I became an Ordinals RBF sniper to get rich… but I lost most of my Bitcoin

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…