Everyone of us knows that the Ordinal Theory of Casey Rodarmor is a framework that permits to serialize every single satoshi using an ordinal number which it is acquired at issuance (with its coinbase transaction).
It is even known that inscriptions are metadata attached to a specific satoshi.
These two pillars of the ordinals project are the base for "breaking" the fungibility of a satoshi and creating something not-fungible and rare (like the NFTs).
As far as I know they don't change the rules about how sats are transacted between inputs and outputs (in a FIFO/sequential way not in a random way, like the magnetic trace of an old audio cassette).
If this is true, how is it possible to have whatever control (to sell it or hodl it) over your rare satoshi with its rare inscription?
My sats are worth 1 sat each. But if someone is foolish enough to pay me 2 sats for one of my sats, I'll take it.
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Ordinals are Retarded.
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I see it like people who pay more money for rare coins (limited edition or just very old).
I don't think this suddenly makes my EUR coins no longer fungible just because a few people would pay more.
The same holds with sats: You can still buy the same with any sat at any place which accepts bitcoin.
The worst case would be that a counterparty which cares about ordinals gets lucky and receives a rare satoshi which you weren't aware of.
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As long as a single person doesn't think of sats attached to Ordinals as any more valuable then fungibility is not broken.
Ordinals are no different to coinage, you have to take something that already exists, e.g: Gold, and work on top of it to transform it, but that does not change the value of the underlying asset, we have had examples of this in antiquity where people moving from one empire to another found themselves having less purchasing power because their coins didn't have the extra value they were assigned just because they had the face of their king/emperor, for other nations those faces meant nothing so what they had was just regular gold. I can't quote any examples as of now since this is coming from the top of my head and I can't find the exact qoute I'm looking for on Google but my source is Debt: The first 5000 years by David Graeber.
I would say sats and Ordinals are the exact same, pieces of any metal could be shaped into any shape or form to display anything but as long as somebody doesn't know or care about the work put behind the reshaping and its significance, they are just mere pieces of metal.
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Yes, I agree. Good point
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The fungibility of Bitcoin is already broken. Currently, bitcoin is fungible because we generally agree it is.
Today, there are limitations such as coins that are inscriptions or have clear associations with money laundering or terrorism financing.
The only way to fix this is by creating confidential transactions. But when transactions are confidential inflation bugs might go undetected.
Tldr; yes, bitcoin fungibility is broken but possible fixes break bitcoin even more in different ways
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Seems to me that the answer is, yes, ordinals do make sats non-fungible. I have a couple of Bitcoin ordinals, that is to say, I have a couple of sats with inscriptions to them. If I were to drop some sats somewhere, I definitely don't want those ordinal inscription sats to leave my wallet. They're different.
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Clear. Let's say that one day you decide to sell them out (a buyer will make you a very good proposal), how can you be sure that at the end of the transaction these two specific sats will reach the buyer's address? Is this automatically managed by the ordinals software?
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I'm certainly still learning on this, so, I'm not entirely sure. They are in a taproot wallet address. This is where it gets tricky, at least to me and I have homework to do. As I understand, in a "regular" wallet or perhaps Segwit, when you send sats they just send "random" sats. You've got 1000 and you send 10, it just grabs and sends 10. In a taproot wallet you can avoid this, you can say, "Don't send this one sat." Wallet types: https://bitpay.com/blog/crypto-wallet-addresses/ So to try to answer your questions: 1. to ensure it "get's there", I just check a block explorer. 2. I think the Taproot wallet avoids sending the sat you don't want to send. Again, I'm learning though. :)
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Thank you! You gave me an interesting direction of further investigation
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If Picasso were to draw on dollar bills would that undermine the fungibility of dollar bills everywhere?
I'm of the opinion that no. It does not break fungibility at all, it does something that we don't have a good english word to express, and "breaking fungibility" happens to be the closest one. Because it does break fungibility for those that are in the business of collecting and trading dollar bills with drawings on them.