An objective look at the technical concerns behind ordinals and the implications on the Bitcoin network.
This is an opinion editorial by Mark Goodwin.
ordinal (adj.)
c. 1400, “regular, ordinary; well regulated, proper”, from Old French order and directly from late Latin ordinal “showing order, denoting an order of succession”, from Latin order (genitive order) “row, series” (see order (n.)). The meaning of “to mark the place or position of an object in an order or series” dates from the 1590s.1
There are two types of numbers; ordinals and cardinals. Ordinal numbers denote rank or position in a system, while cardinal numbers count how many units of something there are. You can think of ordinals as the number used when communicating a runner’s position in a race, or even within driving directions. “Take the third left.” You can think of cardinals as the numbers used to count how many candies are in that big jar at the fair. In bitcoin terms, the block height of the chain would be an ordinal number, the 10th block, while the number of satoshis in a transaction fee would be a cardinal number, 1000 sats.
ordinals is an open source project from the Bitcoin developer casey rodarmor which consists of two well differentiated parts; Ordinal theory and inscriptions.
ordinal theory it’s an arbitrary but sensible framework for tracing an individual satoshi’s lineage using an ordinal number it acquired at the time of issue. At the current block height, having had three halves starting at 50 bitcoins (50, 25, 12.5, 6.25), when a valid block is found, the lucky miner can allocate 625,000,000 satoshis to himself. same in the currency base transaction, which has no entry. On the current difficulty, miners use this reserved but empty input as additional space for the hash. The Bitcoin network is a series of peer-to-peer databases, filled with integers that contain the current state of the protocol. You can think of ordinal theory as a conceptual social lens for all the numerical data presented in bitcoin blocks. By creating (cc: arbitrary) rules to see how individual satoshis are theoretically distributed after a bitcoin transaction, Ordinal Theory simply suggests a unique perspective for interpreting Bitcoin, explained in its Index. Each satoshi is assigned a unique ordinal number from the candidate block, starting at 0 and continuing to count just under 2.1 quadrillion, with 100,000,000 satoshi clusters conventionally referred to as “one bitcoin.” This number is set to issuing blocks regardless of the incredibly rare but legitimate accounts of successful miners completing the Coinbase transaction output that issues block rewards without a valid bitcoin address. Every bitcoin transaction except this Coinbase transaction , requires both an input and an output. Within a bitcoin transaction, the separate UTXO satoshis, or unspent transaction outputs, are completely indistinguishable and therefore atomically fungible when spent via the output address . The ordinal theory suggests purely socially that there is an order in the distribution mechanism, and satoshis are sent first in, first out, and ordered by in. Due to this arbitrary logistical assumption, you could scan your bitco in the wallet for UTXOs to try and locate rare ordinals. Rare ordinals are direct from the consensus itself, such as the first satoshi in a block after a halving, a legendary ordinal, or even a particular satoshi from a block issued at the time of a personal event. Thus, there is a satoshi associated with every number from 0 to about 2.1 quadrillion, with all sorts of opportunities for numerical repetition, unique integers, and interpretive iterations. An ordinal theorist might even hypothetically assess the interpretation of, say, satoshi 5,412,388 as its base26 counterpart, “BLOCK”.
