What are Ordinals? A Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin NFTs

Ordinals are the new thing taking Bitcoin by storm. On Monday 13 February, inscriptions went with ordinals 100,000 as users flooded the network with images, video gamesand other content.

Ordinal inscriptions, similar to NFTs, are digital assets inscribed on a satoshi, the lowest denomination of a Bitcoin (BTC). Writing on satoshis, named after the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamotois possible thanks to Tapioca upgrade launched on the Bitcoin network on November 14, 2021.

What is an ordinary inscription?

Bitcoin developers have been working to bring non-fungible tokens or NFTs to the number one blockchain for nearly a decade, starting in 2014 with Counterparty, the creators of Rare Pepe NFT collection, followed by Stacks in 2017. The inscription process writes or writes the data to the content stored in the witness of Bitcoin transaction. The witness was introduced in the SegWit upgrade to the Bitcoin network in 2017.

“What the team came up with with Ordinals is genius,” Alex Miller, CEO of Hiro, a developer of tier-2 smart contract platform Stacks, told Decrypt in an interview. “It’s super-core to the Bitcoin ethos in that they basically took several different things and put them together in a way that the original creators didn’t foresee or expect.”

The first step in the creation of Ordinals is users downloading Bitcoin Core and syncing the node to the blockchain. After the sync is complete, the next step is to create an Ordinals wallet and send some satoshis to the wallet.

How did we get to this point?

Launched in 2017, Segregated Witness or SegWit fixed a number of bugs in Bitcoin Core, allowing multiple transactions per block, and laid the foundation for Layer 2 payment channels such as the Bitcoin Lightning Network. SegWit caused heated debate in the Bitcoin community and led to a hard fork of the network resulting in the launch of rival blockchains, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision, also known as Bitcoin SV.

While critics may see Ordinals as an abuse of the network, Ordinals developer Casey Rodarmor says these claims are unfounded.

With Tapioca, all parties to a transaction can work together to make these complex transactions look like standard person-to-person transactions. They do this by combining their public keys to create a new public key and combining their signatures to create a new signature. It does this through a device called Schnorr signatures.

The Taproot upgrade also mixes single and multi-signature transactions, making it more challenging to identify transaction entries on Bitcoin’s blockchain. Taproot improves privacy while reducing the amount of data needed to create them, lowering transaction costs that have become much higher as Bitcoin has become more popular.

“One thing people don’t understand is that for Bitcoin to be secure, the blocks have to be full. That’s part of the coin security model,” Rodarmor said Decrypt in an interview. “If the blocks are not full, no one has a reason to pay more than the minimum fee rate to have their transactions included in a block. So, as a result, the blocks must be full.”

Ordinals can be a complicated process due to the size of the Bitcoin blockchain and the need to use the command line (Windows) or Terminal (Mac/Linux).

What’s next for Ordinals?

The race is on to develop more seamless methods of entering Bitcoin and wallets that allow Bitcoin NFT to be viewed once created.

Looking to create a seamless way for collectors to create Ordinal Inscriptions, Gamma, a Bitcoin NFT marketplace on Stacks, began offering a paid service that allows users to inscribe images and text. Other projects that offer this service include Oridalsbot from the creators of Satoshibles NFT collection.

Hiro Systems announced on Tuesday that it is rolling out support for Odinals on Hiro Wallet, and on Wednesday, Xversea Bitcoin-based online wallet, also launched support for Bitcoin NFTs.