First Ordinal Inscription

In December, engineer Casey Rodarmor created Inscription 0 of the new Bitcoin protocol Ordinals. Within months, the community had grown significantly, especially as marketplaces like Imagine Art and Generative appeared in 2023. Ordinals reignited an apparently dormant interest in the possibilities of digital ownership—beyond currency—on Bitcoin. This reminds of the previous decade’s earliest NFT ideas, which featured essentially the only options available at the time: Bitcoin and its forks, like Namecoin. Bitcoin’s place in this history was secure before Ordinals, but certainly makes it even more relevant now. The reason: Bitcoin now had its own cultural artifacts, which, like NFTs or artifacts of any kind, varied in quality.