The Taproot Wizards are the ordinals collective the Bugle treats less as a company than as a weather condition. In the news record of 2024 they are an active public nuisance, authors of specific outrages with specific victims. In the episode record that follows, they are something stranger and more durable: a fixed point the hosts navigate by. Nobody from the collective ever appears on the show. They are talked about for nineteen months and never once talk back.

Who’s in it: Taproot Wizards · Udi Wertheimer · Richard Greaser · Rod Palmer · Erin Redwing · Pledditor

Related: storylines/ordinals-civil-war · storylines/udi-wertheimer · storylines/erin-redwing · storylines/pledditor

The news record (2024)

The Bugle’s dispatches place the collective’s nuisance phase in the first half of 2024. A scratch-and-sniff NFT glued to the bottom of a community pool closes the pool for aids.¹ Andrew Yang champions their output as universal basic income for miners.² Cosplayers bribe David Bailey into granting them conference speaking time, to the documented rage of ordinal protestors — the headline files the cosplayers under “Taproot Punks,” a designation the record does not otherwise explain.³ The phase closes in Nashville, where a Taproot Wizard party is shut down after Pledditor tips off police.⁴

These four dispatches are the whole of the collective’s career as an agent of events. Everything after is other people talking about them.

The episode record (2024–2026)

By August 2024 the Wizards have been promoted from nuisance to thesis. Rod Palmer names the third great orange-piller of the age: “which is Udi and the Taproot Wizards.”⁵ The compliment is load-bearing — Palmer reframes orange-pilling shitcoiners as a border-opening operation, with Cory Klippsten invoked as holding that the shitcoiners are not sending their best. This is the arc’s governing move: the Wizards are never criticised for what they do, only located on a map of larger grievances.

Richard Greaser extends the map to fee policy a month later, forecasting that it is only a matter of time before Trump “becomes an ally of Taproot Wizards. He realizes that that shelling NFTs on” Bitcoin beats Ethereum and Solana for pumping the fee market.⁶ The Wizards here are an instrument of someone else’s monetary plan, which is roughly how they spend the rest of the arc.

By December the collective has hardened into a compatibility test. Palmer poses the mixed marriage: “a person who runs, like, Bitcoin knots and supports filters versus somebody who, you know, runs a horde and, like, they like hornals.”⁷ Shinobi rules that opposites attract. Protocol politics has become dating advice; the Wizards are one of the two available sexes.

They acquire personnel in February 2025, in Greaser’s roll call of the meme gang casualties: “Bitcoin Kindergarten isn’t publishing. The Council of Bens has pretty much disappeared. They’re in complete disarray. Ben the Carmen joined the Taproot Wizards.”⁸ Amid the collapse of every other faction, the Wizards are the one shop still hiring — recorded, notably, as a defection rather than a rescue.

The arc’s most exposed moment arrives in April 2025, when guest Erin Redwing volunteers that “Jeremy Rubin, Udi Wertheimer, Casey Rodemore, all Jewish. Like, I’ve not seen people point this out,” and Palmer replies that he points it out every day on Twitter for sure.⁹ The guest has walked into the show’s standing Jewish-conspiracy bit rather than around it, naming Jeremy Rubin, Udi Wertheimer and Casey Rodarmor unprompted.

Redwing returns in May with the arc’s only account of the mint itself, conducted by astrology: the Wizards went out at 0.2 BTC each, never came back to floor, and did it against her explicit advice. “They minted during eclipse season, which I specifically warned them not to do. They did not listen.”¹⁰ She adds that she is pretty sure they are afraid to show their face on the show — the closest the record comes to explaining the collective’s total silence across the arc.

Charlie Spears supplies the business model from the inside in July, without flinching: “if you know how shitcoins work, insiders make all the money. I’ve spent a decade making myself an insider.”¹¹ He has never bought the JPEGs he shills. A decade of friendship-farming got him a low cost basis on everything.

The inversion lands in October 2025. Greaser reports back from Redwing’s Vegas inscription conference, where he had gone expecting shitcoiners in wizard hats and instead found himself, by his own account, “to be at a Bitcoin conference, interacting with people that are talking about using Bitcoin.”¹² The ordinals room is the only room in Bitcoin where anyone spends any.

