Do Ordinals Make Bitcoin Better or Worse Money? With Rob Hamilton - WBD624

Rob Hamilton is a co-founder and the CEO of AnchorWatch. In
this interview, we discuss ordinals and ordinal inscriptions:
what they are, how they work, what risks and benefits do they
present to Bitcoin, how would we mitigate negative impacts,
and how the rest of the ecosystem is responding.


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Bitcoin’s use cases grow every year. A new version of money.
An international payments rail. A tool to build out stranded
energy, mitigate methane emissions and stabilise energy
grids. And now, a decentralized immutable repository for
images, audio, video and code. Ordinal inscriptions have been
popularised as Bitcoin’s answer to NFTs, but that framing
significantly underplays the opportunities and threats of
this burgeoning functionality.


Ordinal inscriptions have been made possible via a series of
Bitcoin upgrades going back to SegWit, and additional
software, the Ordinal protocol, developed by Bitcoiner Casey
Rodarmor. Rodarmor’s motivation was to make Bitcoin fun. But
it has sparked a fierce debate about the nature and purpose
of Bitcoin. In short, if Bitcoin is the new version of money,
should all other uses that impact this primary use case be
excised?


Philosophically, can a decentralized anarchic system without
a fixed mission statement have rules of use beyond what is
technically possible? Or, does the hard-won trajectory for
Bitcoin that emerged from the blocksize wars set a clear
enough ideology of what Bitcoin is and isn’t? Whilst
technically, what can actually be done to counter the ordinal
impact? Will this require another fork, or are there softer
mitigations? And what will be the cost to the network of such
changes?


The flip side to this debate is the positive impact ordinal
inscriptions are having on Bitcoin transactions. Miners are
at last seeing a use case that is, at last, bringing value to
transaction verification. Whilst it is leading to questions
about the blockchain being bloated is this actually a good
thing in that it accelerates the market determination of true
transaction value on the base layer?


Whatever the outcome will be, such discourse is a natural
consequence of having a decentralized network without any
rulers. Vigorous and healthy debates have galvanised and
strengthened the Bitcoin protocol since its inception. Long
may it continue.