The artist commented saying that his initiative serves to not forget what happened, because in this way Gensler’s tweet has been immortalized forever on the unbreakable and unchangeable blockchain of Bitcoin.

In fact, the image is now saved on the Bitcoin blockchain thanks to the technology of Ordinals, where it will remain forever. 

This is a webp image file weighing only 24.32 KB. 

It was included in block 825,059 of the Bitcoin blockchain, mined yesterday at 23:01 GMT+1, thanks to this transaction.

Note that Billy Restey has spent a whopping 258,177 Sat, equivalent to over 117$, to register that transaction. 

The Gensler tweet turned into an NFT Ordinal

The tweet immortalized forever by Restey in that transaction is the one in which the current president of the SEC, Gary Gensler, announced on his personal X profile that the SEC’s X profile had been violated. 

Note that Restey did not capture the counterpart tweet published on the SEC profile, but that of Gary Gensler. 

Probably this is due to the fact that in October Gensler himself warned everyone on his personal X profile that it was advisable to activate two-factor authentication.

In fact, the problem experienced last night by profile X of the SEC is due to a successful hacker attack precisely because the agency had not activated two-factor authentication. 

The consequence is that the hacker then published on that same official profile the false news of the approval of Bitcoin ETFs.

Interestingly, the SEC had always published a tweet in October inviting everyone to be careful about what they read on the internet, emphasizing that the best source of information about the SEC is the SEC itself.

Gensler and SEC’s mistakes

In the tweet captured by Restey on the Bitcoin blockchain, Gensler made a mistake. 

In fact, he wrote that the SEC’s Twitter account had been compromised, and that an unauthorized tweet had been published. 

In reality, Twitter no longer exists for a few months, that is, since it changed its name to X. In fact, in the corresponding SEC tweet it is written instead that X profile has been compromised.

The most serious mistake, however, was definitely not activating two-factor authentication, as suggested by Gensler himself. 

In the past, the SEC made another mistake regarding Bitcoin spot ETFs, as it rejected Grayscale’s request to convert its Bitcoin Trust into an ETF. In fact, Grayscale then sued the SEC itself, and a court ruled in favor of Grayscale and against the SEC. 

At this point, after all these mistakes, it is not surprising that some US senators have asked for explanations from Gensler, and are calling for his removal from the agency’s presidency. 

The Ordinals

The Ordinals are files or texts that can be saved on the Bitcoin blockchain. 

They exploit the technology of the so-called Inscriptions that allow to inscribe arbitrary contents containing native digital artifacts within Bitcoin transactions.

They are not real NFTs, that is, non-fungible tokens, but they have very similar functions.

In addition, they allow the real on-chain saving of image files, making them immovable. 

For about a couple of weeks, the boom of the Ordinals is over, but despite this, the fees are still high.

The fact is that for every created Ordinals, a transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain is required, so a boom in the creation of Ordinals leads to a boom in transactions. 

The more transactions there are, the higher the fees given to miners to validate them by including them in a block, so much so that during the recent December boom, the average daily fees skyrocketed to over $37 per transaction.

Now they have dropped to $11, but it is still a high value, compared to the $1.1 at the end of October.

On the other hand, the December boom of the Ordinals has only slightly deflated.