When the Ordinals system was first launched, it divided bitcoiners. The inscriptions were a almost instant hit, but some felt they were a bastardization of bitcoin’s true purpose (as a peer-to-peer payments system) or had a “reflex allergic reaction,” Rodarmor says, to anything resembling an NFT. Enthusiasm for signups resulted in network congestion as people began experimenting with the new functionality, so boost transaction fees to a maximum of two years and adding fuel to an already heated debate. A bitcoin developer requested that registrations be prohibited. Those who trade in rare satellites have also been targeted, says Danny Diekroeger, another satellite hunter. “Bitcoin maximalists hate this stuff and they hate me,” he says.
The fuss over the Ordinal system has mostly died down, Rodarmor says, but a “loud minority” at X is still “infuriated” by the invention. “I would like hardcore bitcoiners to understand that people are going to do things with bitcoin that they think are stupid, and that’s okay,” Rodarmor says. “Just get over it.”
The search for rare sats, itself an eccentric mutation of the bitcoin system, falls into that group. “It’s very strange,” Rodarmor says.
A band of merry satellite hunters
An ecosystem of software tools and services is starting to form around the rare satellite market. There are specialized marketplaces for sat trading, wallets that prevent users from accidentally spending rare sats, services that help businesses identify valuable sats passing through their accounts, etc.
In 2022, Danny and Kenny Diekroeger, two brothers from California, founded the software company Deezy Labs. After the Ordinals system was introduced, they changed the business to focus on products that automate the satellite search process and connect buyers with sellers. . “We started hunting ourselves, but our goal was to package it up so others could hunt too,” Kenny says. “Part of what we’re trying to do is figure out how to make it more accessible to anyone who wants to do it.”
The Diekroegers are part of the same small community of satellite hunters as Restey. Technically, the hunters compete against each other, but they say their relationship is collegial. The group meets on Discord and Telegram, where they discuss strategies and celebrate any particularly valuable findings. Deezy has developed a Telegram bot that alerts hunters using the company’s automation tools about any rare satellites they find. “You wake up in the morning and review what you found during the night. It has all these crazy emojis,” Danny says. “When one of us finds something important, we publish it to the others. It’s a good dopamine hit. It is super fun”.
There are many varieties of satellites to get the group excited about:black, pizzas, hitmen, alpha, omegas, silk routes, block 9and more, each with different attributes that make them attractive to collectors. Restey is a fan of sats palindromewhose identification numbers read the same forwards as backwards, because they can be rare on multiple levels: a hunter could find a palindrome that was also owned by the creator of bitcoin, for example, or a palindrome that contains within it a repeated sequence (For example, #1103301111033011), of which there are very few. Some hunters treat it like a business and sell everything they find, but Restey keeps his favorites in a special wallet: “They just have an aesthetic look,” he says.
