forget about the market price(retail market) for one minute

the look at the whole sale market of the cheapest methods to acquire coin
mostly this is the most efficient mining costs

q4 2022 had a $15k bottomline cheapest wholesale(most efficient mining) cost

since then mining hash rate has gone up meaning not only is the market price tested that bottom. the actual costs have since gone up which also gives stronger support
to cause the market to not test that previous bottom. but if it does dip again to test a newer raised bottom slightly above $15k

no one wants to sell at a loss and anyone that has intended to sell at $16k has done so.

anyway here is some math

based on 260exa hash average for q4 of 2022
gave a ~$7.5k hardware cost
  - 260exa / 191thash =1361257 asics
     a $3.63k asic with a 2 year life cycle = $4938638743.46 for 2 years (105000 blocks)
     $4.94b / 105000 blocks = 47034.66 a block
     47034.66 a block /6.25 = 7525.54 per btc hardware

gave $7.5k electric
  - 1361257 * $0.21 (5.2kwh at $0.04 is 0.208) = $283141.46 electric an hour
    = 283141.46 /6 /6.25 = 7550.44 per btc
totalling $15k mining cost for efficient hardware and low electric rate

NOTE
if average hashrate was say:
300exa = hardware 8685.71 + electric 8712.04 = 17397.75

meaning if a LENGTHY period of mining stabilises around 300exa
then the efficient mining cost bottom is going to be 17.4k
thus strengthening the bottom where no one wants to sell below "cheapest mining"

if we then look at the hashrate. we are seeing hasrate go over 300eca meaning the lengthy period average of the 2022 estimate is increasing thus going above last periods $15k and getting closer to the presumed average i just mentioned

this means chances of crashing again to near $15k is alot less chance then the first time it did

enjoy

regulators are not politicians put in place to protect the wealth of citizens

regulators are ex bankers promoted to supervisor roles to protect banks and do a bit of policing of bank customers that can harm a banks reputation(cause bank runs if banks are fined or sent to court)

regulators dont want newbie businesses attaining the same competitive status as banks that offer pension plans so ofcourse the first ETF is not going to be managed by some company that only existed under a decade ago.. they want the wall street elite to offer the first ETF. is just the regulators want to have the rules (walls" in place to ensure the elite banks still have a role to play in the evolving finance sector

firstly OP calls himself a scholar.
this does not mean he is wise, old and well experienced. it means he is young and still learning
but is/recently was in some higher end educational system, where his life experience is mostly just that educational system

but lets delve into a few thoughts of the OP

1. value vs values
the singular is a economic number. the plural is a sentiment of desire, need, and utility/benefit

2. value(economic number)
value is not the market price. value sits below the market price. its the most efficient acquisition COST on the planet of bitcoin (lets call it the wholesale amount)
there are real costs to mine blocks. around the world these costs vary because different countries charge different costs for electric.
using the rational costs of the main countries that are mining at industrial(large asic farms) rate you can work out a base cost(value) of the most efficient mining cost AND also the inefficient residential(hobby) rate of the most inefficient expensive cost(premium) on the planet

the retail(market) moves within this value-premium zone
because no one wants to sell at a loss and no one wants to buy higher then the most innefficient cost

3. the 2024 halving
value($15k) premium($95k) (rates of q4 2022) .. will and does increase over time (hashrate increasing) the market will go up over time
when the btc reward per block halves this actually makes the work(hashrate) cost per btc double

yep its like if 2022 you can make 10 loaves of bread per hour. and min wage is $10 per hour means $1 a loaves labour cost
if in 2024 you can only make 5 loaves an hour. but labour cost rose to $12. then that is $2.40 a loaf labour cost a 2.4x increase

no one wants to sell bread/btc below costs meaning the wholesale rate will go UP by more then double which will affect the zone the market/retail rate moves within. thus giving more pressure/incentive for the market rate to go up

4. unless hashrate tumbles down to extremely lower amounts or hashrate stays at a certain level and asics get more efficient/cheaper to run by more then 2x. all signs are showing the value/cost rate will be higher in 2024 not lower due to the halving 2x factor of production vs cost

enjoy understanding those basic economic lessons of bitcoin. and take the time to understand and run scenarios based on that.

