Why I developed the Ordinals Bitcoin NFT project

Bitcoin is trying out non-fungible tokens (NFT) again.

First there were colored coins in 2012, which were aimed at representing all types of non-Bitcoin assets on Bitcoin.

I interviewed him for BUIDL Week.

Started in New York City, Bitcoin BitDevs is a community that hosts monthly meetings to discuss some of the more technical aspects of Bitcoin. Rodarmor’s place at the helm in San Francisco is indicative of his commitment to testing out new Bitcoin ideas. Bitcoin BitDevs are a critical part of Bitcoin’s grassroots culture.

Rodarmor is a Bitcoiner and no one can tell him otherwise. He got into Bitcoin because he “hates[s] government” and is in the “sound money camp” when it comes to Bitcoin, he told the “Stephan Livera” podcast earlier this month. He likes Bitcoin because it is better, non-government money with a predictable, sound monetary policy; it is not because it can enable NFTs.

Still, he’s now best known as the guy who enabled the latest iteration of NFTs on Bitcoin.

“Do you promise?” I asked. “Yes!” he replies, but regrets that the lifting in his apartment turned out to be quite high. He adds that he thinks he has some “pretty juicy traps.”

He does. Rodarmor looks relatively appropriate for someone who develops software full-time.

He originally learned about NFTs in 2017 and was not particularly interested in the type of digital art that was being created, bought and sold. He toyed with the idea of ​​a digital art auction house at the time, but only briefly. Then came Art Blocks, an influential generative digital art project on Ethereum founded by Erick Calderon. The new aesthetic caught Rodarmor’s eye.

Rodarmor was inspired to work on an Ethereum smart contract using Solidity, but became frustrated with Ethereum, which he describes as a “Rube Goldberg machine.” He didn’t like the idea of ​​building NFTs on Ethereum, so he gave up on that idea. Then, in early 2022, he picked up the idea of ​​NFTs again and wanted to figure out how to do it on Bitcoin.

Part of Rodarmor’s motivation is to make Bitcoin fun again (as he tweeted earlier this year about Bitcoin NFTs). It is a bear market after all. He certainly seemed to be enjoying himself during our interview.

Ordinals are hilariously simple, at least in theory. The Ordinal protocol outlines a way to sequentially number satoshis – the smallest unit of bitcoin, representing 1/100,000,000 of a bitcoin. And when satoshis are given a serial number, users can write data on those satoshis to create digital artifacts, which is Rodarmor’s preferred term over NFTs.

Not because these are not NFTs, but because these NFTs are slightly better, in his view. Inscriptions are always immutable: the art, text or whatever inscribed data is placed directly on the blockchain. This differs from most other types of NFTs which tend to store the actual JPG or text file somewhere else and then post a link to that data on the blockchain. Whether you care about NFTs or not, this is a definite upgrade to the immutability of NFTs.

Read more: Bitcoin NFTs: What are Ordinal NFTs and how do you create one?

Somehow, this seemingly simple technology update has come with quite a bit of seriousness. Some OGs in the space have described Ordinals as an attack on Bitcoin’s fundamental mission of conducting unhindered financial transactions. People who support Bitcoin want Bitcoin to survive. They also tend to own bitcoin and they want their bitcoin to be safe. Anything that can be interpreted as a threat to the Bitcoin protocol is a threat to the sovereignty of bitcoin users and holders.

And so Rodarmor has found himself the protagonist of this season’s Bitcoin crisis.

I asked how he felt about being on the receiving end of a lot of criticism.

He believed that “the atmosphere now was very good once [he] learned where his critics were coming from.” He was initially very defensive, but once he began to take the time to engage with the more thoughtful, cautious critics through some one-on-one conversations, there was considerable common ground .Rodarmor feels that the Bitcoin community is largely filled with these kinds of thoughtful critics, those who “shout for the sake of shouting” are in the minority (although they are vocal on Twitter).

Of these thoughtful critics, Rodarmor referred to conversations with Blockstream’s Warren Togami. Togami founded Fedora Linux, an open source distribution of the Linux operating system, so his understanding of open source projects is credible.

Togami says that if the Bitcoin community decides that different fee rates are appropriate for different classes of traffic on the Bitcoin network (read: ordinary financial Bitcoin transactions vs Ordinal NFT Bitcoin transactions), that’s up to them. As a community project, isn’t it up to Bitcoiners to decide and then run code that can add quality information as a priority to transactions? (Here’s a somewhat technical tweet thread that touches on this topic.)

Rodarmor believes that approach will not work. But hopefully it’s the kind of criticism and discourse that’s good for Bitcoin in the long run.

From the other vocal Ordinals critics, there is valid concern that Ordinal NFTs will lead to irreversible chain bloat. Because inscriptions have led to an influx of large blocks, it may become more difficult for new node participants to start up due to the huge amount of data that will accumulate over time. New node participants are essential to maintaining Bitcoin as a decentralized, permissionless and robust monetary network – where those without a financial majority can still have input into how Bitcoin is run.

In theory, Ordinal NFTs could increase transaction fees which would motivate miners to stick around in the future when the block grant ends. The block grant is the new bitcoins awarded to miners for successfully mining a block. It is the main way miners are financially compensated now.

Miners help secure the Bitcoin network, so when the subsidy disappears, transaction fees may need to be increased to keep miners from leaving the network a lot.

I’m not sure where I land on whether Ordinal NFTs will fix Bitcoin’s security budget problem. But I asked Rodarmor what he thought.

His response? “YOLO. Let’s find out.”