The hot new thing in Crypto are ordinals. In a nutshell, an ordinal is a piece of information written to the Bitcoin blockchain and referenced by a unique address also held in the blockchain data structure.
Sounds familiar to an NFT but an NFT is a token which references a piece of data somewhere else on the internet like IPFS (inter-planetary file system) which hold the actual data. It might be somewhere else, but the trouble is, if the file or its storage goes away then the NFT data is gone only leaving the token pointing to nothing.
This means Ethereum could be doing its thing in a hundred years but the Bored Monkeys or Punks may have long since evaporated in a cloud of bit-decay.
An ordinal is actually stored in a Bitcoin block so while Bitcoin or any of its forks live, the data is there. The only way for it to vanish is for Bitcoin to stop existing and for ever instance of the blockchain to be erased. That is nigh on impossible.
All sorts of things are being stored up to the limit of 4 meg of information but storage is not cheap as it has to be mined into the blockchain. I paid to mine a 25K byte image into Bitcoin and it cost $115, so megabytes are going to cost thousands. The attraction is the fact the ordinal of the art piece I created will never disappear, is quite strong.
When I visited the Miami Blockchain show on the 19th there were 8 million ordinals in existence and 4 days later there a 9 million. Ordinals are exploding.
This is or maybe isn’t great news for Bitcoin.
It has certainly exploded transaction fees.
Here is a chart.
Chart thanks to bitinfocharts.com
Many Bitcoin ‘maxis’ aren’t a fan of this fun stuff. Bitcoin is their digital gold, Bitcoin is for serious economic purposes, not frog pictures, its like taking gold and making trinkets out of it….oh wait!
However the concern is real. If there is huge value in storing things like pictures and text in the Bitcoin Blockchain it will drive up the cost of financial transactions and that seems like a threat. Alternatively, it will drive low value transactions off Bitcoin and onto Layer 2 solutions in the same way Polygon serves that purpose for Ethereum.
Then again Ordinals may be a fad doomed to die out. However that is not going to happen. More likely Ordinals will spark a new wave for Bitcoin where it goes beyond its previous incarnation while still remaining the Layer 0 of all Crypto.
The fact transaction levels have shot up, driving a bonus for miners, mainly of who were struggling untill a sudden flow of Ordinal fees came pouring in, should be enough to prove that Ordinals are a breakthru, not a bain.
Ordinals are another ‘rabbit hole’ to fall down and one I expect to be extremely fruitful.
Go ask Alice.
Forbes.
Bitcoin Ordinals are the next big thing in Crypto.
The hot new thing in Crypto are ordinals. In a nutshell, an ordinal is a piece of information written to the Bitcoin blockchain and referenced by a unique address also held in the blockchain data structure.
Sounds familiar to an NFT but an NFT is a token which references a piece of data somewhere else on the internet like IPFS (inter-planetary file system) which hold the actual data. It might be somewhere else, but the trouble is, if the file or its storage goes away then the NFT data is gone only leaving the token pointing to nothing.
This means Ethereum could be doing its thing in a hundred years but the Bored Monkeys or Punks may have long since evaporated in a cloud of bit-decay.
An ordinal is actually stored in a Bitcoin block so while Bitcoin or any of its forks live, the data is there. The only way for it to vanish is for Bitcoin to stop existing and for ever instance of the blockchain to be erased. That is nigh on impossible.
All sorts of things are being stored up to the limit of 4 meg of information but storage is not cheap as it has to be mined into the blockchain. I paid to mine a 25K byte image into Bitcoin and it cost $115, so megabytes are going to cost thousands. The attraction is the fact the ordinal of the art piece I created will never disappear, is quite strong.
If you want to go look its Ordinal 8041535.
When I visited the Miami Blockchain show on the 19th there were 8 million ordinals in existence and 4 days later there a 9 million. Ordinals are exploding.
This is or maybe isn’t great news for Bitcoin.
It has certainly exploded transaction fees.
Here is a chart.
Chart thanks to bitinfocharts.com
Many Bitcoin ‘maxis’ aren’t a fan of this fun stuff. Bitcoin is their digital gold, Bitcoin is for serious economic purposes, not frog pictures, its like taking gold and making trinkets out of it….oh wait!
However the concern is real. If there is huge value in storing things like pictures and text in the Bitcoin Blockchain it will drive up the cost of financial transactions and that seems like a threat. Alternatively, it will drive low value transactions off Bitcoin and onto Layer 2 solutions in the same way Polygon serves that purpose for Ethereum.
Then again Ordinals may be a fad doomed to die out. However that is not going to happen. More likely Ordinals will spark a new wave for Bitcoin where it goes beyond its previous incarnation while still remaining the Layer 0 of all Crypto.
The fact transaction levels have shot up, driving a bonus for miners, mainly of who were struggling untill a sudden flow of Ordinal fees came pouring in, should be enough to prove that Ordinals are a breakthru, not a bain.
Ordinals are another ‘rabbit hole’ to fall down and one I expect to be extremely fruitful and there is a new land grab underway.
Are ordinal’s going to be a huge financial opportunity.
Go ask Alice.