..
comparing that to ethereum
when ethereum was PoW it had a base value/cost of $850-$10k which is why the markets played inside that window (market played at 1k-$5k inside the value-premium window)

however now its PoS that cost/value went down to $40value-$480premium.
due to a few economic and technical reasons ethereum being staked got locked into staking and not released to be sold off. so the market correction to a lower market rate within that new lower window has not happened yet due to that lock. which caused the market to artificially stay at a now high speculative bubble amount .. but it will correct down

ethereum if you check the market rate is not doing its own "price discovery" inside the window. instead its stuck at a ~1:14 rate of btc where its just blindly following btc price movements due to the economics of btc arbitraging.

yep btc is holding ethereum up due to lack of ethereums own userbase involvement of ethereum users making their own orders to correct away from this
but,, it will happen once staking can be unlocked

in short expect ethereum to correct down. whilst bitcoins market goes up due to higher base costs of acquiring bitcoin

enjoy

no
they were declaring record VALUATIONS
due to the market ATH giving their hoarded coin a large valuation. and when the markets corrected after the ATH it drops the valuation
(ATH mid 2021 -  testing bottom end of 2022)
(68k -16k =75% drop of coin reserve valuation)

what you are also finding is now covid is over with and businesses start asking staff to come back to the office. they are checking the efficiency of work flow over the last 2 years and realising they can still operate effectively on a skeleton crew (reduced workers)  and thus. shows its time to remove the dead wood

as with most social drama queens that use other queens of social quotes as confirmation bias

yet using stats
feb 2023 node count as stated by nutildahs use of lukes stats
53k

yet 2018 had 200k
2019 had 105k
2021 had 95k
2022 had 52k

what you notice is that people ramp up their nodes when the bitcoin price is moving the most

ordinals have been around for a month but nodes only started moving by a small percentange this week now that price is peaking above 25k ..

it has nothing to do with ordinals. its market price provoked node usage where people are mving funds around to buy or sell coin

also
although there are more taproot utxo
there is not equal growth of btc per taproot utxo
https://txstats.com/dashboard/db/taproot-statistics?orgId=1

so ordinals are not actually making people want to hoard value in taproot utxo
instead they are just abusing taproot

oh.. and the increase of taproot utxo are not also correlating with increase of LN channel openings of said utxo so no its not helping populate LN either

anyway lets translate this post into a form nutildah only understands

nutildah doesnt want to mention the large % of leaps of past events but wants to be laser focused on  a small blip

also look out for the BIS
they are building bridges between countries CBDC and setting limits on banks holdings of cryptos

banks themselves wanted 5% or more of decentralised crypto holdings(bitcoin) but the BIS bit back by saying its 2025 proposal(currently draft) will only allow banks to hold 2% of its total collateral/reserves in decentralised cryptos like bitcoin. and another X%(yet to be agreed) for stable coin based cryptos

nutildah its not about getting a gotcha

i have explained the flaw and holes that ordinals have. where they are not the same as NFT due to the hole/flaw in the ownership transfer weaknesses

you then started talking about ethereum purchases of contracts
you are side stepping and avoiding the obvious rather then learning

you are the one throwing out alot of "whataboutisms" to avoid conceding, by changing the arguments from ordinals to counterparty, to bitcoin to ethereum

so just accept that ordinals on bitcoin(this topic) does not show any real NFT utility of the meme dead weight due to not actually structurally and securely having a ownership claim system
(its a provenance system of receipts. not a ownership system of possession)
(where the taint/provenance can be broken in many ways)

i did try to teach you about some of your whataboutisms about general blockchain timestamps and your ethereum side track debates
but you narratives had faults in them too

