Live A Bitcoin life less Ordinary...

So I wanted to share a recent story I found quite interesting.?

The ordinal project, you may have heard of it... It's being dubbed as the NFTs of Bitcoin - it is a new and quite novel way of storing data on the Bitcoin blockchain.

This has led (as always with these sorts of protocol changes) to a plethora of problems and opportunities, and to be honest... I am here for it.

Debates on the direction of decentralised public blockchains fascinate me, these decisions made now theoretically could lay the foundations of something much larger in years to come. And this recent addition to the wider debate; just so happens to be happening to what some would describe as the only, and certainly the most sacred of all digital currencies... Bitcoin.

The project, as would be expected, has the community incredibly divided. With both core developers and very early adopters and maxis, such as Dan Held , opining on the subject in recent weeks;

Why it's good: Brings more financial use cases to Bitcoin. Drives more demand for block space (aka fees)

My take: If you pay a tx fee, it's not spam. Bitcoin is permissionless. Can't stop anyone from building it anyway

On the one side, many believe that the use case will bring new users to the network and increase the participants' adoption and network fees.

And on the other hand; many see it as a deviation from Satoshi's vision of a new cash system for all, and that memes have no place on the network...?

Software engineer Casey Rodarmor released the project to the world at the end of last month, it allows the production of "Digital artifacts" on the network,?much like an NFT, with Jpegs, Audio, Video, PDFs, etc. The NFT structure allows for individual Satoshis (each bitcoin is made up of 100'000'000 satoshis) to be inscribed with "arbitrary content". This content is cryptographically inscribed and represented by a string of numbers that can be transferred via a bitcoin wallet just like any other transaction on the network.

"This content is then inextricably linked to that satoshi, turning it into an immutable digital artifact that can be tracked, transferred, hoarded, bought, sold, lost, and rediscovered.”?

This has pushed the bitcoin block size up, with the average block size increasing by over 2.5mb since the 5th of Feb, and has reached new all-time highs.

This was coupled with an increase in "non-0 wallets" across the network... Bitcoin core developer and inventor of Hash-Cash (the algo bitcoin is based on) Adam Beck weighed in, countering the "anti-censorship" argument with

"Bitcoin is designed to be censor resistant. doesn't stop us mildly commenting on the sheer waste and stupidity of an encoding"

So what effect this has on the overall network remains to be seen, the transaction fees on the network spiked on the release of the protocol and many are indicating the ordinals project as the root cause, others believe it to be not so clear as indicated by Eric wall;

"Isn’t the block size limit supposed to prevent that?

Sounds like the limit is too high if node requirements can become unwieldy, not because of a particular type of usage within the block size limits."

Regardless of the debate raging across Twitter and other social networks, the adoption is increasing and the OTC market is booming. Derivatives of famous projects on other chains are quickly being produced and fetching very large sums of money, or BTC in most cases.?

At this stage, it's not like buying an NFT on Eth or Solana for instance. It is currently a little risky, with no marketplaces yet it's not one I would "yolo" into if you had the chance, without a modicum of more research.?

The only method to buy them is on the OTC market - facilitated by creator discords and plagued with all the "Web3" scammer problems from the more prominent ETH, SOL et-al NFT projects you may be used to.

But as always in crypto, some of the best opportunities, are not always that easy to get. The main issue is you will need to break every rule for investing in a web3 project.

• Unlikely "doxxed"
• Unlikely to have a website or a team (So no comebacks)
• You will need to send them money and hope they send you it (escrow is the way forward here if you need a hand with this let me know)

If this sounds like fun, and you want to have a try - let me know how you get on! I haven't tried yet, but I will over the weekend and let you know... I think I might try making one, that will need a whole new post though.

One prominent project of note, is the Ordinal Punks with records being set for the asset, with a sale of 7 "ordinal Punks" bundled together for around 15BTC or ~$350k last week according to Decrypts sources. These were believed to be punk derivative. Of a derivative, but the project team has since confirmed it's a "totally new kind of punk". The OG eth punks are represented by the project "Bitcoin punks" which are a direct derivative of the V.1 Eth Crypto punks, which many say started this all in the first place!?

Wherever you sit on this subject, it's looking to be undeniably a new trend and one I will certainly be keeping an eye on in the coming months, and when I manage to work out how to make one I will post my journey!

Who knows, it could all go to 0... think that's what makes it fun potentially? But, I will leave you with a quote from the architect of this current state of play, Mr. Rodarmor;

“This is 100% a meme-driven development.”

#Bitcoin #NFT #Ordinals #Cryptocurrency #Web3 #meme