Bitcoin Ordinals have proven the critics wrong. The NFT-style collectibles are still going strong two years after launch — and as you might expect, degens have found an unusual way to make money from them.
It’s called “replace-by-fee (RBF) sniping,” and people who get good at it can even make tens of thousands of dollars in a single evening when market conditions and timing align perfectly.
It’s basically a sneaky way to cut in line to snap up Ordinals before anyone else. Legitimate collectors hate it, and some platforms are doing their best to stamp it out.
On the Bitcoin network, transactions wait in the mempool before they are processed, much like how commuters wait to get picked up at a bus stop. The bus arriving every 10 minutes is a new block mined by a miner.
Most people patiently wait for their turn to get on the bus, but an RBF sniper slips the driver a bit more money to get priority boarding. In the world of Bitcoin Ordinals, this means they can grab a valuable asset before someone who was waiting in line.
Cutting in line doesn’t mean stealing the assets, as the sniper still pays for them. However, the technique seems a bit unfair to many people, except for those to whom code is law. Quary, who runs Bitcoin marketplace Magisat, argues that RBF is a built-in function of Bitcoin and the cutthroat fee auction it creates is just a natural part of the network.
“Bitcoin has to assume that every participant is profit-driven and adapt the rules to accommodate that, and the market still has to be resilient to that. This is exactly how Bitcoin works,” he says.
In the first half of the year, when there were only about five snipers, Quary could earn up to two BTC on a good night. Nowadays, the earnings are divided among more snipers.
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