Ordinals and Inscriptions arrived on Bitcoin in January 2023 and immediately divided the community. Some called it a brilliant use of Bitcoin’s existing capabilities. Others called it spam. Both reactions made sense, which is what made the debate interesting.
To understand Ordinals, you need two building blocks: what a satoshi is, and what SegWit and Taproot made possible.
The two key ideas
Developer Casey Rodarmor proposed a system for giving every individual satoshi a unique serial number based on the order it was mined. The first satoshi ever mined is Ordinal 0. The second is Ordinal 1. And so on, through all 2.1 quadrillion satoshis that will ever exist. This numbering system is applied retroactively — it doesn’t require any change to Bitcoin’s protocol. It’s a convention for tracking and identifying individual sats.
An Inscription is data — an image, a piece of text, a song, a video — embedded into a Bitcoin transaction and attached to a specific satoshi using the Taproot witness data structure (made possible by the SegWit and Taproot upgrades). The data is stored directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, permanently. It cannot be deleted. It cannot be moved to a different chain. It lives on Bitcoin itself.
Together, Ordinals + Inscriptions allow someone to permanently attach a piece of digital content to a specific, uniquely numbered satoshi on the Bitcoin blockchain. That combination is what the community started calling “Bitcoin NFTs,” though many in the Bitcoin space resist that framing.
How it actually works (simply)
When you make a Bitcoin transaction using Taproot, you can include data in the “witness” portion of the transaction. Before Ordinals, this space was used only for cryptographic signatures. Rodarmor realized there was no technical rule preventing other arbitrary data from being stored there instead.
An Inscription transaction stores the content (say, a JPEG image) in that witness space, and associates it with a specific satoshi being spent in that transaction. Once the transaction is confirmed on the blockchain, the data is permanently part of Bitcoin’s history. The satoshi that carries the Inscription can then be tracked and traded like any other satoshi — but with the knowledge that a specific piece of content is attached to it.
What can be inscribed
In practice, people have inscribed images (including the entire first pixel art collection, CryptoPunks, effectively moved to Bitcoin), text, short videos, audio files, and even small games — all stored on-chain. The block size constraints imposed by Taproot’s witness discount mean inscriptions are limited to a few hundred kilobytes, which forced interesting creative constraints on early artists. Violetta Zironi’s decision to inscribe raw, unproduced audio recordings — discussed in the How Bitcoin Unites article — was partly a response to this limitation.
The debate
The case for Ordinals
- Uses Bitcoin’s existing protocol without changes
- Generates transaction fees that support miners post-halving
- Brings artists and new users to Bitcoin
- Demonstrates Bitcoin’s expressive capabilities
- On-chain permanence superior to Ethereum NFTs pointing to external servers
The case against
- Fills block space that could be used for financial transactions
- Drives up fees for ordinary payments during high inscription periods
- Not what Bitcoin was designed for, in the view of many maximalists
- Introduces complexity that may create attack surfaces
- Debases the “digital gold” narrative with speculative culture
The key point is that Ordinals required no change to Bitcoin’s protocol to exist. Rodarmor used existing capabilities. In Bitcoin, if you can do something with the existing rules, nobody can stop you from doing it — and nobody controls the network to prevent it. That is simultaneously the argument for and against Ordinals, depending on your perspective.
Notable inscriptions
A few milestones
As of 2025, tens of millions of Inscriptions exist on the Bitcoin blockchain. The debate about whether they belong there continues. The blockchain, true to its design, records them all equally alongside every financial transaction — indifferent to the argument.
Bitcoin is bigger than any single use case.
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