The Ordinals protocol

Pekelo

Pekelo

TL;DR: Crypto just got more unusable and creepier.

What is the Ordinals protocol? "NFT promoters have officially released “Ordinals” protocol. Ordinals exploits Bitcoin to allow the storage of large files directly on the main blockchain.

Some NFT goons managed to find an exploit in Bitcoin source code that allows them to store files up to 4mb directly on the mainnet blockchain.

The NFTers hope to leverage this to roll out a whole world of widely available Bitcoin NFTs with relatively low transaction fees.

This means that every BTC node will have to download all of this bullshit every time a block is sent. As you could guess, this will completely cripple Bitcoin main net, making it even more slow and useless than it is already."

People will put up illegal content that is then pretty much impossible to take down

Wait, wasn't it already possible to put up illegal shit on the blockchain?

"The difference is that it was a link to CP and so they could remove the content from the source leaving a dead link on the chain. Now the CP will be on the actual chain itself."

Remember, Bitcoin is still in beta...

More info:

https://read.pourteaux.xyz/p/illegitimate-bitcoin-transactions

"The end result is that there is effectively no limit short of the blocksize on what can be stored on the bitcoin blockchain using this method (thankfully, like OP_RETURN, Ordinals transactions can still be pruned). In other words, it is possible to make an Ordinals transaction that takes up an entire 4MB block if you broadcast such a transaction to a miner (in practice, Bitcoin Core limits this size to 400,000 bytes). Yet even considering this smaller 400,000 size limit for an Ordinals transaction, such a size is still five thousand times the size of the OP_RETURN limit that was the source of all the controversy back in 2014."
 
"The last block mined had only 63 transactions in it because there was an NFT shoved in it that took up most of the space and generated no fees for the miner "
 
What will happen when people use this mechanism for storing permanent, unchangeable data society doesn't approve of -- like violating a copyright or child porn?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-nft-mints-rising-transaction-231651954.html
Bitcoin NFT Mints Are Rising—But So Are Transaction Fees

Jason Nelson
Fri, February 3, 2023 at 5:16 PM CST·3 min read

Ordinals, a controversial new project that lets users put NFT-like media assets on the Bitcoin blockchain, is seeing surging activity this week. On Thursday, Ordinals recorded its largest number of single-day mints—but network fees are apparently growing as a result.

More than 1,000 total Bitcoin NFTs have been minted via Ordinals, according to public blockchain data curated by Dune, topping that total on Thursday as 420 new “inscriptions” were made on the blockchain. That’s more than three times the amount of NFTs minted on Bitcoin via the process on Wednesday.

However, Thursday also marked the highest average transaction fee on Bitcoin in more than a month, landing at $1.53 worth of BTC per data from YCharts. That’s the highest it’s been since December 27, 2022

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Image: Dune Analytics
The launch of Ordinals revived the heated and long-standing debate in the Bitcoin space about block sizes, legitimate transactions, and whether JPEGs and other media should be inscribed on the original blockchain. Thanks to the Taproot upgrade, Ordinals has allowed anything from knock-off Bored Apes to video games to be added to the Bitcoin blockchain.

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NFTs are digital assets that are provably unique and linked to digital (and sometimes even physical) content like artwork, movies, and music files, and they can prove ownership of an item or membership in an exclusive group.

While blockchains like Ethereum and Solana are synonymous with NFTs, the practice of committing digital assets to a blockchain network has existed on Bitcoin since 2014, with projects like Counterparty and Stacks leading the way.

Rising transaction fees are an apparent side effect of adding NFTs to Bitcoin’s mainnet. Bitcoin transaction fees are determined by the volume of data in the transaction and the speed at which the user wants their transaction completed. Users who want their transactions to go through during periods of high traffic can decide to pay more fees to push their transactions through.

On January 21, when Ordinals launched, Bitcoin transaction fees topped out at 2.10% as a percentage of the block reward for miners—but on January 24, Bitcoin fees topped out at 3.44%, according to data from Hashrate Index. On Thursday, that figure reached 3.86%.

A closer look at the Hashrate Index data shows that the percentage is spiking at times during the day, including to a mark of nearly 8% late Friday afternoon. However, the overall daily average has thus far landed at a much lower number amid the rise of Ordinals.

The increase in transaction fees has led some Bitcoin maximalists to call Ordinals an affront to the Bitcoin ethos. Others say the project allows the spamming of the decentralized network.

It's sentiment that Ordinals developer Casey Rodarmor does not share. He told Decrypt on Monday that Bitcoin blocks need to be full to give users a reason to pay more than the minimum fee.

“If blocks are not full, then nobody has any reason to pay more than the minimum fee rate to have their transactions included in a block,” he said. “So as a result, blocks must be full."

Ordinals Launches NFTs on Bitcoin, Unsurprisingly Sparking Controversy

He further explained that while he's keen on full Bitcoin blocks, he does not support increasing the size of the blocks. "I wouldn’t advocate to raise the block size,” he affirmed.

Even so, Ordinals are apparently affecting how people use the Bitcoin network, which may only fuel the continuing debate around their value and use.
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Is this a new application for NFTs, or just a boarded-up ape?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bored-ape-owner-burns-169k-213217533.html
Bored Ape Owner Burns $169K NFT to Move It From Ethereum to Bitcoin
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André Beganski
Tue, February 14, 2023 at 3:32 PM CST·6 min read


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A valuable digital collectible was permanently removed from circulation over the weekend, as its owner aimed to symbolically shift the asset’s underlying blockchain from Ethereum to Bitcoin.

The collectible was Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) #1626, an Ape from the most valuable project in the NFT space. Its most recent sale on OpenSea took place last November when it sold for 108 Ethereum—that's nearly $432,000 at the time of the transaction, or around $169,000 at today's prices.

