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Bitcoin is once again experimenting with NFTs. It started with the appearance of colored coins in 2012, aiming to represent all types of non-Bitcoin assets on Bitcoin. Then in 2014 came Counterparty, which was built as a derivative of Bitcoin, allowing the creation and trading of digital assets backed by its XCP token. Counterparty is where "Rare Pepes" (NFTs inspired by the Pepe the Frog meme) were born in 2016, long before the Ethereum NFTs we know today.
This time, it's Ordinal NFTs and Inscriptions, implemented by the Ordinal protocol developed by Casey Rodarmor.
Rodarmor has been involved in technology since 2010. He worked at Google for a while, then briefly at Chaincode Labs, doing some nominal work on Bitcoin Core (the main code implementation of the protocol). After taking over from Alexander Leishman, the founder of River Financial, last year, he now co-hosts the San Francisco SF Bitcoin BitDevs.
Bitcoin BitDevs started in New York City as a community that holds monthly meetings to discuss more technical aspects of Bitcoin. Rodarmor's leadership position in San Francisco indicates his commitment to testing new Bitcoin ideas. Bitcoin BitDevs is an integral part of Bitcoin's grassroots culture.
He said in our interview that he is now working full-time on Ordinals. The project now has paid interns (Liam Scalzulli and RaphJaph) and paid Discord Mods.
Rodarmor is a Bitcoin advocate, and no one can tell him otherwise. He got into Bitcoin because he "hated ZF" and belonged to the "sound money camp" when it comes to Bitcoin, as he told the "Stephan Livera" podcast earlier this month. He likes Bitcoin because it's a better non-sovereign currency with predictable, sound monetary policy; not because it enables NFTs.
Nevertheless, he is now best known for enabling the latest iteration of NFTs on Bitcoin.
Motivation
Rodarmor began studying Ordinals in 2022. During our conversation, his personal assistant Erin and Rodarmor's podcast co-host for "Hell Money" sat on the couch in the background. As Rodarmor adjusted his camera, I also noticed a trap bar deadlift barbell to his right.
"Do you lift dumbbells often?" I asked. "Yes!" he responded, but unfortunately, lifting things in his apartment makes too much noise. He added that he thinks he has some "very appealing traps."
He does. Rodarmor looks like someone who is more suited to full-time software development.
He first learned about NFTs in 2017 and wasn't particularly interested in the burgeoning digital art being created and traded. He had briefly thought about setting up a digital art auction house, but it was short-lived. Then came Art Blocks, an influential generative digital art project on Ethereum founded by Erick Calderon. Its new aesthetics caught Rodarmor's attention.
Rodarmor was inspired to use Solidity to develop Ethereum smart contracts, but he was frustrated with Ethereum, which he described as a "Rube Goldberg machine." He didn't like the idea of building NFTs on Ethereum, so he abandoned the idea. Then, in early 2022, he revisited the idea of NFTs and wanted to figure out how to implement them on Bitcoin.
When he started studying Ordinals, he told me his inspiration came directly from Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto referenced something called "ordinals" in the original Bitcoin codebase, and the ordinal theory was born from there. (For the technically inclined or generally interested, check out Jeremy Rubin's notes on the original Bitcoin codebase.)
Part of Rodarmor's motivation is to make Bitcoin fun again (as he tweeted earlier this year about Bitcoin NFTs). After all, it's a bear market. In our interview, he certainly seemed upbeat.
Ordinals are very simple, at least theoretically. The Ordinal protocol outlines a method of numbering satoshis sequentially, where satoshis are the smallest unit of Bitcoin, representing 1/100,000,000 of a Bitcoin. Once satoshis are given a sequence number, users can engrave data onto these satoshis to create digital artifacts, which is a term Rodarmor prefers over NFTs.
In his view, it's not that these aren't NFTs, but that these NFTs are better. The inscriptions are always immutable: the art, text, or any inscription data is directly put on the blockchain. This is different from most other types of NFTs, which tend to store the actual JPG or text files elsewhere and then put a link to that data on the blockchain. Whether you care about NFTs or not, this is a clear upgrade in NFT immutability.
Backlash
Somehow, this seemingly simple technical update comes with quite a bit of intrinsic seriousness. Some OGs in the field describe Ordinals as an attack on Bitcoin's founding mission of unrestricted financial transactions. People who support Bitcoin want Bitcoin to survive. They also tend to own Bitcoin and want their Bitcoin to be secure. Anything that can be interpreted as a threat to the Bitcoin protocol poses a threat to the sovereignty of Bitcoin users and holders.
So, Rodarmor finds himself at the center of this season's Bitcoin crisis.
I asked him how he feels about the backlash he's received.
He thinks "the atmosphere is very good once you know where the criticism is coming from." He was initially very defensive, but once he started spending time engaging with more thoughtful, cautious critics through some one-on-one conversations, they had a lot in common. Rodarmor believes that the Bitcoin community is mostly filled with these kinds of thoughtful critics. Those who "scream for the sake of screaming" are the minority (though they are loud on Twitter).
Among these thoughtful critics, Rodarmor mentioned conversations with Warren Togami from Blockstream. Togami founded the open-source computer operating system distribution Fedora Linux, so he has a good understanding of open-source projects.
Togami said that if the Bitcoin community decides different fees apply to different categories of traffic on the Bitcoin network (read: regular financial Bitcoin transactions vs. ordinal NFT Bitcoin transactions), then that's up to them. As a community project, isn't it for Bitcoin people to decide and then run code that can add quality-of-service information (such as transaction priority)? (There's a technical tweet thread involving this topic.)
Rodarmor thinks this approach won't work. But hopefully, in the long run, this type of criticism and discussion will be beneficial for Bitcoin.
From other vocal Ordinals critics, there are concerns that Ordinal NFTs could lead to irreversible chain bloat. As inscriptions flood in due to inscriptions, accumulating large amounts of data over time, it may become more difficult for new node participants to boot up. New node participants are crucial for maintaining Bitcoin as a decentralized, permissionless, and robust monetary network—where those without the economic majority can still have a say in how Bitcoin operates.
In theory, Ordinal NFTs could increase transaction costs, which would incentivize miners to keep going after large subsidies end. Block subsidies are new bitcoins rewarded to miners who successfully mine blocks. This is |
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Post time 31-3-2024 21:36:06