“NFT Art Is Fairly Silly”, says Casa CTO Jameson Lopp on Bitcoin Ordinals Rise

Times, they are changing.

The recent hype surrounding Bitcoin NTFs, also called Ordinals, has driven a key thorn in the side of the maximalist community.

Instead of laying down the rails for “thermodynamically sound money“, it is used to print multiple JPEG files. Bitcoin supporters are also concerned about the scarce amount of block space available, a resource apparently too valuable to share with digital art.

The rise of Bitcoin NFTs is also a symptom of a bear market, he said. With low prices, block space is affordable. “In a bull market, that [Ordinals] would cost people thousands of dollars to do this,” said Casa CTO Jameson Lopp Decrypt.

To say that Bitcoin advocates are annoyed is an understatement.

“I get it because I’ve always thought that NFT art is pretty stupid. Personally, I’ve never found value in tokenized art,” he said. “It’s not something I want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for, so I can say that it gives me joy that no one else is the owner of this art.”

Lopp is in a unique position to see the crypto culture wars as well, having faced a similar variation when his wallet company announced it would add support for Ethereum. Previously, wallet provider Casa had only offered Bitcoin services since 2018.

Into the Belly of the Bitcoin Beast

The move to add Ethereum, announced last November, sparked similar outrage from many of the same people who complained about new inscriptions on Bitcoin.

“Nothing to be proud of” tweeted Samson Mow, CEO of Jan3 and well-known Bitcoin promoter, at the time. “RIP Casa” and “embarrassing” read some of the milder responses.

These days, though, it looks like adding support for Ethereum will pay off when the product finally launches in a few weeks, Lopp insists.

“From what we can tell and what we expected, a large majority of the people who were openly hostile and upset about it were not even our customers,” he said.

Rather than taking sides, what Casa is really looking at from a business perspective is “addressing as much of the market as possible in terms of encouraging self-storage”, meaning that users have to take responsibility for dealing with sometimes complex aspects of multi-signature transactions.

Cryptocurrency self-storage refers to the process of managing your assets yourself using private keys instead of relying on third-party providers such as centralized exchanges. The latter is considered a low barrier to entry for those new to the crypto space, but security is a major concern, as demonstrated by the FTX collapse last year as users were unable to withdraw their funds.

There are also “multi-sig” wallet options, such as Casa, which offer additional flexibility for self-storage of crypto assets. Instead of just one private key, a multi-sig wallet is secured by a few at the same time. If the user loses one key, their money is still safe.

What annoys Casa CTO the most is less the tribalism between coins, but “seeing people choosing third-party trusted custodians because they make it very easy to hold all the assets and take care of all the complexity for you.”

Adding support for both Ethereum and Bitcoin thus appears more like a middle ground.

“From an ideological perspective, it’s a trade-off that I’m willing to make if adding other highly adopted assets means we get more people to self-storage Bitcoin as well,” Lopp said.

Race ‘cancelled’ by maximalists

Still, many in the Bitcoin community have not been as understanding of that compromise.

“I fully understand the tribalistic aspects – this is a result of competing narratives and the fact that you have different assets claiming to be the best,” Lopp told Decrypt. “You should expect their supporters to use different tactics to support one over the other because they’re competing for a finite amount of value that they’re trying to absorb and get people to adopt.”

Admitting that the Bitcoin space is no stranger to some extreme individuals “who made being a Bitcoin maximalist — whatever that means — a big part of their personality,” Lopp also admitted that he has many issues with the term itself .

Lopp also revealed that he has been “cancelled” a number of times, with people upset by his interest in privacy-centric cryptocurrencies.

“Some of it went off the rails and became a little unproductive, especially when you get into a kind of puritanism like shaming people for being interested in other things,” he said.

According to Lopp, the crypto space is “all about doing whatever you want without permission,” which also means that “people should expect that they’re going to be upset by other people doing certain things, like the Bitcoin NFT controversy that’s happening right now.”