Ordinals Launches NFTs on Bitcoin, Unsurprisingly Sparking Controversy

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When it comes to dig­i­tal col­lectibles, most enthu­si­asts think of Ethereum, Solana, or Polygon—deservedly, as proof-of-stake blockchains have cor­nered the NFT mar­ket­place. But dig­i­tal col­lectibles using the Bit­coin blockchain have exist­ed since 2014, and sev­er­al projects have made it their con­tin­u­ing mis­sion to bring NFTs to the first and biggest cryptocurrency.

NFTs are dig­i­tal assets that are prov­ably unique and linked to dig­i­tal (and some­times phys­i­cal) con­tent like dig­i­tal art, movies, and music that show proof of own­er­ship or mem­ber­ship in an exclu­sive group.

Even though NFTs have been in the Bit­coin ecosys­tem for near­ly a decade, how­ev­er, some still don’t see the point.

One of these projects is Ordi­nals, and some Bit­coin max­i­mal­ists are call­ing it an affront to Bit­coin principles.

Ordi­nals cre­ator Casey Rodar­mor takes the crit­i­cism in stride, say­ing the con­tro­ver­sy helps his cause.

“I actu­al­ly love the haters,” he said. “I mean, they do more to dri­ve peo­ple to find out about the project than any­body else. I don’t know what they think when they have these mas­sive audi­ences, and they go, ‘This is an attack on Bitcoin’—it seems like you don’t want to do that if you don’t want peo­ple to use the thing.”

Rodar­mor is a for­mer Bit­coin Core con­trib­u­tor who designed Ordi­nals to allow the trans­fer­ring of indi­vid­ual satoshis on the Bit­coin net­work. “The Ordi­nals pro­to­col is just a sys­tem for num­ber­ing Satoshis, giv­ing indi­vid­ual sats a ser­i­al num­ber, and then track­ing them across trans­ac­tions,” Rodar­mor told Decrypt in an interview.

The Ordi­nals pro­to­col enables users to explore, trans­fer, and receive indi­vid­ual satoshis, which may include unique inscribed data such as videos and images. The process of adding assets to indi­vid­ual satoshis is called inscrip­tion. As Rodar­mor explains, inscrip­tions make it pos­si­ble to put con­tent in a Bit­coin trans­ac­tion and assign it to a satoshi. Once com­plet­ed, Rodar­mor says, the inscrip­tions are stored in a Bit­coin transaction’s signature.

The process stays entire­ly on the Bit­coin net­work and does not require a sidechain or addi­tion­al token, accord­ing to Rodar­mor. “My design goal, from the begin­ning, was to cre­ate some­thing that would strike peo­ple as being Bit­coin native,” he said. “That means it can’t have a token, and it can’t be a sidechain.”

Satoshis—named after Satoshi Nakamo­to, the pseu­do­ny­mous cre­ator of the Bit­coin blockchain—is the small­est unit of a Bit­coin. When some­one buys a cup of cof­fee using BTC, they are most like­ly using satoshis instead of a whole Bit­coin, which cur­rent­ly trades around $22,700 per coin, accord­ing to Coingecko.

“This use of block space is prob­a­bly the low­est impact use com­pared to oth­er things that you can do,” Rodar­mor says. “Full nodes down­load this data, but then they ignore it,” The inscrip­tions have no resource require­ments, he adds, refut­ing claims that Ordi­nals and inscrip­tions abuse the Bit­coin pro­to­col or would dri­ve up trans­ac­tion costs.

“One thing that peo­ple don’t under­stand is that in order for Bit­coin to be secure, blocks must be full—that is part of the Bit­coin secu­ri­ty mod­el,” he said. “If blocks are not full, nobody has any rea­son to pay more than the min­i­mum fee rate to have their trans­ac­tions includ­ed. So, as a result, blocks must be full.”

Rodar­mor says that while inscrip­tions con­tribute to mak­ing blocks full, inscrip­tions do not change the size of the Bit­coin block. That would be some­thing Rodar­mor says he would not advocate.

Even in the event of anoth­er upgrade to the Bit­coin net­work, Rodar­mor says it would be unlike­ly to cause any prob­lems for Ordi­nals, as the pro­to­col only relies on minor parts of the Bit­coin network.

“[Ordi­nals] relies on the fact that trans­ac­tions have inputs, trans­ac­tions have out­puts, [and] that inputs and out­puts are val­ued in satoshis,” he said. “So you can’t break Ordi­nals in an upgrade with­out break­ing a whole lot of oth­er things.”

 

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