Bitcoin has changed. And the purists are not happy. The center of the discussion revolves around Ordinals, a new protocol (ord) created by Casey Rodarmor that allows digital artifacts to be recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain. Or the same, it brings the concept of NFT to the Bitcoin network.

Associate images with Bitcoin transactions. These Ordinals leverage the OP_Return function to insert data into Bitcoin transactions. It is mainly used for adding images.

This is something we’ve traditionally seen on the Ethereum network, but now it’s also found in Bitcoin. In the past, this was not possible as Bitcoin only allowed a very limited amount of information to be added and there were high associated fees. But that changed in 2017 and especially at the end of 2021.

Taproot promised changes. And they came. It took several years for a technical possibility to turn into a real addition. The cost of adding data to transactions was reduced with the SegWit update, but it was the Taproot update that improved compression and made it easier to add ‘smart contracts’ to Bitcoin.

We’ve gone from an 80-byte limit to 4MB. Expanding information that can be associated with Bitcoin high enough to be able to include JPG images.

These images can already be found on the Ordinals website, where we found images linked to Satoshi, the smallest possible unit of Bitcoin (0.00000001 BTC).

“Useless garbage.” Just go to the Ordinals website to see that the quality of the associated images is far from what is normally thought when talking about NFTs. Almost all of them are just memes. Logically, the value of images may increase in the future, but criticism has already emerged that these additions will not do anything good for the Bitcoin network.

Adam Black, one of the early developers of Bitcoin and CEO of Blockstream, was the one to post one of the most direct criticisms, collecting the emotions of others. Basically, he thinks that adding these NFTs to Bitcoin is all it’s doing is wasting space and worsening efficiency.

The first patches have already arrived. Less than two weeks have passed since the Ordinals website update, and its creator has already announced that it will manually block some images from the web. Due to the nature of the protocol it can’t create a filter for all images, but they did see how they went from memes to some out-of-place pornographic images.

good for miners; far from the first soul. They argue that Bitcoin was created not as an alternative to Ethereum, but rather as a haven value and a payment network between users. With Ordinals, they fear that Bitcoin has a high number of transactions that could worsen the experience with purely financial payments and transactions.

Including these tokens can benefit miners because they have more data to process and their fees may increase. You just have to look at Ethereum to see where the withdrawals could go. It’s hard to reach extremes as extreme increases in gas rates, but if these Ordinals become popular, a change could be noticed.

The creator of the rankings argues that its impact will be almost zero. “This use of blockchain is probably the least impactful use compared to anything else that can be done. Full nodes download this data, but then ignore it,” Rodarmor explains. In other words, these Ordinals would need to occupy a full block to increase the costs of the Bitcoin network, but since they occupy very little of the base (one satoshi), they are unlikely to represent a significant impact.

Freedom or optimization. There are two positions. Proponents of the Bitcoin network can cover many uses and that these Ordinals are one more case. On the other hand, those who think network space is wasted Bitcoin turns into something useless, no matter how small this space is.

A comparison with physical money would be the use of banknotes. Unfortunately, not all banknotes or coins are used to make payments. There are also those who make use of them for decoration, as a keepsake, or for any other use that isn’t exactly related to their value.

These Ordinals are an addition to the Bitcoin network enabled by the latest update. We’ll see if they remain an extra niche or if they continue to grow so that Bitcoin becomes more like Ethereum. A discussion that goes back to Bitcoin’s origins, we’ll see how it evolves.

Image | subham