How to get started with ordinals

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Create your digital legacy on Bitcoin

Chris Castig

Since the inception of BitcoinsBTC in 2009, it has operated as a sovereign digital currency. In January 2023, Bitcoin Ordinals introduced a second practical use case for Bitcoin: data storage.

Once registered on the blockchain, an ordinal can never be modified or deleted. Ordinals will exist online as long as Bitcoin exists. It is this permanence that makes ordinals special. They inherit the power of Bitcoins forever database to archive data online forever.

Bitcoin ordinals allow anyone to upload up to 4MB of data to the Bitcoin blockchain. However, each MB has a price.

I will show you how to register your first Bitcoin ordinal. Keep reading all the essential information you need to get started!

From zero to millions

Registration is the process of uploading data. Whereas ordinals refer to the unique number assigned to each new ordinal.

Casey Rodarmor’s Listing 0

Casey Rodarmor

The ordinals date back to December 14, 2022, when Casey Rodarmor discovered a flaw in the latest version of Bitcoin, allowing him to download a black and white skull PNG. The skull would be known as Inscription 0. Each successive inscription is given an increasing number, signifying a unique identifier: 1, 2, 3, etc.

Today, there are ordinal listings of $12 million. A surplus of more than 46 million fees spent on the Bitcoin network in the creation of ordinals, according to Dune Analytics.

How to start a Bitcoin Ordinal The easiest way to start a Bitcoin Ordinal is to use a listing service like Gamma, Unisats or OrdianlsBot. In the tutorial below, I’ll be using Gamma to illustrate the process, although the signup flow is similar on each site, so feel free to choose whichever you prefer.

Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to start a Bitcoin ordinal:

1. Download a bitcoin wallet

Xverse Wallet Homepage

Chris Castig

First you need to download a bitcoin wallet. But before doing so, it is important to understand which wallets you can and cannot use for ordinals.

To register an ordinal, you will need a Taproot bitcoin address. You will know if you have a Taproot address if it starts with bc1. For example, this is a Taproot address:

bc1puutp67dsgrh8lvurmdh054tk45t8gfqhd8g46w0q6qnrsa99p6xqtjxqnl

The easiest way to get a Taproot bitcoin address is to download Xverse, UniSat, or Hiro Wallet.

Download one of these wallets in your web browser. And once connected, proceed to the next step. For the following examples, I will use the Xverse wallet.

2. Go to Gamma.io

Gamma.io Ordinals Page

Chris Castig

Go to Gamma.io/Ordinals and select the type of ordinal you want to create: single image, block image or text. For this example, let’s select Single Image.

3. Upload your image to Gamma

Download your registration on Gamma

Chris Castig

While 4MB is the maximum limit for an ordinal, 400KB is the upper limit of the size you can inscribe without using a miner. Anything over 400KB and you have to work with a bitcoin miner to structure a block for you.

How big is 400 KB? About the size of a medium sized JPG or 8 page PDF.

Gamma allows you to register up to 400 KB and will help you automatically optimize your image to meet the maximum limit.

4. Enter the address where the entry will be sent ordinal entry to sendChris Castig

With your Xverse or Hiro wallet, select receive and make sure to copy the address to your wallet that starts with bc1p.

Copy your bc1p address from Xverse

And enter the address as receiving bitcoin address

5. Pay bitcoin fee and wait 10 minutes You can pay with any bitcoin wallet.Chris Castig

If you did everything correctly, you should see your ordinal appear in your Xverse wallet.

your Xverse walletChris Castig

Bitcoin, since its inception, has primarily served as a means of sending, receiving, and storing bitcoins. It seems Bitcoin Ordinals have breathed new life into Bitcoin.

In the first six months of 2023, Bitcoin overtook Solana to become the second most popular NFT blockchain. Leading the movement are popular Bitcoin-based creative projects such as DeGods, OnChain Monkeys, YugaLabs, Beeple, and MegaPunks.

With Ordinals, Bitcoin becomes more competitive with chains like Etheruem and Solana, which for years have been the main ecosystems for NFT collections and token-based innovations like DAOs, voting, and asset tokenization.

The Ordinals protocol inspired the derivative token Bitcoin via the BRC-20 protocol and .sats, an attempt at online decentralized identity using Bitcoin Ordinals.

Developers are already pushing Bitcoin ordinals in innovative ways, including recursive registrations, which enable truly decentralized high-resolution apps, websites, and images at much lower file sizes and costs. We’re sure to see a lot more of this technology over the next few months, says Gamma.io co-founder Nick Sainato.

gamma.ioOrdinals | Gamma Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

I’m the co-founder of Console.xyz and an adjunct professor teaching digital literacy classes at Columbia Business School. I’m also a co-host of a podcast on learning to code and author of a forthcoming Web3 book, The Decentralized Generation: Seven Lessons for Staying Digitally Literate in the Age of Web3.

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