What are Bitcoin Ordinals?
Last updated
Last updated
Here, you'll find a curated collection of valuable Bitcoin Ordinals resources, from articles to video tutorials and tweet thread, all aimed at providing you with an increased understanding of this exciting technology. Dive in and explore. Reach out to the OCM community on our Discord if you have any questions or want to share some helpful resources with us too.
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Danny Yang and Bill Tai, cofounders of Metagood and creators of OnChainMonkey, discuss with Laura Shin, crypto journalist and author of "The Cryptopians", on her podcast Unchained Crypto on why OCM will migrate their NFT collection from Ethereum to Bitcoin, and what might be in store for Ordinals.
OCM Genesis is the first NFT collection where all 10,000 images and metadata (similar to DNA describing the NFT) were generated using code entirely on-chain in a single transaction on Ethereum on September 11, 2021. With the launch of Bitcoin Ordinals, on February 8, 2023, OCM Genesis was the first ever collection of 10,000 images to be inscribed entirely on-chain on Bitcoin in one inscription, Inscription #20219 which represents the year (2021) and month (9, September) that OCM Genesis was created all on-chain on Ethereum. All 10,000 images were inscribed in a single inscription, in less than 20 kilobytes, and for only $23.01.
Bitcoin Ordinals didn’t initially have a way to look up all the items in the collection or to determine a total supply, until parent-child provenance was added on Sep. 6, 2023. Every item ‘children’ in the collection links to the ‘parent’, thereby making collection provenance provable, on-chain, immutable and easily identifiable.
“The collection provenance is established by having a parent collection ordinal that is referenced by its many children ordinals that are all members of the collection. This has two significant advantages: provenance for the collection is very clear, and storage space required to store all of the data for the child ordinals can be greatly reduced by reusing data in the parent.”
— Metagood & OCM co-founder & CEO Danny Yang in Bitcoin Magazine article " Ordinals Are Good For Bitcoin, But More Standards Are Needed” (Apr. 2023)
Additional references:
Ordinal team parent-child provenance implementation GitHub pull request: https://github.com/ordinals/ord/pull/1963
When you create an inscription, the Ordinals protocol needs to assign a satoshi a serial number, which references the file in the blockchain. When everything is going swimmingly, the inscription count will rise by the number of files inscribed. In the case of cursed inscriptions, it works in the opposite manner, where negative values are displayed and counted backwards with each inscription that is created.
Cursed inscriptions were found when a group of developers discovered a bug in the existing Ordinals code responsible for the standardisation of inscriptions. Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Ordinals, became aware of the loophole and posted on GitHub his thoughts and potential solutions for the bug, where he mentioned: “Consider these new inscriptions “cursed” and assign them negative inscription numbers.” — The Bitcoin Manual article "What are Cursed Inscriptions?"
Ordinals Protocol v0.6.0 on June 4, 2023 introduced a significant development known as cursed inscriptions. This is an important index upgrade that recognizes many inscriptions previously skipped and unsupported. Learn more about cursed inscriptions in the nft now article, "Bitcoin NFTs? Ordinals Inscriptions Explained (Finding, Buying, and More)".
On Jan. 5, 2024 at block 824544, the Ordinals bid the end of future cursed inscriptions in celebrating the Jubilee. This means existing cursed inscriptions will remain cursed, and new ones can never be created. OCM Genesis will remain a 10k cursed inscription collection.
Bitcoin Ordinals introduce a higher level of functionality to digital artifacts, outclassing your typical JPEG NFTs! A standout feature is recursion.
An inscription is data that you want to store on Bitcoin. The maximum size is only ~400 kbytes (or ~4 MB with the help of a miner and high costs). Not only is the size a hard limitation, but the cost goes up with the size. Recursion solves the maximum file size bottleneck and reduces cost. Recursion allows you to split up your work across multiple inscriptions, so you have more space to inscribe your work. More importantly, recursion lets you re-use past inscriptions to greatly save cost!
In computer science, recursion is when a function calls itself, allowing repeated operations. This is possible with Bitcoin Ordinals, where an inscription can reference and incorporate parts of prior inscriptions. This opens up new avenues for dynamic and evolving digital artifacts.
Recursion is even more powerful when used with code. Recursions lets you use programs from other inscriptions in your inscription. For OCM Dimensions, we inscribed several widely used code libraries for compression, Three.js and p5.js, and everyone can use them!
Co-founder & CEO Danny Yang dives into recursive inscriptions, their importance, practical applications, and how recursion works with OCM Dimensions:
"One of the most notable projects using recursive inscriptions is OnChainMonkey. OnChainMonkey is a popular NFT project that has created a new NFT collection using recursive inscriptions. The collection, called "OCM Dimensions," consists of 300 3D animated Bitcoin Ordinals that were created using recursions."
Additional references:
A satoshi is the smallest denomination of bitcoin that can be recoded on the blockchain. Each bitcoin is divisible into 100,000,000 satoshis, abbreviated to sat(s). In other words, a sat is the equivalent of 0.00000001 bitcoin and is named after the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Co-founder & CEO Danny Yang explains why Block 9 sats are quite special for Bitcoin: -- Block 9 sats are the oldest sats in circulation, and carry remarkable historical significance. -- Block 9 sats were mined and owned by by Satoshi himself, and the first sats to be sent in a peer-to-peer transaction to Hal Finney, an early Bitcoin contributor. -- Learn more >
OCM Genesis migrating to BTC on Block 9 sats. Learn more >
Block 78 occupies a significant place in the history of Bitcoin. It was mined by Hal Finney, an early Bitcoin contributor, marking the first instance when an individual other than the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto contributed to the blockchain's growth.
OCM Karma migrating to BTC on Block 78 sats. Learn more >
Additional knowledge references on notable sats:
Co-founder & CEO Danny Yang describes these key points, and how OCM Dimensions was created to be a showpiece for Ordinals here.
Learn more about these top Ordinals attributes, what they mean and how OCM Dimensions relates to them:
Galaxy, a corporate news, crypto educational resources, and institutional thought leadership content organization, publishes informative research and reports on Bitcoin Ordinals. Galaxy's second and most recent report on Oct. 2, 2023 details the powerful features and significance of Ordinals, particularly on recursive inscriptions, parent-child provenance, and re-inscriptions.
Read about art on Bitcoin as a Medium, and how OCM Genesis on Bitcoin were artfully created on Bitcoin Ordinals:
Find more talks with Web3, crypto and blockchain leaders on the Combinator Talks page >
Rare Sats
Recursion
BRC-20
Inscription Numbers
File Size
Parent-Child
Cursed Inscriptions
Domain Names
File Type
Teleburning
These are just some illustrative examples of creators using OCM Dimensions recursion, inscribed p5.js or Three.js libraries in their work, with many more waiting to be explored and created.
