Thread by Leonidas.og

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1/ Why I just spent 3.25 BTC (45 ETH) to acquire these 2 alien and 6 ape punks on Bitcoin.

(and why I’m excited about ordinals)

🧵
2/ To put it simply, I’ve fallen in love with the ordinals protocol. It’s elegant, opinionated, and strives to bring digital objects to Bitcoin in a way that honors its ethos and values. I got to meet the founder back in September and am so proud of him.
3/ For those who don’t know, every Bitcoin can be subdivided into 100,000,000 satoshis. Recently, @rodarmor found a way to associate a unique number with every satoshi so that they can be individually tracked and transferred.
4/ Then he took it a step further by developing a method for inscribing arbitrary data onto a satoshi. When you put all of this together it means that you can store any content that you want directly on Bitcoin and then transfer it to others.
5/ Want your art on Bitcoin? Just inscribe the JPEG.

What about a song? Just inscribe the MP3.

A website? Just inscribe the HTML.

A video game? No problem, somebody already inscribed a fully functional game of Doom which you can play here: ordinals.com/inscription/521f8eccffa4c41a3a7728dd012ea5a4a02feed81f41159231251ecf1e5c79dai0
6/ So far there are ~38,000 inscriptions and this number has been roughly doubling every day for the past week. However, interacting with the ordinals protocol is currently cumbersome as you need to run a full Bitcoin node and have minor technical skills.
7/ But this is changing quickly, which is part of the reason why I’m so excited about the future of ordinals. An organic ecosystem is forming and IMO it is inevitable that the infrastructure needed to onboard several orders of magnitude more people will get built out.
8/ Explorers, collections, inscription tools, wallets with a GUI (currently only has a CLI), and trustless marketplaces with a GUI (currently all trades are OTC) are all actively being developed.
9/ This brings me to the Bitcoin Punks. As a Historical NFT collector, my thesis is that value will accrue asymmetrically to the collections that are early. I’m not interested because they are punks (they could be anything) rather I care because they are low number inscriptions.
10/ Bitcoin Punks are 10,000 of the first 34,400 ordinal inscriptions. As a collector, this narrative resonates strongly with me.
11/ My theory is that the more successful the ordinals protocol becomes, the more inscriptions there will be and thus the more rare and desirable the earliest inscribed collections will become.
12/ I think some people are missing the point by paying attention to the art/collection. In the future, quality will matter a lot more, just like it does for Ethereum, however, the ordinals market is currently predicated on low inscriptions having long-term collectible value.
13/ I believe that collectors will value the permanence of having art backed up forever to the Bitcoin blockchain, and think the high-end cryptoart market will eventually come to value what the Bitcoin brand adds to a collection but for now it’s all about low inscription numbers.
14/ So the TLDR is: I’m very optimistic about the future of the ordinals protocol and these rare assets from an early collection are my way of placing a bet on that optimistic future playing out.
15/ If you would like to learn more I would recommend checking out the documentation on: ordinals.com
16/ Be super careful if you are doing OTC ordinal trades. Ideally use a trusted escrow. And if ordinals don't click with you then just don't buy into all of the fomo. If you're going to collect/inscribe do it because you DYOR and believe in the future of the protocol.
17/ Lastly, I have no affiliation with the team behind Bitcoin Punks. I saw it late last night when it was at 800 mints, thought their crowdsourced free mint technique was clever and tweeted it out. I didn't mint any myself bc the tool crashed but am happy to now be a holder.
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