Why we should leave the church in the village

NFTs and Bitcoin – topics that don’t actually go together. With seven transfers per second, Bitcoin is considered too slow for many use cases. Alternative second-layer solutions are even needed as a means of payment. His trademark: the 21 million coin limit, decentralization and resistance to censorship. These qualities define good money. Bitcoin is optimized for this.

Few people know: NFTs are a genuine Bitcoin invention. The RBG Client has been able to define ownership claims for Bitcoin and Lightning for years. Already in 2010 discussed Satoshi and company in the Bitcoin Talk Forum about opening up the protocol in this direction. But the feature is hardly used. The debate is now gaining new impetus with the publication of a framework. So-called ordinals should finally help the BTC-NFTs to achieve a breakthrough.

Ord, an implementation of the Ordinals idea, is an “index, block explorer” and “command line wallet” capable of “giving satoshis a numismatic value, allowing them to be collected as rarity and.” can be traded,” says the GitHub file of the implementation.

Bitcoin purists are rattled by the push, including Blockstream CEO and BTC pioneer Adam Back. With reference to the already tight block space, there is no room for knick-knacks such as memes or art on the BTC blockchain. So many people are already talking about one DOS attack and fears a spam avalanche on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin and NFTs: Take it easy

Much alarmism about nothing. With an open protocol like Bitcoin, people will have to put up with building applications for it. Adam Back sees that too. In a tweet, the cryptographer writes:

We can appreciate that we can’t really stop them and that it’s a free world with anonymous miners. But we can encourage developers not to include these transactions.

Adam Back

On the other hand, not even Ordinals developer Casey Rodarmor assumes that the implementation will be used extensively. The developer says to Coindesk:

My idea is that Ordinals is an art project that is fun and I hope it inspires people to learn more about Bitcoin.

Casey Rodarmor

Should the project, contrary to expectations, enjoy great popularity, NFT disciples will have to dig deep into their pockets – and pay the corresponding transaction fees so that a miner takes pity on processing the JPEG in one block. This can even be the case with falling block subsidies due to the halvings provide an additional source of income for the miners.

Porn on the blockchain

Today, February 2, 2023, the debate took another turn. Because with the “goatse” image, strangers saved pornographic shock content on the BTC blockchain for the first time via ordinals, in which a man bent forward presented his bottom. The image, which by the way is not new as an internet phenomenon, will now be stored on the blockchain for all eternity.

The fact that Ordinals developer Rodarmor had no other choice but to delete the content from the block explorer shows the inconsistency of the entire project. Nevertheless: One can assume that the hype surrounding ordinals will subside. Because similar to the NFTs on smart contract platforms like Ethereum, the use case is limited.

Ultimately, the trend of using the Bitcoin blockchain for other non-financial squabbles is not new. sites like bitcoinstrings.com/all list all sorts of junk that has accumulated on the blockchain over the years. And isn’t Satoshi’s message in the BTC Genesis block also a kind of “abuse” of the oh-so-puristic blockchain? Perhaps we should keep the church in the village when we debate ordinals.