Changing My Mind on Ordinals

How and why I softened my distaste for Ordinals and Inscriptions over the last year

When Casey Rodarmor brought NFTs to Bitcoin, I was disappointed like many Bitcoin maxis. Didn't he read the white paper? Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, not a distributed database of monkey JPEGs. I even penned a column for Forbes where I made a Chicago School of Economics argument.

That logic went as follows. There are two kinds of transactions on Bitcoin, financial and non-financial transactions (aka NFTs, pun intended). Yet both kinds of transactions settle in one fee market. So if demand from NFTs increases, this will drive up the fees for all Bitcoin transactions, making it more expensive to use Bitcoin for its original intent, namely, transfers of value. So now, while it is possible to store a JPEG on Bitcoin that used to live on Ethereum, it is now harder to move Bitcoin in the developing world, where transaction fees can discourage usage. In economic parlance, NFTs crowd-out financial transactions.

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