The recently released ordinals 0.4.2 is a specialized bitcoin wallet that programs a specific signature of a bitcoin transaction using rules within the protocol consensus to record any type of data on the token sidechain. That is of course if you offer the market rate and it spreads to a willing miner. This software allows, for ease of access, any willing buyer to purchase ledger space, primarily by landing on witness data. In 2017, SegWit, a bitcoin soft fork theorized by Peter Wuille and Luke Dashjr, among others, removed signature data from transactions in a block and placed it in a roughly 4MB block length. By introducing a new metric for block size in the form of weight units, SegWit created a distinction between bytes and vbytes (four weight units), limiting the maximum block weight derived roughly from taking four times the non-token bytes (inputs). and transaction outputs). ) and subtracting it from the total witness data (signatures and unlock scripts). This was executed so that previous generations of Bitcoin software could still validate transactions, but it actually increased the available block size by releasing the 1MB block limit set by Satoshi in late 2010. SegWit was also built to solve attacks. of malleability by divorcing the witness data in to preserve the identification of the transaction. The idea of this “sidechain”, economically, was to discount the rate of satoshis per vbytes to encourage the execution of slightly more complicated bitcoin scripts that have traditionally allowed for scaling efforts; The Lightning Network itself requires HTLC, or Hash Time Locked Contracts, to probabilistically enable trust in this exponentially more efficient shared UTXO payment channel. Taproot, a 2021 bitcoin soft fork, enabled more op_codes and the Merkelized Alternative Script Tree (MAST) with a transaction type called P2TR, or a payment script to Taproot, as well as raising the standardization limits for data transmission. While SegWit was a critical status change on the ledger when it created this witness datablock extension, Taproot was more of a systems upgrade that unlocked potential scalability and privacy features. Both forks are necessary for the details of exactly how Ordinal 0.4.2 works, but the ability to pay miners per block space to include arbitrary data in bitcoin has been around since block genesis. This is perhaps most infamously done in OP_RETURN, which allows spent outputs to display a message or encode a key in their available 40 bytes, leaving the UTXO unspendable, but easily removable from the UTXO pool.
The Ordinal software allows users to generate valid bitcoin transactions containing arbitrary data in their own script, such as text files, PNGs, or even a program script. These transactions are signed using this modified wallet software, Ordinal 0.4.2, in the form of an op_code “envelope” that is ultimately written within the transaction witness data. This envelope is built using the OP_FAIL code, which by default does not push the code below it onto the programming stack. The data for an entry, containing a filetype data header and the file itself, is placed inside the OP_IF instance below it intended to execute op_code and is stamped with the final program OP_ENDIF if executed. Due to the use of this op_code, enrollment data can eventually be removed entirely from your own node, and the computation required to validate a presumably expensive heavyweight script is potentially less than even a single Lightning channel open. Because block size is static since SegWit, the implications on node broker centralization fears due to increased costs to run a node are not exacerbated any more than if blocks were simply routinely full; maybe even less. Regardless, near-complete blocks are an expected result of a successful bitcoin network, and the network must be prepared.
registrations they are associated with a specific satoshi of the transaction and therefore could be associated with one mentioned in the ordinal theory. This simulated way of reading the Bitcoin blockchain creates potential avenues for users to sentimentally value one singular satoshi over another. If the holder of said ordinal is willing to exchange it for more than its singular satoshi value, this could, in a specific sense, break fungibility. But again, that was always the case and entirely possible within localized exchange rates for fiat pairs, market arbitrage, a poorly timed transaction, or even naive peer-to-peer barter. There is nothing about the inscriptions or ordinal theory that causes any change of state within the atomic principles of a satoshi; it is purely a social lens. Privacy concerns are similarly resolved; there is no molecular tracer within an inscription tracking your individual sitting within the sheer functional fungibility of a bitcoin transaction. They all come out exactly the same, but you just refer to one as such. You can spend an ordinal exactly as you would any other satoshi.
Bitcoin is a database with a specific consensus, and there is nothing within the ordinal theory or the inscriptions that violates those rules. But there’s also nothing against consensus by running an adversary node inside a Lightning path that collects metadata for surveillance, fixing attacks, using on-chain analytics software, or even a bitcoin donation scam. The point is that just because something is a potential use case for bitcoin doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a net good for users of the system. And yet Bitcoin is a system of rules, not bias, and the arbiter of validity must remain code. The nodes that Inscribers have synced since the release of Ordinal 0.4.2 contain the rules for what constitutes a valid block and the dynamic block space fee has set the market for truth only with its legitimately satisfied economic demands. Entries have a unique property of selective impermanence with the potential to utilize the database and increase market demand for the bitcoin asset and bitcoin block space. The worst action to take would be one that hastily distorted the close conditions that are currently established. Someone could have simply bought each block in perpetuity. Someone could have always stuffed arbitrary data into smart transactions if they wanted to pay the fee.
But why the hell would you waste your satoshis doing that?
You could accidentally spend a rare one.