sorry im not going to act like a blind sheep and just ass kiss and say your right when your wrong
but other readers prefer to see how things can work or what can go wrong. rather then read some nutters love story of having their ass kissed by blind sheep

have a nice day

each batch/yield/product can have a QR code that links which address its part of. where yes the addresses change per day/batch/season. but . the good thing about code. you can code a taint analysis system/blockchain explorer where  the wholesaler tags its addresses to make it known which address is what

i used vanity address as just this forums easy demo. but the same can be done by just using normal addresses that change per batch/yield/season. where a explorer, which the qr code sends you to, converts block data into useful human readable reference

you are not stuck with having the same QR code(locked to one address) on a product range for 20 years. qr codes on packaging can change per batch.. much like "sale by" dates change on packaging

you dont need to duplicate "contracts"

you simply need to show a plausible timestamp of claim of ownership of an image pre dates yours.

which can easily be forged by premining a new blockchain that contains an image in a block that appears to have existed years ago

but hey enjoy trying you fight your right in court

emphasis no need to try modifying your contract.. just create a new contract signed before yours. that then nullifies your contract in court

their equipment/office space and real tangible value of servers and stuff is not worth billions
its just a few dozen million at best estimates

its coins it privately buys is worth near a billion+ i suspect

however investors buying shares do not need to give over "billions" to give blockchain.com a multibillion dollar valuation

a investor can just buy 0.1% of total shares for $1.5m to create a share cap of $1.5b

so never trust a companies valuation. nor any coins market cap. becasue these "caps" have no association with how much cashable value is guaranteed to be sold for to fill that cap

a international single currency is not useful. because there is no trade(exchange) value if its just moving the same currency. they make money on the swaps/reserves of differing currencies

the m-bridge will be a network of multiple currencies allowing the so called "atomic swaps" for fee's

which will be seen as pre dating your time stamp. thus which one is the forgery now

also..
again..
really..? oh let me guess. the get out clause "single".. because you bought 2 of them not just 1

you said a time stamp cant be forged.
my post just proved someone can make a timestamped blockchain in 10 days that make it appear that it is 15 years old and has your silly image your trying to sell in 2023 inside a timestamped dated block that appears to have existed between march 2008-march 2010

your just upset how easy it was to debunk you

nutildah you have no concept of non fungible tokens because you have yet to learn the lack of transfer

also using bitcoin as the bloat library to then use ethereum as a value transfer. is not helping bitcoin be a value transfer(payment system)

but it seems you have no desire of caring about bitcoin being a payment system. you just want to bloat bitcoin into a useless library network of dead data to promote ethereum as a paymetn network

shameful

as for
oh yes it can be done
heres one example

create a new blockchain. throw in the 100,000+ memes of bitcoin dead meme data into the first 100,000+ blocks of a new blockchain with super low difficulty. add a time stamp of 10min intervals per block(simple math of unix time addition per block creation)
but premining them super quick succession in seconds per block (600x speed)
repeat until say block 800,000 (it will take about 10 days)
whereby from block800,001 you then release the blockchain to then mine at normal speed of ~10min per block with real time added

thus all appearances show that this blockchain is 15 years old and started in march 2008 and all the ordinals were present in before march2010(the 100,000th block) where by it was always around, just not publicly talked about until now. but for all intense and purposes of timestamps and blockheight. it appears to be the age it implies

pre dating all provenances of 2023

---

its easy to spot the types of people that dont care about the viability/security of a payment system..
its the type of people that just pretend their new scheme they bought into is utopian dream of hope and promise to recruit other people into just so the promoter can get rich quick by scamming the sucker they recruited into handing them money so the promoter can escape the scam before it collapses.. not caring about who it leaves behind

ordinal does not have NFT status. as it does not transfer ownership the way you want to think it does..
but heck why do you care. as long as you make quick greedy profits your willing to say or believe anything as long as you can pass on the problems to other people, whilst you take their value

if you cared about value security (store of value) you would be trying to scrutinise and look for the loopholes and bugs and flaws to try and get them fixed to protect value.

