Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain / Ordinal ruleset inscription Updated 2025-05-26 +Created 1970-01-01
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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.
Figure 1.
Ordinal #0
. This is the first ordinal ruleset inscription: ordinals.com/inscription/6fb976ab49dcec017f1e201e84395983204ae1a7c2abf7ced0a85d692e442799i0. It was made on block 767430 (2022-12-14).
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:
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OurBigBook.com / Action plan Updated 2025-05-26 +Created 1970-01-01
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The steps are sorted in roughly chronological order. The project might fail at any point, and some steps may be carried in parallel:
  • make OurBigBook Markup good enough, to the point that it allows to create a static version of the website, which is used to prototype certain ideas, and for Ciro to start writing test content.
    Status March 2022: reached a point that it is already highly usable. The following website may continue.
  • create a basic implementation of the website, without advanced features like PageRank sorting and WYSIWYG. This is not much more than a blog with some extra metadata, so it is definitely achievable with constrained resources.
  • find a university teacher would would like to try it out.
    Ciro would like to volunteer to work for free for this teacher and students to help the students learn.
    He would like act like a "super student" who has a lot of free time and motivation.
    Ciro would start by mapping the headers of the lecture notes onto the website, and then slowly adding content as he feels the need to improve certain explanations.
    Finding teachers willing to allow this will be a major roadblock: how to convince teachers to use CC BY-SA.
    If such enlightened teacher is found, it will allow for the initial validation of the website, to decide what kind of tweaking the idea might need, and start uploading quality technical content to the site.
  • once some level of validation as been done, Ciro will start looking for charitable charitable grant opportunities more aggressively
  • if things seem to be working, start adding more advance features: PageRank-like ranking sorting and WYSIWYG editing
    The recommendation algorithms notably is left for a second stage because it needs real world data to be tested. And at the beginning, before Eternal September kicks in, there would be few posts written by well educated university students, so a simple sort by upvote would likely be good enough.
Ciro decided to start with a decent markup language with a decent implementation: OurBigBook Markup. Once that gets reasonable, he will move on to another attempt at the website itself.
The project description was originally at: github.com/cirosantilli/write-free-science-books-to-get-famous-website but being migrated here. The original working project name was "Write free books to get famous website", until Ciro decided to settle for OurBigBook.com and fixed the domain name.
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WikiWikiWeb Updated 2025-05-26 +Created 1970-01-01
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The venerable first wiki.
The pre-Eternal September feeling is palpable.
People could freely comment their thoughts and sign below, making it much closer to what Ciro Santilli wants OurBigBook.com to be. But with upvotes ;-)
Nothing can better encapsulate the nostalgia of early day Internet. Genius at times, banal at others, you will be forever in our hearts!
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