Bitcoin Magazine's Ordinals Desk

Thirteen browser tabs and a question about one magazine. On Monday, March 25, 2024, the host of the Mining Disrupt News Surge spent most of his show on whether a Bitcoin publication should run a trading desk for ordinals.

On the day the episode was recorded, Bitcoin traded at $66,832. On October 26, 2026 it was $80,236.

The argument began with a deal that fell through. An artist offered David Bailey, whom the host linked to Bitcoin Magazine, a JPEG for one Bitcoin. Bailey said yes. The artist then posted a video refusing to sell, saying he would not let his work be digitized and flipped to another buyer.

From there the criticism widened. Matthew Kratter of Bitcoin University warned against purity tests, but noted the magazine's disclosures showed it owned ether. Francis Pouliot of Bull Bitcoin, a Canadian exchange, wrote that he had only just learned the magazine ran an over-the-counter desk for ordinals, where people trade inscriptions and rare sats.

The host was torn on part of it. Ordinals are on Bitcoin, he said, and a publication about Bitcoin will report things its readers do not like. But reporting on something is not the same as running a desk for it. In his words, if they are true bitcoiners through and through, they should not be touching any of it.

The rest of the show moved fast. Greenpeace USA promoted a report tying Bitcoin mining to coal and gas lobbying, and X users attached a community note claiming the group was paid five million dollars by the creator of Ripple to attack Bitcoin. A chart from Brady Swenson of Citizen Bitcoin showed the wealth of the top tenth of one percent tracking the money supply almost line for line, which the host called the problem with money that bitcoiners have described for years.

He also played a clip of Matt Odell praising Bitkey, a hardware wallet with no seed phrase. With collaborative custody, a user can lose the device, the phone, or both, and still recover the coins. Odell compared the ease of it to buying a fund at Charles Schwab, except the user holds the keys.

He noted that Cathie Wood had raised her Bitcoin target from one and a half million dollars to three point eight million, on the view that institutions would put a little more than five percent of their portfolios into Bitcoin.

And he closed with a warning about a reported flaw in Apple's M-series chips that may expose private keys and cannot be patched. His advice was short: do not keep your keys on your digital devices.

The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.