ok simplied

most countries are designing their CBDC as such

the main net layer is a blockchain between central bank and commercial payment services(banks). this is called the wholesale layer. where banks have reserves they swap between each other.
below that COMMERCIAL payment services(banks) have thier own customers who have accounts(like channels) with
which the commercial service gives 'inbound balance to
(customers request using that balance to go back to the commercial banks as long as the commercial bank then routes value to a destined other bank who has a destined other customer)

yep the silly guys messing with things like liquid and LN are sandbox testing CBDC idea's which they got from the hyperledger(bis) project in 2015
(banks got free coders who didnt know it)

anyway back to the features commercial bank customers see:
where by there are 3 types of accounts
level 0 are the non-kyc accounts that have a inbound limit of like a months wage at min wage
level 1 are the simple-kyc accounts that have a inbound limit of like a years wage at middle income wage/small business value
level 2 are the full-kyc accounts that have a inbound limit of lambo lifestyle and corporate account income level

if users wnat to send or receive more then their levels limit they will have to upgrade their account by registering with required documents

and yes even china and many countries have a level 0 no-kyc wallet (much like how people today can have a virtual visa card now without life history registration)
..
as for the international settlements.. well there is another network above each countries CBDC called the M-bridge which will become like the IMF reserves network

most of this information can be found on the BIS website

..
some of the CBDC domestically. (inside their country)
will have some commercial banks
where users can have small amount of tokenised digital vouchers of units of small value that users can peer-to-peer swap (without the routing process of bank reserves) so that in times of bad internet connectivity people can still make small payments directly with each other

i still laugh at the people that for X years have been saying
"do not let tx scaling occur becasue it wil bloat up the blocks"
are now saying
"do not let tx scaling occur bloat up the blocks with memes"

they do not care about mining pools total tx fee balance award
they jsut want individual users to pay extra fee's so that bitcoin becomes annoyingly expensive to use

yep they dont want cheap fee's or fee mechanisms that make it good to use boitcoin. they want people to pay more.

its all a game to get people to stop using bitcoin and start using other networks for payments.

those types of people are not bitcoiners. nor even care for bitcoin security
they promote pruning and softer rules to not be verified.

they are shameful and malicious

ok imagine this

1Wh34tF4rm3r (4btc) - 1S33dsuppl13r (0.5) (seed supplier)
                                   1m4ch1n3l34s3(1.0) (machine lease)
                                   1m4nur3St0r3 (0.5) (manure store
                                   1lab0ur4C05t (1.0) (labour cost)
                                   1Wh34tF4rm3r (1btc) (farmers profit)
and then
1Whol354l3r(4.5 btc) -> 1Wh34tF4rm3r (3btc) (wheat farmer purchase)
                                     1Whol354l3r(1.5 btc) (wholesalers profit)

and then
1r3t41l3rHQ(9btc) -> 1Whol354l3r(4.5 btc) (wheat from wholesaler)
                                1r3t41l3rHQ(4.5 btc) (retailers profit)

results are:
this can easily be audited, shows the money flow
it can also show the source of retailers produce
customers can easily track addresses to source where they can see the farmer address and farmer can publish its address and people can see fair trade, source, the quality of their products they bought (knowing the seed supplier)
EG genuine domestic seeds not foreign

the farmer can show its costs for the previous season (tx 1) to show the wholesale what it expects the wholesaler to pay
the wholesaler shows its costs to show what the retailer is expected to pay

farmers can see their competitors to see if wholesalers are offering competitive deals equally

silly people think bitcoin needs NFT on bitcoins blockchain to compete against ethereum..and boost bitcoin recognition..

