4 Things Every Artist Needs To Understand About Bitcoin Network’s Update for Native NFTs – Rolling Stone

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Dig­i­tal arti­facts have come to Bit­coin, essen­tial­ly break­ing Ethereum and Solana’s vir­tu­al duop­oly on NFTs. But many have expressed their dis­dain for the tech­nol­o­gy based on inven­tor Casey Rodarmor’s Ordi­nal pro­to­col. And with good reason.

Ordi­nals’ inscrip­tion fea­ture enables stor­age and track­ing of NFT con­tent on the BTC blockchain, but as indus­try observ­er “Bit­coin is Sav­ing” notes, “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

Indeed. Ethereum, with its proof-of-stake mod­el, is much bet­ter posi­tioned and equipped to accom­mo­date the NFT indus­try and sup­port respon­si­ble artists as they explore the next fron­tier of the new cul­tur­al econ­o­my

Ethereum’s code change to Proof of Stake enabled its val­i­da­tion process to use 99.95% less ener­gy than a Proof of Work (PoW) pro­to­col, like that used for Bit­coin trans­ac­tions. By reduc­ing the elec­tric­i­ty need­ed to val­i­date a trans­ac­tion, Ethereum sev­ered the life­line PoW blockchain plat­forms pro­vide to cli­mate-destroy­ing fos­sil fuel pow­er plants used by Bit­coin min­ers. NFT artists now have a clear tech­nol­o­gy option that doesn’t con­tribute to cli­mate pollution.

The vir­tu­al real­i­ty artist known as Sutu, for exam­ple, lever­ages the resources that enable cre­ativ­i­ty to flour­ish around evolv­ing tech­nol­o­gy while embrac­ing glob­al equi­ty and envi­ron­men­tal stewardship.

In cham­pi­oning the con­scious cryp­to cre­ator move­ment, Sutu high­lights the social and finan­cial via­bil­i­ty of sus­tain­able and trans­par­ent NFT prac­tices. His lim­it­ed-edi­tion Neonz col­lec­tion of 10,000 retro-futur­is­tic avatars on Tezos sold for around a mil­lion dol­lars while pub­li­ciz­ing clean NFT prac­tices and demon­strat­ing inno­v­a­tive avenues the arts com­mu­ni­ty can fol­low to har­ness tech­nol­o­gy in the pur­suit of sustainability.

Ordi­nals give ser­i­al num­bers to satoshis, Bitcoin’s micro frac­tion­al cur­ren­cy, mak­ing them unique and non-fun­gi­ble. Cre­ators can then inscribe a satoshi with dig­i­tal con­tent — a pic­ture, scanned doc­u­ment, video clip, etc. More­over, by tak­ing advan­tage of the cryptocurrency’s Tap­root and Seg­re­gat­ed Wit­ness fea­tures, these inscrip­tions can be as large as 4 megabytes, cer­tain­ly large enough to accom­mo­date these media.

The Rolling Stone Cul­ture Coun­cil is an invi­ta­tion-only com­mu­ni­ty for Influ­encers, Inno­va­tors and Cre­atives. Do I qualify?

That’s where much of the prob­lem arises.

Bit­coin orig­i­nal­ly was intend­ed to facil­i­tate finan­cial trans­ac­tions only, and it has done an effec­tive job of car­ry­ing out this task. But flood­ing the BTC blockchain with bulky, cum­ber­some NFTs caus­es sev­er­al crit­i­cal problems:

1. It threatens to lock “small blockers” who rely on the chain’s limited scale to eke out revenues and small profits.

These play­ers often are part of cot­tage indus­tries in dis­ad­van­taged com­mu­ni­ties who can­not hope to com­pete with syn­di­cates and Bit­coin pools to mine the larg­er blocks. As Bit­coin is Sav­ing observed, “mar­gin­al­ized peo­ples in devel­op­ing coun­tries will have to pay more to run their Bit­coin nodes and send trans­ac­tions.” For exam­ple, a few days after the launch of Ordi­nal inscrip­tions, Lux­or mined a block weigh­ing in at 3.96 MB. While many blocks can grow to that size giv­en thou­sands of finan­cial trans­ac­tions, this one con­tained only 63 because one is a 3.94 MB dig­i­tal image.

2. It obliterates Bitcoin’s original intent.

If often-friv­o­lous NFT projects grow legs on the Bit­coin blockchain, they may clog the entire process of pre­cious band­width. Think of NFT inscrip­tions as farm trac­tors on the free­way. They take up mul­ti­ple lanes and move slow­ly. Small­er finan­cial trans­ac­tions, which the chain was built and intend­ed to serve, get stuck in the queue and can­not get around the lum­ber­ing traf­fic in front of it. They must bide their time until the trac­tor reach­es its des­ti­na­tion and pulls off the road. As the Lux­or exam­ple shows, a sin­gle block could accom­mo­date more than 10,000 finan­cial trans­ac­tions or one NFT.

3. It can cause costs to rise.

Because Ordi­nal inscrip­tions are per­formed, con­duct­ed and stored on Bitcoin’s main net­work, the added con­ges­tion will put pres­sure on the sup­ply of min­ers’ abil­i­ty to record data effi­cient­ly. Keep­ing these assets on-chain is a low-return use of resources that will dri­ve up fees and trans­ac­tion costs. And because NFT inscrip­tions will draw big­ger pay­offs, min­ers will like­ly favor them over the record­ing or finan­cial deal­ings. Mer­chants, investors and oth­er stake­hold­ers will either have to match the high­er NFT fees or be left behind.

4. It opens the door to spam, bloatware, malicious data and socially unredeeming “artifacts.”

Rodar­mor already has been forced to acknowl­edge this draw­back and scram­ble to remove an extreme porno­graph­ic inscrip­tion from the front page of Ordinal’s web­site. The offend­ing satoshi, which was on the site for about 30 min­utes, has been tak­en down but the image can nev­er be expunged. 

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Open­ing Bit­coin to NFTs com­pounds the blockchain’s already dif­fi­cult path to scal­ing and facil­i­tat­ing adop­tion. Legit­i­mate finan­cial trans­ac­tions will feel the pinch as large NFT nodes soak up the avail­able space and squeeze small min­ers and nodes out of the most prof­itable workflows.

The inscrip­tion prac­tice also brings into ques­tion Bitcoin’s fun­gi­bil­i­ty and anonymi­ty. If a few satoshis con­tain NFTs that fluc­tu­ate in val­ue, they are dif­fer­ent from their peers. Mak­ing some of the sev­er­al satoshis unique could allow them to be eas­i­ly traced, remov­ing pri­va­cy pro­tec­tion, which is one of the blockchain’s most valu­able assets.



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