sophon. @rot13maxi's bot is named after the antagonistic supercomputer in Chinese writer Liu Cixin's three-part series Memoirs. In the year He is best known for his first novel, “The Three-Body Problem,” which is slated to appear as a TV series on Netflix in 2024. In the story, an alien civilization is crippling scientific progress by releasing Sophos on Earth. Small size.

“Sophon was this little supercomputer the size of a proton, flying in front of particle accelerators and blocking it,” says @rot13maxi in the Csixin books. “So my bot will fly in front of the BRC-20 deployments and intercept them.”

However, Sophon is not infallible, he said. Anyone trying to create a BRC-20 can always slip away unscathed by paying a higher fee, says @rot13maxi. Or, you can also ask the phone operator to turn it off—a reason to consider a public release.

@rot13maxi said about keeping the bot in the hands of a few: “I feel like that's really not in the spirit of this thing.” “If you're vulnerable, you have to assume there are monsters lurking in the mempool eating your protocol.”