The Bitcoin community is debating over the launch of the Ordinals protocol, which stores NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Ordinals, explained that NFT-like structures are formed by inscribing satoshis, the Bitcoin network’s native currency, with arbitrary content.
“Inscriptions are digital artifacts native to the Bitcoin blockchain,” Casey Rodarmor notes.
The Ordinals protocol allows individuals to explore, send, and receive individual satoshis, which may contain unique inscribed data. The inscription is the process of adding assets to individual satoshis.
Inscriptions allow you to include content like an image, text, SVG, or HTML, in an inscription transaction and attribute it to a satoshi. Once completed, the inscriptions are saved in the signature of a Bitcoin transaction.
Not everyone in the Bitcoin community is pleased with the launch of the Ordinals protocol.
Bitcoin purists argue that the blockchain should only be used for financial transactions, as Ordinals deviates from Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer payment system.
Rodarmor disputes the claim made by the protocol’s naysayers that Ordinals will crowd blocks and raise transaction fees in order to compete with conventional payment operations.
According to Rodarmor, while inscriptions help to fill blocks, they do not impact the size of a Bitcoin block. Rodarmor says he would never advocate for such a thing.
The amount of Bitcoin, a miner receives for successfully solving a block is decreasing, and some think tanks on the opposing side of the argument have adopted Ordinals as a remedy.
Even if the Bitcoin network is upgraded again, Rodarmor believes it will pose no problems for Ordinals because the protocol only relies on minor elements of the Bitcoin network.
Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr believes that Ordinals is an “attack” on Bitcoin. Bitcoin enthusiast Dan Held said, “Ordinals = NFTs on Bitcoin. This is good for Bitcoin.” He supported Ordinals arguing that it would increase demand for block space and consequently fees while also introducing more use cases to Bitcoin.
Also Read: Bitcoin Developer Luke Dashjr Reportedly Lost 200+ Bitcoins
Meanwhile, Rodarmor is not that affected by the negative sentiments “I actually love the haters. I mean, they do more to drive people to find out about the project than anybody else. I don’t know what they think when they have these massive audiences, and they go, ‘This is an attack on Bitcoin’—it seems like you don’t want to do that if you don’t want people to use the thing.”
