Since the NFT marketplace is dominated by proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains, it is not surprising that enthusiasts immediately jump to Ethereum, Polygon, or Solana when it comes to digital collectibles.
However, there are digital collectibles that use the Bitcoin blockchain and these have been around since 2014.
As a matter of fact, a number of projects have made it their mission to bring non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to the biggest and first cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin NFTs
Despite the fact that NFTs have been part of the Bitcoin ecosystem for almost a decade, there are still people out there who do not see the point.
Ordinals are one of these projects and it has been referred to as an affront to BTC principles by some maximalists.
Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Ordinals, does not appear to be fazed by the criticism and said that the controversy was only helping their cause.
He said that he loved the haters because they are the ones that generate more interest and push people into learning about the project than anything else.
He added that he could not understand how these people worked because they have massive audiences and they actually create awareness about something they do not want people to use, claiming it is an attack on Bitcoin.
The Ordinals protocol
A former Bitcoin Core contributor, Rodarmor came up with Ordinals for enabling the transfer of individual Satoshis on the network.
He said that the protocol is essentially designed to number Satoshis, which gives a serial number to individual Satoshis and they can then be tracked in various transactions.
Users can take advantage of the Ordinals protocol for transferring, exploring, and receiving individual Satoshis that may include unique data like images and videos.
The inscription is the name of the process that adds assets to individual satoshis. Rodarmor elaborated that they can add content to a BTC transaction via inscription and it is then assigned to satoshis.
He said that the inscriptions are stored in the signature of a Bitcoin transaction once they are complete.
More details
Rodarmor further added that there is no need for an additional token, or a sidechain because the entire process takes place on the Bitcoin network.
He stated that from the get-go, his design aim had been to come up with something that would be native to Bitcoin, which means it cannot be a sidechain and it cannot have a token.
The Ordinals creator said that as compared to the rest of the things that people do, this use of block space was the one that had the lowest possible impact.
He said that the data was downloaded by full nodes, but they do not pay any heed to it. He also disclosed that there are no resource requirements for the inscriptions.
One of the reasons Ordinals was being criticized was because people believed the Bitcoin protocol would be abused by the inscriptions and this would increase costs, but these claims were refuted by the creator.
Rodarmor said that blocks need to be full for Bitcoin to be fully secure and this is something people fail to understand.