This is an account of a non-technical novice fumbling through the perilous novel landscape of Bitcoin Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens, with the balance scale just slightly tipped towards curiosity than trepidation.

It is May 2023 now. 4 months ago (January 2023), Casey Rodarmor released the Bitcoin ordinals protocol, which allowed people to inscribe data on Satoshis. A Satoshi is the lowest denomination of Bitcoin. 1 Bitcoin is 100 million Satoshis. Inscribed data can be in various forms, eg text, image, video, music. The crypto community started to get curious about these "Bitcoin NFTs". 2 months later (March 2023), Domo introduced BRC-20, a way to create fungible tokens. This was the catalyst that set the market on fire. The Bitcoin community split like Moses split the Red Sea. One side, let's call them the ultra-orthodox OG maxis, were on fire with fury and rage. These mutated, illegitimate Satoshis were clogging up the Bitcoin network, causing transaction fees to skyrocket to infinity and beyond. Torrents of transactions of 1 Satoshi carrying useless monkey jpeg data were obstructing legitimate transactions. The other side, let's call them the reforms, were also on fire - with excitement. For some, Bitcoin Ordinals present a golden ticket to a flip a quick fortune. Some see genuine real world application potential. Whatever it be, the result is a tidal wave of ordinals and then BRC-20 tokens minted.

TODAY (30 May 2023), the number of BITCOIN ORDINAL INSCRIPTIONS BLASTED PAST 10 MILLION.

Ordinals infrastructure is still in its nascent stage. Curiosity kills the cat? There are 21 million ways to lose money while poking around this new landscape. Perhaps you sent BTC to a non taproot address, found yourself a victim of double-spending due to compromised code of your ordinals wallet or just plain ended up a bagholder of BRC20 token that pumped and dumped too quickly before you could take profit.

Haters dismiss ordinals as useless and worthless because they have no smart contract functionality like ERC20 tokens that allows for DeFi applications like staking, lending etc. But hey you know what? Just because Bitcoin ordinals can't be used like the NFTs and tokens on the Ethereum blockchain doesn't render them useless. They just serve a different market. Different Use Cases is not the same as No Use Cases. 

People thought Cryptopunks were useless and worthless too. When Cryptopunks were first released in 2017, the contract's code was so buggy that buyers instead of sellers could withdraw the amount of ETH paid for the that Cryptopunk. For example, if I paid you 1 ETH for your punk, I, not you, get the punk and also the 1 ETH of payment. So, I effectively got it for free! Rinse and repeat on n sellers. Larva Labs, the creator of Cryptopunks, had to re-issue the entire collection, which is the one we see today. The original buggy collection is now known as V1 Punks. Heh. Betcha didn't know. Anyway, my point is that, the floor price of a Cryptopunk NFT is approx $100k today. It was free to mint when it was first introduced just 6 years ago. So hey, to quote from Michael Saylor, "You can criticise, but don't censor". Life surprises and mocks us.

I have joined the party. Thanks to UniSat Wallet's UI that idiot-proofs otherwise daunting code to tech-illiterate people like me, I successfully deployed a BRC20 contract and minted some tokens with relative ease. My token is RKJR, in honour of Robert Kennedy Junior, challenging current POTUS Joe Biden for the position of Democratic Party nominee in next year's U.S. Presidential election (Nov 2024). RKJR made a historic speech at Bitcoin Miami (18-20 May 2023), declaring his support for Bitcoin. In closing, the audience gave a standing ovation to RKJR announcing that he is accepting Bitcoin campaign donations through the Lightning Network. So yeah, that's my BRC20 token, with a total supply of 20242024 tokens and a mint limit of 2024 tokens. Haha! And the entirety of this content is my ordinal (text-form).

The total supply of Bitcoin is hard-capped at 21 million. Each sat used as an ordinal is one sat less that is used for store of value. Isn't that equivalent to effectively cutting the circulating supply? When people hodl sats, they're not using it as currency anymore. The number of Bitcoin available in the market to be used for monetary purposes is cut. I don't know about you, but I vaguely recall my Economics 101 professor say something like "price moves inversely with supply", ie when supply goes down, holding all other factors constant, price must go up.

There are unlimited other uses for ordinals than what we see now. Imagine if country governments inscribe ordinals as population identity.  That immediately uses up millions of Satoshis. How about if ordinals are used for voting, not only for president elections that happen every few years, but even everyday purposes like by school communities, corporations, interest groups. Satoshis can also be used for provenance of luxury goods and I'm pretty sure there are billions of diamonds, bags, cars, property etc that could use up the limited Satoshi. Every day, people invent myriad ways of using ordinals in the most creative ways. Have you seen marriage vows inscribed on an ordinal? It exists.

Inevitably, the Bitcoin network will get even more congested as this plays out. It's not necessarily a bad thing, though. For one, high demand for transaction processing increases mining difficulty, which increases the defense strength of the network against potential hackers. Additionally, market dynamics behooves that demand invites business and along with it, innovation. Without doubt, we'll be seeing new solutions emerge in abundance, perhaps as sidechains, layer 2s or some entirely new invention. That's a thrilling new era for Bitcoin that we can look forward to!

Elon Musk tweeted, "The most entertaining outcome is the most likely". The drama of world events these days, though, have unfolded such that it is rather the most unexpected outcome that is the most likely. Who would have expected FTX to collapse? Further, who would even have any idea that it would resurrect 6 months later as FTX 2.0? How likely is it that the central bank of the world's leading economy raises interest rates non stop in a recession, against all rationale? That congress would have the temerity not merely to lift but to entirely eliminate the debt ceiling? Who would have thought that Tom who was teetering on the edge of getting laid off would have his fortune flipped to wind up as CEO of Waystar Royco and master of Shiv?