The commercial break has meanwhile absorbed them. The Trinkets for Plebs read prices its scarcity against the collective’s blockspace consumption: the trinkets are “running out faster than block space when Ooty has VC money.”¹³ Being a unit of measurement in someone else’s ad copy is the natural endpoint of nineteen months as a fixed point.

The last beat, in March 2026, dismantles the premise retroactively. Greaser defends the Bugle against the charge that ordinals were never represented, noting that “Udi and Eric have competed in the past, and they performed extremely poorly.”¹⁴ Redwing rejects the framing outright: Udi and Eric Wall are anti-maxis who happened to land on ordinals, and were going to do the Taproot Wizards on Ethereum anyway. The collective, on this reading, was never about Bitcoin at all. It was about being against something, and Bitcoin was merely where the argument was.

Disputed

The seeded version of this page dated the storyline 2024-01 to 2024-07 and described it as an active nuisance arc ending with the Nashville raid. The four news dispatches do support that phase.¹⁴ The episode record does not support it as the whole story: the arc’s first beat post-dates the claimed ending by three weeks⁵ and its last runs to March 2026.¹⁴ The span is corrected here to 2024-01 to 2026-03.

The seeded page also listed Pledditor and Andrew Yang among the arc’s participants. Both are attested in the news record only; neither appears in any of the ten episode beats. Pledditor is retained on the strength of the Nashville dispatch;⁴ Yang is named in plain text above, having no page.

Whether the collective is a Bitcoin project at all is left open by the sources. Greaser argues the Bugle gave ordinals a fair hearing and they lost it;¹⁴ Redwing, in the same exchange, holds that the Taproot Wizards were an anti-maxi vehicle that would have been minted on Ethereum given the chance. Both readings are on the record and neither is retracted.

irl: Taproot Wizards is a real ordinals project co-founded by Udi Wertheimer and Eric Wall. Casey Rodarmor authored the Ordinals protocol. The Bugleverse’s versions of these figures are satirical and the events documented above are not.

Footnotes

1. Bugle News, 2024-01-23 — “Community Pool Closed Due to Aids Following Taproot Wizards Scratch And Sniff NFT Glued To Bottom Of Pool”. ↩ ↩²

2. Bugle News, 2024-01-30 — “Andrew Yang Champions Ordinals As UBI For Miners”. ↩

3. Bugle News, 2024-03-07 — “Ordinal Protestors Enraged As Taproot Punks Cosplayers Bribe David Bailey Into Giving Them Speaking Time”. ↩

4. Bugle News, 2024-07-29 — “Taproot Wizard Party Shut Down After Pledditor Tipped Off Nashville Police”. ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Bugle Weekly 22 @ 29:41. The ASR mangles Udi badly across the segment — “Moody”, “Oodie”, “Gowdy” — and renders Cory Klippsten as “Corey Klitzden at SWA”. ↩ ↩²

6. Bugle Weekly 27 @ 1:00:50. ASR gives “shelling” for shilling. ↩

7. Behind the Podcast 2 @ 20:37. ASR: “runs a horde” is likely “runs a Core node”; “hornals” is ordinals. Taproot Wizards is named cleanly in the same cue. ↩

8. Behind the Podcast 11 @ 9:37. ASR: “Ben the Carmen” is Ben Carman, who has no page here. ↩

9. Behind the Podcast 14 @ 1:34:57. ASR: “Casey Rodemore” for Rodarmor. ↩

10. Spamming Vegas Livestream with Fundamentals and Erin Redwing @ 59:03. No individual Wizard is named in the segment, so none is attributed. ↩

11. BTP 19 @ 1:52. The quote spans two adjacent cues; ASR stutters “if if you know”. ↩

12. BTP 26 @ 32:29. ASR gives “Aaron Redwing” and calls the event “spam in Vegas”. ↩

13. Bugle Weekly 83 Part 1 @ 0:14. “Ooty” is read here as ASR for Udi — no other Bugleverse figure fits VC money plus blockspace — but the identification rests entirely on that fit and is held at medium confidence. ↩

14. Bitcoin Magazine Maxi Madness Victory Twitter Spaces With Casey and Erin @ 17:56. ASR renders Udi as “Oody”. ↩ ↩² ↩³