Sprinkled in between the Zora/Base debacle this week was a substantial amount of bickering both within the Ordinals community and cross-chain about Ordinals as a medium. The bickering isn’t exactly new. But this latest flavor of it highlights how little there is to show for all the effort and money poured into making “Bitcoin season 2” a force to be reckoned with. Below I’ll try to explain why I say that and why, despite the noise, I have continued interest in Ordinals:
The Ordinals community remains small, an ironic fact given the status of Bitcoin itself. It’s so small that for most of its lifespan, it has been more akin to an amorphous blob of opinions and interests rather than distinct groups of participants. Everyone has their hands in everything.
And that makes sense! The Ordinals community is composed of Bitcoiners who fundamentally believe in the chain over the quality of life and ease of use you could have on smart chains. Yet it’s hard to grow a community when doing so means new entrants who may not have those same ideals endure a categorically worse UX given inherent design aspects of Bitcoin. You can try your best to abstract those quirks away with infrastructure and tooling but the reality of Bitcoin being Bitcoin remains: most people just want to own BTC and call it a day.
While small, it’s those beliefs held by Bitcoiners that make Ordinals such a distinct community from the rest of the crypto art space. The collectors, creators, builders, and traders on Bitcoin have little overlap with or interest in what’s going on elsewhere in crypto. You see collectors and artists from other chains dabbling in Bitcoin affairs from time to time but you almost never see it the other way around. A large portion of Bitcoiners truly believe that all other chains are testnets that will eventually cease to exist and that blockchain culture will return en masse to be rebuilt on Bitcoin.
Say what you will about this belief. It’s not one I personally hold but I think it’s important to keep this dynamic in mind when you want to understand the “why” of Ordinals for many. This nuance gets lost when you see the mantra get co-opted by people who claim to hold these beliefs but clearly don’t and appropriate them for self-serving purposes.
You see these beliefs represented in the tech too. Ordinals as a protocol are a square peg in a round hole because they have to be. They’re janky because they have to be, as are every accompanying standard and meta-protocol that has followed them. They allow for interesting experimentation and conceptual approaches but simply as a standard for most things, smart chains will always have them beat in practice. But you’ll never hear a Bitcoiner say this because it’s on Bitcoin, which means it has to be better.
It’s that last sentence where so many of these disagreements come from. Rather than looking at Ordinals as an approach that has its own pros and cons, it’s treated as the end-all solution to onchain art and provenance. Again, say what you want about this belief but it is what it is.
Being Early
One of the worst mistakes you can make in this space is thinking you’re early to something that’s already happened. You see this mindset parroted in the Ordinals community endlessly: “we’re early, give it time.” It becomes a source of mass complacency in what’s being built, or lack thereof.
Bitcoiners who may not have experienced the proliferation of onchain culture pre-Ordinals because of these hardened beliefs started from square one. Narratives that have come and gone over the years played out once again to this new audience.
Even while the protocol was new, carbon copies of pre-Ordinals trends played out again as if they were still a question mark. This includes everything from artist royalty debates and p5.js tutorial art to insider WLs and music NFTs. Early inscriptions were heralded as “historic,” while projects flooded the space in an all-too-familiar oversupply. Anyone who experienced 2021 knew how all of these things would end and now Ordinals collectors do too.
Realistically speaking, the only thing I can think of that the Ordinals community is early to is the Ordinals protocol itself. Computer art has existed for ~half a century and onchain art on Bitcoin has been explored for over a decade now. Yet listening to much of the Ordinals community discussions would have you think both of these ideas first appeared with Ordinals.
In that sense, I find that the “we’re early” narrative echoed throughout the Ordinals community is the other way around. They’re not early to digital culture, digital culture is just early to them.
Take low inscription numbers, the sequential number given to every inscription relative to when it was inscribed, as a case study. Low inscription numbers, primarily sub-10,000 (the first 10,000 inscriptions) are valued at a hefty premium by a sizable portion of the community simply because they were the first inscriptions placed on Bitcoin using the Ordinals protocol.
But what exactly makes them early?
