The Bitcoin community currently finds itself in a civil war over, well, Bitcoin NFTs.
Also known as Ordinals or inscriptions, modern Bitcoin NFTs burst onto the scene in January 2023 when Casey Rodarmor introduced the Ordinals protocol, which allows inscribing media onto individual satoshis.
Since then, collections like NodeMonkes and Bitcoin Puppets have become popular atop this paradigm, in turn generating more demand for Bitcoin blockspace and more revenue for miners.
For some, this onchain frontier has catalyzed a new, welcomed wave of creative experiments on the OG chain and reinvigorated hopes that Bitcoin's dwindling security budget problem can be solved at the market level.
Yet for others—the hardliner purists—Bitcoin NFTs are hailed as spam that clog the network. They maintain that Bitcoin should be a ledger for financial transactions, not a storage medium.
Long story short, tensions have been flaring across these battle lines lately, leading to lots of debate on what the future of Bitcoin should look like.
On the one hand, the creatives and pragmatists want Bitcoin development to lean into innovation, like reenabling the OP_CAT opcode to allow for more complex programmability and pave the way for truly trustless Bitcoin L2s.
On the other hand, the hardliners want Bitcoin to ossify the way it is now to entrench its reigning digital gold status and prevent further developments that are friendly to Ordinals on the L1.
To me, the irony is that the pragmatic path here could satisfy both sides, at least as far as Bitcoin NFTs are concerned.
Consider OP_CAT. Returning this opcode, which Satoshi himself originally introduced, would allow L2s like Starknet to natively settle on Bitcoin, axing the need for trusted bridges.
For example, this sort of tech would unlock directly bridging Ordinals from Bitcoin to Starknet and vice versa:
To start, you'd send an inscription-bearing sat to an OP_CAT covenant.
The covenant would then commit the relevant info, after which a STARK prover on the Starknet side would record the lock and generate a proof.
A Starknet smart contract would verify the proof and mint a 1/1 ERC-721 NFT that represents the locked inscription, after which the NFT could be freely used and traded on Starknet.
To move back to Bitcoin, there would a process to burn the ERC-721 that generates a new STARK proof.
With the proof supplied to the original covenant, OP_CAT would be used to validate the message and release the inscription on Bitcoin.
That's the gist as I understand it. So what am I getting at?
By opening the door to this sort of scaling, the affordability and UX strides would catalyze a lot of Bitcoin NFT activity to migrate from the L1 to L2s.
This migration would decongest Bitcoin, tamp down on state bloat, and allow the mainnet to stay focused on financial transactions. Conversely, Ordinals would become cheaper, faster, and easier to use, all while still being entirely rooted in Bitcoin and inheriting its security guarantees.
It's not a pipe dream, either. Consider how much NFT activity has moved from Ethereum to L2s in recent years. It's even to the point now that people debate if too much activity has moved over.
So for Bitcoin, everyone can have what they want. Creatives can go nuts with Ordinals on L2s, and hardliners can hoard their sats on the L1 in peace.
Even the security budget would benefit! Imagine one day that many L2s pay to settle their transactions on Bitcoin, offering a boon to miners as the chain's block rewards continue to decline on schedule.
Ultimately, getting to this “have your cake and eat it too” future is a political problem now, not a technical one.
In the meantime, the Bitcoin community can continue exploring other scaling techniques, like BitVM or federated multisig bridges, that don't require OP_CAT. There are other inventive UX workarounds like Asset Runes and Broly, too.
Yet whatever happens, it seems that both sides of the Bitcoin civil war are digging in, so the grand question now is if a détente can arrive anytime soon and what form it would take.
If a breakthrough does come here, Bitcoin can explode into a teeming multi-layer ecosystem where its purists and its pragmatists can both thrive, each on the terrain they prefer. That's a vision worth fighting for, I say.
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