NFTs are digital assets that are provably unique and signify the ownership of an item, often digital art. The ownership of BAYC #1626 is linked to a digital token that is recorded on the Ethereum network, where it could also be traded—that is, up until recently.

Digital tokens can be permanently removed from circulation through a process called burning, which involves sending an asset to a location where it cannot be retrieved. Jason Williams claimed to have burned BAYC #1626 over the weekend, preventing it from being sold ever again, at least on Ethereum’s network.

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“Essentially throwing a Lamborghini into a trash compactor–It's kind of fun,” Williams told Decrypt. “Whether putting bloated JPEGs on Bitcoin’s base chain is smart or not is a whole 'nother discussion, but I think it's going to be a lot of fun seeing how it plays out.”

Williams believes his Ape now exists on Bitcoin. That’s because the location to which BAYC #1626 was burned is linked to an Inscription made through Ordinals. Ordinals, created by Casey Rodarmor, is a project that allows content like videos and images to be assigned to individual satoshis—the smallest unit that Bitcoin can be divided into—where they permanently exist on Bitcoin’s network as Inscriptions.

Even though the number of Inscriptions on Bitcoin is approaching 100,000, there are few notable marketplaces for people to trade them, and a significant number of buyers and sellers are linked together currently through Ordinal’s discord server.



Ordinals Gain Momentum With 76,000 NFTs Minted to Bitcoin


The burn took place using a newly developed feature for Ordinals named Teleburn, which creates a unique location with each new Inscription to which digital assets can be burned. The feature allows users to assign an existing asset from another network to a Bitcoin Inscription while removing it from circulation, effectively transferring the token between chains in the eyes of those who created the new feature.

“The idea is that you are one-way, permanently burning an asset on another chain and pointing it to the ordinal that lives on the Bitcoin chain,” said Rob Hamilton, who collaborated with Rodarmor to create the new Ordinals feature.

Hamilton approached Rodarmor about developing the Teleburn function last Saturday at Bitcoin Park, a coworking space in Nashville, Tennessee that caters to the Bitcoin community. The two decided to work together after Hamilton pointed out that Williams wanted to burn his Ape, who had responded to one of Rodarmor’s Tweets.

“Let's go write some code right now,” Rodarmor said, according to Hamilton, adding that the prospect of burning an Ape got Rodarmor “really excited.”

Rodarmar did not respond to requests for comment from Decrypt. However, the two can be seen developing Ordinal’s Teleburn function in a recent Tweet, according to Hamilton.

Burning BAYC #1626 wasn’t the first time that Ordinal’s Teleburn function was used. Rodarmor first tested the new feature out on an ENS domain he owned, rodarmor.eth. Then the pair oversaw Williams as he burned the ape.

The term Teleburn was coined by Rodarmor, as a combination of the words teleport and burn, said Hamilton. Rodarmor referenced the function’s hasty development with Hamilton in a recent tweet.

Hamilton believes the Teleburn function will catch on as a way for people to bridge their digital collectibles, noting that Rodarmor plans to extend Ordinal’s Teleburn support to assets on other chains aside from Ethereum, such as Tezos and Solana.

“This has now set the standard of representing an asset across the chain,“ said Hamilton. “It's going to be the way to actually have skin in the game,” pointing out that assets burned are permanently gone from circulation.

A chimp off the old block?
As news of the Bored Ape burn spread on Twitter Monday, Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano weighed in on the matter, stating the Inscription linked to BAYC #1626 is an unlicensed reproduction of the original NFT because Williams no longer maintains its possession on Ethereum’s network.

“If you transfer your ape to an address you no longer control (even if it's the 'burn' address), you have effectively given up your license,” he stated.

Solano also pushed back against the notion that BAYC #1626 is “gone from [Ethereum] forever,” as mentioned in the post’s initial Tweet, because it still exists on-chain, even if people can no longer access it.

A spokesperson from Yuga Labs confirmed to Decrypt the company believes the Inscription of BAYC #1626 is an illegitimate Ape.

"Only NFTs minted from Ethereum contract: 0xBC4CA0EdA7647A8aB7C2061c2E118A18a936f13D are legitimate BAYC NFTs," a Yuga spokesperson said, referencing the smart contract that yielded the collection's 10,000 Apes.

Whether the new Ordinals function could supplant Ethereum’s popularity for hosting digital art is doubtful, according to the CEO of Web3 development platform Hiro Alex Miller. Hiro builds tools for Stacks, a network built on top of Bitcoin that aims to bring smart contract functionality to the underlying network.

“As much as I am very pro-Bitcoin and think there’s going to be a massive ecosystem there, it's not going to replace Ethereum NFTs tomorrow, or probably at all,” Hiro told Decrypt. “I think it's gonna be interesting to see where this goes.”

Miller said the Teleburn function provides a solution for keeping track of a digital art’s provenance—the record of prior ownership—across blockchains, adding that it’s challenging to establish which digital collectible is the real one if it exists in circulation on multiple chains.

The Hiro CEO also compared how data is stored on Bitcoin using Ordinals versus Ethereum NFTs. While it’s possible to store assets such as images on-chain using Ethereum, most NFTs point to an asset that is stored off-chain, whether that’s also an image or another type of file. With Inscriptions, the data is stored directly and permanently on Bitcoin’s blockchain.

Regardless of whether the Inscription of BAYC #1626 is an unofficial version of its Ethereum-based predecessor, Miller thinks the collectible will “carry a lot of value” because of its first-of-a-kind nature.

“He basically turned it into something that is now an ultra-rare [Ape],” Miller said, referencing the categories by which NFTs are often ascribed value based on the rarity of their attributes. “The market is going to value it as its own unique piece of art.”
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