Ordinals and a16
Bitcoin Ordinals have been all the hype lately. The recent Bitcoin upgrade combined complex transactions with simple ones enabling the ability to inscribe. Ordinal Inscriptions, similar to NFTs, are digital assets inscribed on a satoshi, the lowest denomination of a Bitcoin (BTC). Inscribing on satoshis, named after the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto is possible thanks to the Taproot upgrade launched on the Bitcoin network on November 14, 2021.
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are blobs of arbitrary data and associated metadata, the latter of which tells a Bitcoin node how to render said data (is it an image? Text? Something else?). The inscriptions are functionally similar to calldata on Ethereum in that they store read-only data. Due to the quirks of both Tapscript (introduced in Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade) and Segregated Witness, a 2017 Bitcoin upgrade, these inscriptions can theoretically be as large as 4mb (indeed, someone minted a 3.96mb inscription in early February 2023). The inscription data is posted to Bitcoin’s blockchain as part of the witness data – the section of a transaction that stores transaction signatures, and available for decoding back into viewable content by any full archival Bitcoin node that runs the ORD software.
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are individual satoshis (sats), which are currently the smallest Bitcoin denomination (each 1 BTC = 100m satoshis). The term ordinal comes from what creator Casey Rodarmor calls “Ordinals Theory,” the idea that individual satoshis can be labeled and tracked across Bitcoin’s supply (UTXO set). If users opt-in to this methodology, it becomes possible to see when sats have been mined and in what order. Users can even apply different rarity traits to these individual sats based on various criteria (i.e., how long ago they were mined, whether they participated in a famous transaction, etc.). At the time of writing, there are more than 250,000 inscriptions tied to individual satoshis (ordinals), with most of them mined before 2015. While older satoshis are thought by many to be rare, the reality is that Bitcoin’s monetary policy is such that issuance was significantly front-loaded by Satoshi (by the start of 2016, more than 15 million of the currently circulating 19.2m BTC had already been mined).
a16 Article
Unrelated to Ordinals the a16 team recently co-authored an article with our group focused on publishing our project’s mint strategy. A new NFT launch strategy: The wave mint. Click here for the full article. Andreessen Horowitz (also called a16z, legal name AH Capital Management, LLC) is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
Other notable writing about this topic can be seen.
1337 mint phases are a simple idea: timed mint windows for snapshotted wallets from collections we identified in 4/n. ➜ Take wallet snapshots at random times. ➜ Open mint phases at random times. ➜ Keep them open for random times. Viral fun ensues. Click → to read the full thread
five principles: #YOMO, no public, ever, communities first, reward holders and early believers, a chance for everyone to win. Click → to read the full thread
@1337skulls is the first project to elegantly integrate a whole culture of CC0 art into a single package... made by people who are deeply immersed and enmeshed in that culture-free mint, 600+ traits, 30+ NFT projects ref. 0% royalties. No roadmap.
