Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

Ordinals are inscriptions created with the protocol described at: docs.ordinals.com/inscriptions.html The protocol was designed by developer Casey Rodarmor, and shares a few similarities with the AtomSea & EMBII protocol.

The protocol also includes a way to have ownership over inscriptions, effectively creating an NFT system on top of the bitcoin blockchain. AtomSea & EMBII also already had such a system however. In either case, Ciro Santilli couldn't give less of a fuck about who owns some random publicly viewable digital asset.

For whatever reason, orinals became extremelly popular compared to the AtomSea & EMBII format, leading to millions os inscriptions, and 10k+ images as of block 830k. They also started to take up a substatial portion of the available block space.

This in turn led to a lot of child porn rediscussion, and people linking back to this page to view earlier inscriptions: incoming links.

Unfortunately, unlike AtomSea & EMBII and even cryptograffiti.info uploads, most ordinals are designed to be just souless bulk collectibles, as with as much artistic merit as any random collectible card set or postage stamps you may find at a newpaper stall. To make things worse many of them are likely algorithmically generated. Eternal September had truly arrived to the Bitcoin blockchain. As a result, machine learning would be almost essential in order to find interesting uploads amidst such bulk.

The source code for the reference uploader and indexer is at: github.com/ordinals/ord

The reference viewer server for the runs at: ordinals.com.

The i0 at the end of the URL above means "inscription 0". This is because a single transaction can have multiple inscriptions.

Some of them have sold for high prices. Magic Eden is a popular interface for trading them:

The ordinals also started taking up large portions of the Bitcoin blockchain:

Apparently the "Taproot" Bitcoin update made it easier to upload image-sized data once again, which had become prohibitively expensive 2023 and much earlier:

Bibliography:

This is a term invented by Ciro Santilli, and refers to a loose set of uncommon Bitcoin inscription methods that involve inscribing one or a small number of payloads per Bitcoin transaction.

These methods are both inefficient and hard to detect and decode, partly because Bitcoin Core does not index spending transactions: bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/61794/bitcoin-rpc-how-to-find-the-transaction-that-spends-a-txo. This makes finding them all that more rewarding however.

On the other hand, they do have the advantage of not depending on any block size limits, as their individual transactions are very small.

Inscribing anything large would however take a very long time, as you'd have to wait until the previous payload chunk is confirmed before going to the next one. This alone makes the format impractical perhaps.

Known examples:

"P2FMS" terminology mentioned e.g. at: Data Insertion in Bitcoin's Blockchain by Andrew Sward, Vecna OP_0 and Forrest Stonedahl.

Is it mega fast? Nope

Does it work? Yup.

Used on Bitcoin Inscription Indexer for Ciro's Bitcoin Inscription Museum.

By the rich founder of Mt. Gox and Ripple, Jed McCaleb.

Interesting dude.

This section is about partial implementations that are only able to read the blocks, ususally coming from Bitcoin Core, to interpret the data:

A detailed list of all transactions is kept at: ../sponsor/budget.js.

Ciro Santilli use the following accounting for this sponsorship calculations.

For significant one time donations, he takes the final money received in one of his cash GBP accounts, then he checks how much that is in dollars on Google at the time of cash out, and then writes that amount down as the final dollar value which is what ultimately counts. This exposes Ciro to USD/GBP fluctuations, but it simplifies accounting for donors which is more important, so it is likely worth it.

For small regular donations, Ciro just tallies it all up in GBP from time to time and converts it all to dollars in one go as it is not worth spending too much time updating those too often.