Ordinal ruleset inscription (2022-, Bitcoin NFT)

Ordinals are inscriptions created with the protocol described at: docs.ordinals.com/inscriptions.html The protocol was designed by developer Casey Rodarmor, and shares a few similarities with the AtomSea & EMBII protocol.

The protocol also includes a way to have ownership over inscriptions, effectively creating an NFT system on top of the bitcoin blockchain. AtomSea & EMBII also already had such a system however. In either case, Ciro Santilli couldn't give less of a fuck about who owns some random publicly viewable digital asset.

For whatever reason, orinals became extremelly popular compared to the AtomSea & EMBII format, leading to millions os inscriptions, and 10k+ images as of block 830k. They also started to take up a substatial portion of the available block space.

This in turn led to a lot of child porn rediscussion, and people linking back to this page to view earlier inscriptions: incoming links.

Unfortunately, unlike AtomSea & EMBII and even cryptograffiti.info uploads, most ordinals are designed to be just souless bulk collectibles, as with as much artistic merit as any random collectible card set or postage stamps you may find at a newpaper stall. To make things worse many of them are likely algorithmically generated. Eternal September had truly arrived to the Bitcoin blockchain. As a result, machine learning would be almost essential in order to find interesting uploads amidst such bulk.

The source code for the reference uploader and indexer is at: github.com/ordinals/ord

The reference viewer server for the runs at: ordinals.com.

The i0 at the end of the URL above means "inscription 0". This is because a single transaction can have multiple inscriptions.

Some of them have sold for high prices. Magic Eden is a popular interface for trading them:

The ordinals also started taking up large portions of the Bitcoin blockchain:

Apparently the "Taproot" Bitcoin update made it easier to upload image-sized data once again, which had become prohibitively expensive 2023 and much earlier:

Bibliography: