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 with good reason, as proof-of-stake blockchains have cornered the NFT market. But digital collectibles using the Bitcoin blockchain have been around since 2014, and several projects have gone on an ongoing mission to bring NFTs to the first and biggest cryptocurrency.

NFTs are digital assets that are demonstrably unique and linked to digital (and sometimes physical) content like digital art, movies, and music that prove ownership or membership in a proprietary group.

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

One such project is Ordinals, and some bitcoin maximalists call it an affront to bitcoin principles.

“you can’t stop them” of course! bitcoin is designed to resist censorship. does not prevent us from commenting lightly on the waste and stupidity of an encoding. at least do something effective. otherwise it’s another evidence of block space consumption.

Adam Back (@adam3us) January 29, 2023

Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor takes the criticism head on, saying the controversy is helping his cause.

In fact, I like enemies, he said. I mean, they do more to get people to find out about the project than anyone else. I don’t know what they think when they have these massive audiences, and they say, 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 individual satoshis to be transferred across the Bitcoin network. The Ordinals protocol is just a system for numbering Satoshis, assigning a serial number to individual sats, and then tracking them through transactions, Rodarmor told Decrypt in an interview.

The Ordinals protocol allows users to explore, transfer and receive individual satoshis, which may include unique registered data such as videos and images. The process of adding assets to individual satoshis is called listing. As Rodarmor explains, inscriptions allow content to be put into a Bitcoin transaction and attributed to a satoshi. Once completed, says Rodarmor, the registrations are stored in a Bitcoin transaction signature.

The process remains 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 appear to be native to Bitcoin, he said. This means it cannot have a token and it cannot be a secondary string.

Satoshi is 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 is currently trading around $22,700 per coin, according to Coingecko.

Marginalized people in developing countries will have to pay more to operate their Bitcoin nodes and send transactions because privileged wealthy white people want to put JPEG designs on the blockchain as status symbols. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Bitcoin is saving (@BitcoinIsSaving) January 29, 2023

This use of block space is probably the least impactful use compared to other things you can do, says Rodarmor. Full nodes download this data, but then ignore it. Signups don’t need resources, he adds, refuting claims that ordinals and signups abuse the Bitcoin protocol or increase transaction costs.

One thing people don’t understand is that for Bitcoin to be secure, the blocks must be complete, which is part of the Bitcoin security model, he said. If the blocks are not full, there is no reason for anyone to pay more than the minimum fee rate to have their transactions included. So, therefore, the blocks must be full.

Rodarmor says that while listings help fill blocks, listings do not change the Bitcoin block size. That would be something Rodarmor says he wouldn’t advocate.

Even in the event of a further upgrade of the Bitcoin network, Rodarmor says it is unlikely to cause problems for ordinals, as the protocol only relies on minor parts of the Bitcoin network.

[Ordinals] is based 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 lot of other stuff.

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