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Orange is the new black: Ordinals widening the cultural lens for Bitcoin

Bitcoin was created to change the culture of money. It generated financial capital for many, but lacked cultural capital. Users migrated to alternatives like Ethereum to prove out applications of blockchain for expression and collection, rather than accumulation. They provided hope of mass adoption. Now the old world of Bitcoin is learning from the new world of NFTs; to write history while forging the future. The old world is transitioning to the new. Ordinals are providing a digital record of this evolution in real time. Unlike manuscripts of the past, it is completely immutable.

At the end of January 2023, the Ordinals protocol was launched to the Bitcoin mainnet by Casey Rodarmor. Ordinals enable inscriptions of images, text and other content on individual satoshis. While similar to NFTs as a piece of content posted to a blockchain, a key difference for these digital artifacts is they are permanently on-chain with a unique, sequenced number based on the order of inscription (chronologically from 0 onwards). Each inscription is guaranteed to be a part of history – on the first blockchain in history. The immutability of the content is not reliant on a pointer to a file hosted in external storage.

Ordinals are all about order. Without sequenced satoshis, there’s no inscriptions. It’s fitting that the order of inscription has also proved to be important, with inscription numbers currently being a primary driver of value. These attributes together allow an inscription to transcend the stasis of its content to be at the intersection of culture and time. Early inscriptions are the cave paintings of the digital age. There is a land grab for satoshis, which have exceeded 500k inscriptions in the two months that have passed since launch.

There is often debate surrounding the first for many things regarding Ethereum NFTs as there is no indisputable record that can be easily investigated. Historical knowledge is summarised by publications, blogs and Twitter accounts like @LeonidasNFT. New discoveries lead to revisions. Even CryptoPunks have a V1 despite the V2 being recognised as the first pfp collection. There’s been many NFTs across many chains, continuing to fracture the source of truth. Who can restore content if builders, platforms of choice, or links go down? People can right-click save forever. The latter may not be true for the source. Digital ownership is powerful for online collection and proof of discovery – proof of being there. Ordinals are an elevated response to these different challenges, providing a permanently on-chain, chronological source of truth with time inherent to its design.

Satoshis are the canvas.

Inscriptions are the medium.

Bitcoin is the museum.

We are the creators.