.. but here is the thing. ethereums NFT game/promo/feature is not actually causing ethereum to have much of a unique community.

this is proven by looking at the lack of independent price discovery of ethereum
if it had its own unique community with a different sentiment. you would see ethereums volume be more then bitcoin, if that unique feature was more popular. and also the market price wiggles would look totally different to bitcoins price wiggles..

however looking at ethereums market. it just 95% of the time shadow trades bitcoin.
meaning there is not much of unique community in ethereum. thus NFT has not caused any big change of community sentiment to separate it

just look how ethereum is just shadow tracing bitcoin in most months by about 99% copying the ups and downs but just at a different cost ratio of about 1:14
            bitcoin           |            ethereum




ethereum does not have a big community of unique feature/utility that sets it apart as a novel usecase that separates it

thus NFT is not the big driver of price discovery

all that will happen is:

crypto businesses spend a little bit of money to register their brand in some tax haven country that is not banning crypto (this posts demo: caymen island for instance)
where they use "virtual office(pobox) address for their head quarter of the business. but work remotely elsewhere(around the world)

thus continue to operate but where 99% of businesses are "registered" under free jurisdiction of caymen islands

---

mining farms will have more of a task of trying to find a area to warehouse their asics with a power company thats not forced to ban asic customers. where by this can centralise mining farms to only jurisdiction free zones. (small islands or countries that dont agree with the world economics of US control)
causing a cut in hashrate due to lack of power capacity for those small jurisdiction free zones

this power hashrate will cause difficulty adjustment changes and competition changes for block rewards that can affect the bottomline cost/value of mining thus profit cost per coin bottomline to change

---

merchants selling produce can have their website hosted in jurisdiction free zone to take payment in bitcoin still. while having real world goods distribution centres in any country.
(EG facebooks financial arm is in ireland to avoid US and mainland EU taxes(it takes money in via ireland but still offers services to america avoiding paying american taxes or obiding by americal financial laws))

EG selling denim jeans for bitcoin. is where the website is for instance managed in caymen islands. but the jeans themselves are delivered from amazon fulfilment centres in america. where the caymen island bitcoin receiver sends fiat to american fulfilment centre to handle delivery
thus in short people can still buy denim jeans for bitcoin in america

---

exchanges doing spot trading would HQ in jurisdiction free regions
where by yes they would not get much customer base due to the US jurisdiction on licencing of money service businesses. which if US banned licencing means a exchange cant then service us customers(or majority of countries should majority of countries ban bitcoin exchanging)

however people can just convert US dollar to [this demo] caymen island dollar. and then use the exchange to swap caymen island dollar for crypto

devs snuck in a rule that a certain opcode if used can use upto the weight limit of 4mb
sneaking in(soft) that the opcode after block 7xx,xxx only uses 1 signature length (~80bytes) is still acceptable to old nodes that allow upto4mb. because 80bytes is still within that upto 4mb limit. thus old nodes would not reject such new snuck in adjustment to the limit

however it requires miners to stop adding in upto 4mb and to instead use the new rule of defined 80byte use
so its [lame buzzword] a MASF (miner assisted soft fork) but without causing a FORK(altcoin)

i prefer to call it miner assisted consensus strengthening

yep it wont cause a block re-org of old blocks. nor cause a altcoin. if all miners agreed as long as they join consensus to unite under a consenus agreement to all follow the rule..

only if its contentious where only some pools do and some dont. then there could be a fork where some pools continue to build on bulky tx in bulky blocks. and some build on lean tx in lean block. causing 2 different chains of blocks
thus can (as precedence exists) require that economic nodes (merchants and CEX) can agree they they will reject the bulky blocks at the 7xxx,xxx to scare pools into complying with the lean block design of new rules for the opcode to only be 80 bytes instead of 4mb

which is then a economic node [lame buzzword]assisted hard fork resulting in a miner assisted softfork to ensure there is no contentious split. by forcing compliance

in short using the same methods of 2017 mandatory activation.