On Sunday evening, @Blonskr announced that TapeOut would create new processors and mint transistors on them, accepting only BEM across the board: 0.1 BEM to build one, 0.01 BEM for each mint, and half of the protocol fees burned. Going forward, chip fabrication fees and container-building fees will also gradually switch to BEM.

According to him, starting that day, the BEM mined by miners became the ticket to enter TapeOut. Miners produce BEM, while builders spend it.

After the news came out, BEM surged for a while, then pulled back a bit the next day.

Most of the comments were positive. Some said supply and demand had finally come together; others said to let time take care of the token price.

There are also some more measured voices. @z357z357 worries that the community user base hasn’t reached the scale it should yet, and that requiring BEM might keep some newcomers out. @Sirian_ye thinks burning tokens feels better psychologically, but may not be more effective than using them to deepen liquidity. The deeper the pool, the less impact sell pressure has.

The main TG group has been arguing about it these past couple of days, with some people debating whether mining rigs can actually earn back their cost. Admin Mars Ryan @bitcoin2themars replied: “BEM haters and Bitcoin haters have one thing in common: they don’t hold any.”

Firsto group owner Martin @martin23_sen put it more casually: “Hating on BEM has become a traffic magnet. Keep it up—let’s keep disagreeing.”

The pullback after the rally isn’t hard to understand. When a long-awaited positive catalyst finally arrives, some people will want to take profits first. I mentioned this a few days ago when writing about expectations for BEM.

But what has just been implemented is a little different from the previous developments. Most earlier positives involved someone paying attention or putting on an event. This time, the rules have changed: from now on, you’ll need to acquire BEM before building each processor and minting each transistor, and then burn some of it. This change won’t send the price soaring in a day; its impact depends on how many people actually come to build and mint in the days ahead.

This also addresses @z357z357’s concern. A ticket costs 0.1 BEM—just over a dollar at the current price—so the barrier itself isn’t high. Whether it can keep people around depends on whether there’s anything worth building and playing with inside.

So I’d rather see this as a beginning. The tape-out and container fees haven’t changed, V2 is still on the way, and Blon said in the group that more features are coming next week. Over the next month, it’ll be more worth watching how many people are minting on the new processors and how much BEM accumulates at burn addresses than the candlestick chart over the past couple of days.

Would you build a new processor, or mint something on one?

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Originally published on X @musinoot