Note, this post has been broken into three posts because I feel each is worth taking in and pondering. The game plan for the three parts: (1) review of ordinal inscriptions, (2) recursive ordinals and one I made, (3) unimaginable future possibilities.
An article I recently read in "Magazine" by CoinTelegraph about "recursive inscriptions" on Bitcoin has had me thinking. It's about OnChainMonkeys (OCM), a bunch of NFTs. That alone is nothing new. What they're doing is.
I don't understand it all, especially the not technicals, but something about it urges me to imagine that it just might become something worth paying attention to. I've come to learn that, when something tingles on the back of my neck, it's whispering to me that there's something, something here to pay attention to.
I feel that whisper now.
When there's something that interests me, yet I don't understand it, my tendency is to write about it. The process of writing is my learning and exploring mechanism. So, I'll write here, try to learn about recursive inscriptions and what they may become, and try to convey things as best I can.
What are recursive inscriptions?
Ordinals
Before describing recursive inscriptions (RI), it's worthwhile to revisit what bitcoin inscriptions are. Regular inscriptions, AKA ordinals or ordinal inscriptions are the "old", original ordinals. They actually have only been around a short time, having begun only in January of this year. So, ordinal inscriptions are in fact rather infantile themselves. Both of the terms that they go by accurately describe what's going on:
- ordinals - Refers to an ordered numbering system, a serial number, that is assigned to every satoshi, the smallest bitcoin unit.
- inscriptions - Metadata is written/inscribed onto each now-numbered satoshi, like a message chiseled into stone. This effectively transforms each sat from being fungible (like any other) to being non-fungible (unique), hence, Bitcoin ordinal NFTs.
Ordinals have been gaining traction on bitcoin. For instance, exactly today while I was jogging and listening to a podcast, I heard about how OnChainMonkey (OCM) NFTs will be moving from Ethereum to the Bitcoin blockchain. You can hear what I heard on Laura Shin's "Unchained Podcast" at the 33:58 mark where she asks, "You're now going to be shifiting your entire metagood NFT collection from thereum to Bitcoin, why did you decide to make that shift...?" His answer: "This is the protocol for digital artifacts."
Frankly, I absolutely don't think every NFT collection should be on layer 1 Bitcoin. I'm not sure that OCM belongs there. But, for the sake of secure provenance, I absolutely do believe there is a a place for NFTs on layer 1 Bitcoin.
Case Study
Personally, I've played a small bit with ordinal inscriptions. Particularly, I wanted to put Satoshi Nakamoto's public writings onto the Bitcoin blockchain so that those words would be immutably recorded onto the chain. So, I did that in two ordinals. Ordinal 1,300,549 is simply a text inscription with a link to here which holds links to all of Satoshi's public writings.
That ordinal put a link on the Bitcoin blockchain, but what I wanted was for Satoshi's actual words on chain, not just a link. I've put links on the Bitcoin chain before only to get burnt. In 2015 I suggested the shi symbol ć· as the symbol for the sat. I included a "bitcoinstring" on chain with a Google shortcut link to an IPFS image. My thought was thought the link and image would be around indefinitely...not so. The Google shortcut link http://goo.gl/8vUiGM is now defunct since Google did away with goo.gl. I believe the IPFS image is no longer pinned. Both are gone. Hence, there really was no immutability, aside from the text string that lives on the Bitcoin chain.
Not sure if bitcoinstrings is still alive, but it's kind of a predecessor of ordinal inscriptions.
Side note: I'm thrilled that brianoflondon has currently employed the ć· symbol for sats on his v4v.app tool. If you haven't tried it, do it. It bridges HIVE, HBD, and BTC in a simple, browser-based app.
Fast forward back to today...I wanted immutability. So, with ordinal inscriptions now, I attempted to place a simple text inscription on chain with all of Satoshi's words, but it was too big. The file size was just over the limit of the service I was using. So, I settled by zipping the text file (to reduce file size slightly) and added the .zip onto the Bitcoin blockchain as Ordinal 1,302,152. There's nothing to see visually with that ordinal, but the .zip is there and can be downloaded.
Like the ouroboros snake living off its own tail, the words that started bitcoin now live on the Bitcoin blockchain started by those words.
Now, I don't need to worry about Google getting rid of a URL shortening trick. And, I don't need to worry about an IPFS file being unpinned. As long as Bitcoin the blockchain is there, Satoshi's words will be there on that inscription.
Summed, my two ordinal inscriptions exemplify one of the most exciting things about ordinals...they are totally on chain. For instance, my first ordinal (1,300,549) was merely a text link on chain. The actual content, however, was elsewhere. It was off the Bitcoin chain and on the Hive blockchain, on IPFS, and who knows where else? I wanted Satoshi's words on chain, which is why I made the second zipped ordinal (1,302,152). With 1,302,152, those words were truly on chain, truly immutable.
Above describes ordinal inscriptions, but what about recursive inscriptions?
Recursives
"Recursive" means to repeatedly circle back to something else over and again and to achieve a consistent result in doing so. With recursive inscriptions, one inscription calls or links to other inscriptions to piece together and recycle prior code. Prior code snippets in prior inscriptions mean that code doesn't need to be inscribed/uploaded again, just referenced. Amazingly, referencing prior inscriptions is as simple as newly inscribing <code>/content/inscription_ID_number</code>. By recursively using these already-inscribed blocks of code, the size and cost of a new inscription is greatly reduced.
This is good, and this is what I'll discuss and illustrate in part 2.
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