Its a
protocol that enforces a separate set of rules that exist outside of what has been coded into the bitcoin core software. Counterparty uses a protocol as well. You can't infer Counterparty NFT transfer just by reading blockchain data with that either. It needs to be decoded with an off-chain
PROTOCOL. So why is that OK with you whereas the Ordinals protocol is not?
We've been over this a dozen times and you refuse to take ten minutes to learn how it actually works, thus you will forever be confused. The sad thing is its actually quite simple.
This isn't for you so much as for anybody else who actually cares to understand ordinals:
- The
Ordinals protocol is a special set of rules that exists
outside of the blockchain (same as Counterparty).
- A data inscription is made in the witness space during the transfer of 1000 sats from one address to another (could be a media file or any kind of data).
- The
protocol forever ties one particular sat in the 1000 sat output to the inscription data using
Ordinal Theory.
- Per rules of the
protocol, ownership of the inscription data is passed from address to address along with the sat assigned to it during the initial inscription. This is accomplished via
coin control, aka selecting which input(s) is/are going to be used and for what purpose when making a transaction.
Here's a pretty good analogy:
https://kf106.medium.com/rodamors-bitcoin-ordinals-explained-e0cb775c68ddImagine that every ten minutes an apple farm ships out a canvas bag containing 100 apples. They’ve shipped fifty bags already, so that means that five thousand apples have left the farm. That’s apples 0 through to 4999.
Now they’re preparing bag fifty-one.
They put a hundred apples in a bag, label it [5000..5099], and send it off to the grocery store. We now know that the bag contains apple 5006, say, but we don’t know which of the one hundred apples is apple 5006.
At the grocery store, someone asks for six apples. The grocer takes six apples out of bag fifty-one, puts them in a paper bag, and labels it [5000..5005], and then change the label on bag fifty-one to [5006..5099] so they don’t forget.
Finally, you come into the store and ask for an apple. The grocer takes an apple out of the canvas bag, puts it in a paper bag and writes 5006 on it, and changes the label on bag fifty-one to read [5007..5099]. Then the paper bag with 5006 written on it is handed to you.
Congratulations! You are the owner of apple 5006.
Now imagine the apple farm put a stamp of a picture of a monkey on Apple 5006. Congratulations, you are now the owner of the monkey stamp in addition to the apple.
Now franky1 says that because the apple farm didn't clear the apple monkey stamp rules with him, you are not the legitimate owner of the stamped apple. Yet other people are willing to buy the stamped apple from you who agree it is in your possession regardless of what franky has to say about it.
Unspent transactions
The bag of apples that the previous customer received, and the bag with one apple that you received are called “unspent transaction outputs” in Bitcoin. Your bag with one apple is available for you to spend, if you happen to be living in a country where bags of apples are an accepted form of payment.
And because every transaction is public on the Bitcoin blockchain, we can track down all the unspent transaction outputs, which is something that we cannot do with bags of apples in the real world.
This means that the transparency of the Bitcoin blockchain allows us to know exactly who owns a particular numbered satoshi, even if we do not know which of the satoshis in their unspent transaction collection it is.
Degen #1 pays you $10 for your monkey-stamped apple. He hands you $10 and you give him the apple. Everybody is happy with the exchange, except for franky1 because he still disagrees with the rules made by the apple farm.