The bitcoin halving is almost upon us. While this is mostly exciting since it slows bitcoin's issuance, cutting the block reward down to 3.125 BTC, some people are excited about it because of Runes.

Runes is a new protocol from Casey Rodarmor, the Bitcoin developer behind Ordinals. While the primary ideas behind Ordinals focused on bringing non-fungibility to Bitcoin, by differentiating specific satoshis by the order in which they were minted, the BRC-20 token standard also emerged, helping to bring new issuance of fungible tokens to the network.

Runes is like BRC-20 in the sense that its goal is to allow new tokens to be traded on Bitcoin, but unlike BRC-20, Runes will use a UTXO (unspent transaction output) model. Essentially, Runes is supposed to be a more efficient implementation of …