Once upon a time, the magical world of blockchain was full of wonders and amazements. It was a place where anything was possible, and the limits of imagination were pushed to the brink.
And in this world, there was a protocol known as Ordinals, a magic spell that allowed the great Bitcoin network to store inscriptions of images, music, and videos. It was a spell that had been cast for almost a decade, yet remained largely ignored by the masses.
In the early days, NFTs were considered a foreign concept, one that did not belong in the world of Bitcoin. They were more at home in the realm of Ethereum and other altcoins. However, the recent rollout of the Ordinals protocol has changed everything, as the concept of inscribing pictures, music, and videos on the Bitcoin network has become more popular than ever.
As the Bitcoin community struggled to understand the purpose of these digital assets, the hype of NFTs spread like wildfire on Ethereum and other blockchains. But little did they know that a powerful wizard named Casey Rodarmor had created a protocol that would soon change everything.
And so, the Ordinals project was born, a protocol that allowed for the easy storage of NFTs and other data on the Bitcoin blockchain. The development caused quite a stir within the Bitcoin community, and there was much discussion about its implications.
Ordinals, in the language of magic, can be thought of as a numbering scheme for satoshis. Every sat is numbered based on the order in which it was mined, and from the transaction input to the transaction output, it is sent. Both the numbering process and the transaction process depend on order: the numbering process is based on the order in which satoshis were mined, while the transfer process depends on the order of transaction inputs and outputs.
Thanks to the Taproot upgrade, which took place on November 14, 2021, it is now possible to store more bytes (data) in a block. The Ordinals protocol takes advantage of this extra space, filling it with the data of the inscription that represents an NFT. On the Ordinals website, the inscription is converted to the relevant content.
The Ordinals protocol only works on the Bitcoin network with numbered satoshis, and not through a separate token, sidechain, or other blockchain. This differs greatly from how current NFTs work on Ethereum, Solana, and other blockchains.
NFTs on these blockchains consist only of a link to an external cloud server, such as OpenSea. The content is stored by a third party, not directly on the blockchain. If this third party stops or does not approve the NFT, it will be removed from the website.
This is where the Ordinals protocol comes in. Ordinals store the NFT, which can be a piece of text, an image, or a video, directly in a block via an on-chain transaction. When confirmed by the miners and nodes in the network, these NFTs are forever stored in the blockchain. They are not simply links to a third party that hosts an image, but are directly stored on the Bitcoin network.
However, there are concerns within the Bitcoin community about the Ordinals protocol. Some believe that inscriptions are not in line with the essence of Bitcoin, while others believe that the increased data in blocks could lead to higher transaction fees. But as with all magic, the future remains uncertain, and only time will tell what impact the Ordinals project will have on the magical world of blockchain.