They are a simple version of coins that are minted on Bitcoin specifically using OP_Returns.
They are not designed to have any technical advantages, sidestepping problems with crypto marketing. Instead, they are named assets that are great for gambling.
Shorter token "rune" names become available as time goes on.
I don't think it "tries" to explain anything. It reads more like an advertisement than a documentation. I see no difference between that and a 100 NFT campaigns on Shithereum.
@lloyddunne summed it up nicely in a comment to me yesterday.
Ordinals are an opt in way of viewing individual units of Bitcoin, by assigning them certain rarities. Inscriptions are the NFTs on Bitcoin. Runes is the fungible token protocol on top of Bitcoin.
I mean, people used to collect banknotes with interesting serial numbers. Isn't that essentially the same?
If so, you can't "assign" a rarity; a sat's rarity is in the eye of the beholder. Someone might look for sats whose "serial numbers" are divisible by a high power of 10, others by a high power of 2, or 42.
Under this interpretation this means that a VAST majority of ordinals are unremarkable and worthless ("not worth more than the sat they're printed on").
Ordinals themselves are not a scam. It's just a protocol of simply assigning a number to every sat ever produced. In that regard, there can only be one, for example, sat #10000000000, and that makes it "rare", within that protocol.
What is a "scam", or more accurately false advertising, is claiming that it's the ONLY "true" way of numbering sats, the only one that gives them value.
One could devise a number of variations of this protocol which would assign different numbers to the same sats, making different sats "rare" (maybe a better word is "attractive") under different systems.
No, that's not a scam, it's entirely possible. That's why Ordinals is a protocol, a well-defined way of doing things. Just because you don't need it or like it, doesn't make it any less "meaningful".
Sats are produced in a predictable manner, you can assign a number to each sat produced. Then you need to devise rules that govern what how these assignments follow when coins are split and merged later.
What I'm pointing out that there can be many different ways of doing this, with different rules. So the question is, what (if anything) makes Ordinals the "best" way of numbering sats (other than being the first way)? The answer is, the advertising and publicity built around it.
It's possible inasmuch as selling lunar plots is also possible. There's also many different ways of partitioning the moon and sell the plots to credulous people, yet it's clearly still a scam.
Pretending you're able to identify individual units of an integer number is not any different.
I just take issue with calling the protocol itself a scam. It's just an algorithm/technology.
It's like calling a coordinate system of the Moon a scam. It's not, even if multiple coordinate systems can exist. Selling plots based on that coordinate system is the scam.
It's calling them scarce that's the scam, they taking peoples bitcoin for few Sats. 1 Sat = 1 Sat, there are no rare Sats more rare than others in contrast you may endup paying more to use those so called "rare sats"
To reiterate, no one can track and "tell apart" the five number ones that comprise the integer 5 (to pick a random example) like "ordinal theory" claims to do.
Runes are basically a colored coins protocol designed for issuing tokenized assets. They are designed to replace BRC-20 with something more sensible. They are UTXO based, and rely on the OP_RETURN to store the token data (called a runestone). They do not use the ordinal system for anything, but a rune can be tied to an inscription.
Yes. Better Mastercoin/omni.
Very likely will have the same fate but there is important long term mechanics inside runes, plus it doesn't require dev efforts to exist.