The introduction of Ordinals, an NFT protocol, on the Bitcoin mainnet has the crypto community divided, sparking debate about whether it is good or bad. Ordinals has been created by Casey Rodarmor, a software engineer who officially launched the program. It allows for the Bitcoin version of non-fungible tokens on the Bitcoin network.
However, some argue that the new protocol offers more financial use cases for Bitcoin, while some believe it is shifting away from founder Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer cash system. Dan Held, a Bitcoin bull who was one of those on board with the development, said it would drive demand for block space and fees, and bring about use cases for the top cryptocurrency. He believes that if a user pays a tax fee, it is not spam. Held highlighted that Bitcoin is permissionless and can’t stop anyone from building it anyway.
Some users said these NFT-like structures have taken up block space on the Bitcoin network, and this could potentially drive-up transaction fees. An enthusiast argued that privileged wealthy whites wanting to use JPEGs as status symbols may exclude marginalized people from participating in the Bitcoin network.
Eric Wall, a crypto researcher, believes that Bitcoin’s built-in block size limit would prevent a rise in transaction fees. Adam Back, Blockstream CEO, and Bitcoin core developer is not pleased with the meme culture being brought to Bitcoin. He called out for developers to take the stupidity elsewhere. Back said Bitcoin is designed to be censor resistant and doesn’t stop the community from commenting on the sheer waste and stupidity of an encoding. He urged developers to do something efficient or it is another proof-of-consumption of block-space thingy.
