4 Things Every Artist Needs to Understand About Bitcoin Network’s Update for Native NFTs – Rolling Stone

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Digital artifacts have come to Bitcoin, essentially breaking Ethereum and Solana’s virtual duopoly on NFTs. But many have expressed their disdain for the technology based on inventor Casey Rodarmor’s Ordinal protocol. And with good reason.

Ordinals’ inscription feature enables storage and tracking of NFT content on the BTC blockchain, but as industry observer “Bitcoin saves” notes“just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”

Actual. Ethereum, with its proof-of-stake model, is much better positioned and equipped to accommodate the NFT industry and support responsible artists as they explore the next frontier of the new cultural economy.

Ethereum’s code change to Proof of Stake allowed the validation process to use 99.95% less energy than a Proof of Work (PoW) protocol, like the one used for Bitcoin transactions. By reducing the electricity needed to validate a transaction, Ethereum cut the lifeline PoW blockchain platforms provide to climate-destroying fossil fuel power plants used by Bitcoin miners. NFT artists now have a clear technology alternative that does not contribute to climate pollution.

The virtual reality artist known as Sutu, for example, harnesses the resources that enable creativity to flourish around evolving technology while embracing global justice and environmental stewardship.

By championing the conscious crypto-creator movement, Sutu highlights the social and economic viability of sustainable and transparent NFT practices. His limited edition Neonz collection of 10,000 retro-futuristic avatars on Tezos sold for around a million dollars while publicizing pure NFT practices and demonstrating innovative paths the art community can take to harness technology in the pursuit of sustainability.

Ordinals give serial numbers to satoshis, Bitcoin’s fractional currency, making them unique and non-fungible. Creators can then inscribe a satoshi with digital content – ​​an image, scanned document, video clip, etc. Taking advantage of the cryptocurrency’s taproot and Segregated Witness features, these inscriptions can be as large as 4 megabytes, certainly large enough to accommodate. these media.

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This is where much of the problem arises.

Bitcoin was originally intended only to facilitate financial transactions, and it has done an efficient job of accomplishing this task. But flooding the BTC blockchain with bulky, cumbersome NFTs causes several critical problems:

1. It threatens to lock out “small blockers” who rely on the chain’s limited scale to extract revenue and small profits.

These players are often part of cottage industries in disadvantaged communities that cannot hope to compete with syndicates and Bitcoin pools to mine the larger blocks. As Bitcoin saves, “marginalized people in developing countries will have to pay more to run their Bitcoin nodes and send transactions.” For example, a few days after the launch of Ordinal inscriptions, Luxor mined a block with a weight of 3.96 MB. While many blocks can grow to that size given thousands of financial transactions, this one contained only 63 because one is a 3.94MB digital image.

2. It obliterates Bitcoin’s original purpose.

If often rogue NFT projects grow legs on the Bitcoin blockchain, they can clog the entire process with precious bandwidth. Think of NFT inscriptions as farm tractors on the highway. They take up multiple lanes and move slowly. Smaller financial transactions, which the chain is built and intended to serve, get stuck in the queue and cannot escape the log traffic in front of it. They have to wait until the tractor reaches the destination and pulls off the road. As the Luxor example shows, a single block can hold more than 10,000 financial transactions or one NFT.

3. It can cause costs to increase.

Because ordinary inscriptions are performed, performed and stored on Bitcoin’s main network, the additional congestion will put pressure on access to miners’ ability to record data efficiently. Keeping these assets on-chain is a low-return use of resources that will increase fees and transaction costs. And because NFT inscriptions will provide greater payout, miners will likely favor them over the recording or financial transactions. Merchants, investors and other stakeholders will either have to match the higher NFT fees or be left behind.

4. It opens the door to spam, bloatware, malicious data and socially irredeemable “artifacts”.

Rodarmor has already been forced to acknowledge this disadvantage and fight to remove an extremely pornographic inscription from the front page of Ordinal’s website. The offending satoshi, which was on the page for about 30 minutes, has been removed, but the image can never be deleted.

Opening up Bitcoin to NFTs exacerbates blockchain’s already difficult path to scale and facilitate adoption. Legitimate financial transactions will feel pinched as large NFT nodes soak up the available space and squeeze small miners and nodes out of the most profitable workflows.

The inscription practice also calls into question Bitcoin’s fungibility and anonymity. If a few satoshis contain NFTs that fluctuate in value, they are different from their peers. Making some of the many satoshis unique can make them easy to track, removing privacy, which is one of the blockchain’s most valuable assets.