Oooo, vv tough question.

This one has hidden meaning: https://ordinals.com/inscription/fb3c060cd4506731c3295311e9bc0e8d8d0d865f72c5175494c9acb31710e3dfi0

This one was the second, and of course it was a dick butt: https://ordinals.com/inscription/26482871f33f1051f450f2da9af275794c0b5f1c61ebf35e4467fb42c2813403i0

This one is a higher res version of a signet inscription, which is appropriate: https://ordinals.com/inscription/22d7fa836a87e0532e9aff8d29a1b0aa872ce45545e55d9d9c73cb4309fc8bc3i0

And this one has a high degree of bang for buck: https://ordinals.com/preview/114c5c87c4d0a7facb2b4bf515a4ad385182c076a5cfcc2982bf2df103ec0fffi0

Impossible to pick a favorite!

Good question! I expect that there will be a lot of overlap. Some existing NFTs are already digital artifacts, namely those that are on-chain and immutable. So I think it'll be more of a question of quality and value vs use-case.

However, inscriptions, unlike NFTs on other chains, are basically as indestructible and decentralized as bitcoin itself. This difference in expected longevity may lead to different use cases. But who knows!

I've never been much of a collector, although inscriptions tempt me more than pokemon cards, so who knows!

One of the reasons why I did this whole thing was so that I could make my own generative art inscriptions. I've made a bit of generative art (a bunch of random examples are on my home page) and as generative art became popular on Ethereum, I looked into making my own Ethereum NFTs. Ultimately, I didn't feel like I could make and sell Ethereum NFTs in good conscious. Everything in that ecosystem is so bad, from the fundamental chain security and decentralization, down to the tooling and NFT standards, so I had to make my own. So I'll definitely be making my own inscriptions and trying to sell them. It'll be fun to transition from working-on-ordinals goblin mode to actually-making-inscriptions goblin mode.

I want to keep everything decentralized, so a lot of business models in the broader NFT ecosystem won't work. Opensea is essentially a custodian. When you sell an NFT on Opensea, it doesn't leave your wallet, but you give them permission on-chain to transfer your NFTs on your behalf, so they can effect sales and transfers. I wouldn't want to introduce that kind of centralization, so I'm going to try to implement decentralized non-custodial offers to buy and sell. (See here for a sketch of how it would work, it's pretty simple.)

I might have some kind of gallery of highlighted inscriptions for sale on ordinals.com, and maybe you could pay via lightning to have your offer higher up, but that's about it.

Yah, pretty expensive. There are two modes to run ord in, one which indexes the sats in every UTXO, and one which doesn't. Everything works in the latter mode, you just can't see specific sat numbers. (But inscriptions work, since that's not dependent on sat numbers, just sat movement.) Building the full index requires ~150 GB of space and 64 GB of ram to do in a reasonable amount of time.

I love the idea of Ordinals as Nostr identifiers, but having to run a bitcoin core node and ord index just to be on Nostr sounds like a hard sell!

All sats have an ordinal number (and a name, and a few other representations), but because inscribing a sat requires a relatively expensive transaction, only a vanishingly small fraction of all sats will ever be inscribed.

You can use the ordinals.com block explorer to search for sats using the differ representations. The twobithits sat is coming in 2025. Relatively soon!

This is a question that I personally wonder about myself, and I'm not much of a collector myself, so I might not be able to give a great answer. I think that community is a big part of it. Collecting things is often very social: You buy and sell from other collectors, and talk online and in real life with other people in the hobby.

So many haters T_T

Let's break down "ordinals r fake and ghey" into more specific criticisms:

As far as utility beyond collectables and art, I'm not sure. So far we really haven't seen real utility in other NFT ecosystems, so I'm leaning towards no. One possibility is organization membership, e.g. your status as a member of an organization can be publicly verified with an inscription you hold.

Due to their longevity, inscriptions become the first digital form of high art, and the most important form of digital art every created.

Inscription content is anything that can be rendered by a browser, so this includes HTML, CSS, and JS. Inscriptions are sandboxed, so it can't access the web, but eventually, inscriptions will be able to access other inscriptions. This leads to a rich and weird ecosystem of on-chain images, code, and markup, and interlocking, recursive inscriptions.

Thousands of years from now sats with specific numbers, names, and other qualities take on mystical significance and become the basis for a new techno-animist religion.

Not if you don't use it, so normal bitcoin transactions are users are unaffected. Everything is designed for public use, however, so if you do use, you do need to keep in mind that inscriptions and inscription transfers are public.

Yup, and in fact it's best to keep you ordinal wallets, which do sat control, and your cardinal wallets, which don't, separate. If you put inscriptions or rare sats into a cardinal wallet, you might lose them, and if you put sats from your main stash into an ordinal wallet and make inscriptions, you'll link your main stash to your inscriptions.

Yah, you could! Should we is a different question ;)

Anyone can decide what sats they consider to be exotic. You could decide you really want a sat mined during block 500,000. Or maybe you really want a sat that was stolen in an exchange hack. I think the "official" rarity tiers are ones that are convenient numbers (the same way that people who collect dollar bills for their serial numbers might want ones with a certain number of zeros).

By the way, there are a few blocks that I want sats from, so I set up a bounty: https://www.rot13maxi.com/ordinal_bounties/first.txt

There certainly are different ways of determining rarity, and I definitely encourage people to come up with their own.

The "official" rarity levels, which are first in block, and first after difficulty adjustment, halving, and conjunction (difficulty adjustment and halving happen on the same bloc), are just suggestions, and I wanted to keep them as simple and objective as possible, so they're all based on things that come from the Bitcoin protocol themselves.

A giant cup of a coffee in a River Financial mug. Shout out to Alex and team 😤

ty ty!

HMP was inspired by Erin going "hey we should make a podcast", and the title was inspired by hell money, which is paper money used in ancestor worship.

Definitely 1846313750000000!

1846313750000000 was the first sat of the block in which it was mined, which makes it uncommon. (Sats after the first are all common.) You can see this in the decimal representation, which is 644102.0. The decimal representation is BLOCK.OFFSET, so anything with a 0 as the second number is uncommon or better.

My strat so far has been to offer bounties for interesting sats. Bounty 3 is still outstanding, but it is very hard.