If the game-changing aspect of Ordinals is that asset/work data is stored on-chain on Bitcoin by default, how can we ignore the onchain works on Bitcoin that preceded them? I remain surprised about how little of the community know about or care for pre-Ordinals on-chain works on Bitcoin if the value really is in being “early”. Low inscription numbers feel more reminiscent of the NFT archaeology meta that came and went on Ethereum rather than something unique or special about Ordinals.
But I digress. You can apply the above reasoning to just about every other narrative we’ve seen emerge in the Ordinals space in the context of past crypto and non-crypto digital art trends. All this to say: thinking you’re early is easy when you have no frame of reference and no interest in looking beyond your own bubble.
Looking at these trends repeat themselves makes one feel like its a market wholly focused on primary (hype/accessibility) rather than secondary (collecting). Even most of the supposed high brow art collectives are still dealing in commentary and works that would be written off by the rest of the digital art space, yet get eaten up by Bitcoiners.
This is what happens when what’s produced is dictated by the collectors rather than the creators. There are exceptions but releases generally are geared toward the uniformity of current Ordinals participants and less so their respective intent. This is why you see the same strategies (larger supplies, collabs, tiered WL, etc.) applied to “successful” releases regardless of if it’s art or PFPs or tokens or whatever else.
All of this is to say it doesn’t matter how early you are if no one has the wherewithal to push for change. Only by nature of the dwindling market activity are participants finally waking up to realize far too many suspect people, projects, and mechanics were allowed to prosper. We’ll see how it plays out as time goes on.
Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
People not involved in the Ordinals space might be reading this and are thinking it makes the prospect of looking into Bitcoin sound even less interesting. If Bitcoiners want to stick to Bitcoin, why should we give up what we have on smart chains and we can just let them do their thing?
To some extent, it’s a question I still ask myself even as someone who has spent the past 2 years collecting and building on Bitcoin while still being actively involved on other chains.
Much like most things in life, it comes back to tradeoffs. Ordinals are not the end-all solution to onchain art and provenance, but they do offer a new perspective. That underlying jankiness is the result of a systematically different approach to how you consider onchain objects.
In fact, it abstracts away the notion of these objects to begin with: rather than being distinct assets, they’re units of the base currency (BTC) that a label is slapped on and data is associated with. Your artwork, shitcoins, and everything else are just small units of BTC (satoshis) under the hood.
One way I’ve found it easy to explain this difference in design is that NFTs on smart chains are onchain pointers to off-chain data while Ordinals are off-chain pointers to onchain data. That statement of course does a major disservice to onchain and runtime art communities on smart chains, but for most works, it gets the point across. I say Ordinals are off-chain pointers because Bitcoin itself does not recognize satoshi indexing, data associated with satoshis, or really anything else that relates to Ordinals. They’re merely a layer for imbuing data that is onchain with new meaning.
That’s it.
While seemingly minor, it’s that difference that provides a vast set of new considerations and constraints when putting work onchain. Some people will find that this approach speaks to them to serve as the basis for all of their work, while others will completely write off the very notion of it.
The most balanced response to this shift is that it’s an additional canvas one can interact and converse with. For most works, you merely are changing how they’re expressed onchain. Some works can live on any chain, some works only make sense within the EVM, and some works only make sense inscribed on Bitcoin.
You could certainly do many things way easier on other chains or L2s, but the past few years of on-chain art on Ethereum has been premised on seeing what you can do within the constraints of the chain. Ordinals, and by extension Bitcoin, present a new set of constraints that I think just from the very notion of Bitcoin being Bitcoin make them worth exploring.
Having a system for tracking and associating arbitrary data with the chain’s atomic unit is novel. From there, many aspects of the Ordinals protocol like recursion and parent-child are just analogs to standards elsewhere, but applied in a Bitcoin-specific context. I think the difference that makes provides interesting artistic and conceptual implications.
There’s a smaller but dedicated community of participants on Bitcoin that understand this dichotomy. Whether it be directly commenting on the design principles of Bitcoin/Ordinals or battling the technical limits of this new medium, some of the most compelling crypto art of the past 2 years has been expressed with little regard for the broader noise.