ELI5: What is Ordinals and how they work?

[a298b112]

So lately Ordinals becoming a hot topic. I don't understand how it works. Can someone please explain like if I am five?

[1715399799]

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[1715399799]

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[1715399799]

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[1miau]

So lately Ordinals becoming a hot topic. I don't understand how it works. Can someone please explain like if I am five?

I believe to get a good understanding of the topic, you can read their website, it's explained very well and to understand the general meaning, we also don't need to be a coder: https://docs.ordinals.com/introduction.html
The most important parts are probably:
Overview Ordinal theory: https://docs.ordinals.com/overview.html
Digital artefacts: https://docs.ordinals.com/digital-artifacts.html
Inscriptions: https://docs.ordinals.com/inscriptions.html

It's a bit text to read but their summary is very decent.

There's also an FAQ for common questions: https://docs.ordinals.com/faq.html
Probably, the FAQ is already answering most of your questions.  


Bitcointalk has also a technical discussion topic about it: NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory

[pooya87]

Forget about the official website and the documentation, it is filled with lies and misinformation.
For example "Individual satoshis can be inscribed with arbitrary content, creating unique Bitcoin-native digital artifacts that can be held in Bitcoin wallets and transferred using Bitcoin transactions." is filled with misinformation. The satoshis are not inscribed, the content is not unique and there is no way to guarantee its uniqueness, you also can not and do no transfer the content itself to anybody when you send coins.

Another way of looking at Ordinals is (to put simply) a brand new scam method to sell tiny amounts of bitcoin to idiots at much higher prices.

• First step is to come up with some arbitrary data which can be anything like byte presentation of a picture and create the Taproot script.
• Second step is to compute the corresponding address of that script and sending some small amount of bitcoin to it (eg. 10000 satoshi)
  
• Third step is to find some idiot who would pay a lot of money to buy 10000 satoshi (of course minus the fee so in reality in the example above they are buying 5920 satoshi) for a lot of money.
• Fourth step is receiving the money and sending them the tiny amount of bitcoin whilst revealing the garbage data you created in step one.

There are no NFTs, no arts, no ownership, ... being transferred here, individual satoshis have no extra value, ... and all the other lies they tell in step 3.
Bottom line is anybody who paid more than $1.28 for the example above is being ripped off while contributing to an attack on Bitcoin. Arguing over UTXOs and how they are involved in this spam attack is pointless in my opinion

[a298b112]

Forget about the official website and the documentation, it is filled with lies and misinformation.
For example "Individual satoshis can be inscribed with arbitrary content, creating unique Bitcoin-native digital artifacts that can be held in Bitcoin wallets and transferred using Bitcoin transactions." is filled with misinformation. The satoshis are not inscribed, the content is not unique and there is no way to guarantee its uniqueness, you also can not and do no transfer the content itself to anybody when you send coins.

Another way of looking at Ordinals is (to put simply) a brand new scam method to sell tiny amounts of bitcoin to idiots at much higher prices.

• First step is to come up with some arbitrary data which can be anything like byte presentation of a picture and create the Taproot script.
• Second step is to compute the corresponding address of that script and sending some small amount of bitcoin to it (eg. 10000 satoshi)
  
• Third step is to find some idiot who would pay a lot of money to buy 10000 satoshi (of course minus the fee so in reality in the example above they are buying 5920 satoshi) for a lot of money.
• Fourth step is receiving the money and sending them the tiny amount of bitcoin whilst revealing the garbage data you created in step one.

There are no NFTs, no arts, no ownership, ... being transferred here, individual satoshis have no extra value, ... and all the other lies they tell in step 3.
Bottom line is anybody who paid more than $1.28 for the example above is being ripped off while contributing to an attack on Bitcoin. Arguing over UTXOs and how they are involved in this spam attack is pointless in my opinion

this!
I also have same questions, but before asking those questions I wanted to understand how Ordinals work in a hope that those questions will be resolved. For example, if a single sat can be inscribed with a artifact, say there is a sat that has mp3 inscribed, where is the mp3 is kept/saved/hosted?

[NeuroticFish]

For example, if a single sat can be inscribed with a artifact, say there is a sat that has mp3 inscribed, where is the mp3 is kept/saved/hosted?

You didn't pay attention to what pooya87 told you. I'll quote it again: "The satoshis are not inscribed"
The data you are asking about is in the Taproot script. And you can have anything there, from byte representation of an image or mp3 to something much shorter, like the link to a website. That data, the Taproot script, is stored in the transaction, hence on the blockchain. You can see that since this ordinals crap has started some of the blocks are even larger than 3 MB.

At least this is how I understand all this.

[DdmrDdmr]

You can also get a pretty good idea of how much Ordinals are bloating the blockchain here:

https://dune.com/ddmrddmr/ordinals-data

Unless I messed up somewhere, the data shows that roughly half of the blocksize is being used up by Ordinals these days, with some blocks on the verge of being solely carrying Ordinals (in terms of their occupied space on the block). Looks like something we could do without ...

[BlackHatCoiner]

Can someone please explain like if I am five?

People want to make money easily somehow, so they come up with ideas that redefine their wealth. Since bitcoins are fungible, some decided to disregard that fact, and begin a sort of campaign where they recognize value in some fractions of bitcoin. It's just like NFTs, with the addition that if people take this shit seriously, it can worsens the currency's fungibility.