Ordinal numbers will stay here. Ordinal numbers, or the ability to permanently tokenize bitcoins, Blockchains with data, usually in image or JPEG format, are a contentious topic among some members of the Bitcoin and wider crypto communities. That was not the case for the builders and CEOs of bitcoin-focused companies present at the Advancing Bitcoin conference in London.
Throughout the conference, Cointelegraph asked several CEOs, builders, and key opinion leaders their thoughts on serial numbers. The overall mood ranges from curiosity to apathy to respect. River’s CEO, Alex Leishman, told Cointelegraph that he does not currently have a position on ordinal numbers, but recently received one:
"Abstractly, the idea of having this sort of meta layer on top of Bitcoin that tracks Sats; having a single state or mapping onto the blockchain is really fascinating and potentially interesting for other things .” For example, Leishman said he recently played a clone of the classic computer game Doom (called Yet Another Doom Clone) on Ordinal. “Someone embedded Doom in a little webpage with JavaScript and Ordinal,” Leishman said, loading it from the blockchain.
Fedi co-founder and advisor Eric Sirion, maintainer of the open-source protocol Fedimint, told Cointelegraph that he is also “pretty neutral” on Ordinals: "Essentially, we can't do anything about it in a morally consistent way. Like if we try to fight it, what gives us the right to do so? And, we can't fight it effectively. So, yeah, why bother with that?" Sirion added that he's not necessarily a fan of Ordinals, as they might break the blockchain a little bit, but said: "Who am I to tell other people what to do with the fees they pay?"
The Bitcoin blockchain has since "inflated" with average block sizes at an all-time high, but fees have remained more or less consistent. Benoit Mazouk, CEO of UK-based bitcoin exchange BitcoinPoint, shared Sirion’s concerns about blockchain congestion. Mazouk explained that while he is aware of key bitcoin opinion leaders, such as Blockstream CEO Adam Back, who commented that ordinal numbers are “useless,” he “prefers Bitcoin as a currency.”
Perhaps the bigger concern is that users could upload graphic images and offensive data onto the blockchain. Recently, shocking porn was uploaded as a serial number.
Permanence and censorship resistance, however, go both ways: Leishman noted that a permanent record of potentially important or culturally significant events could be permanently etched into a blockchain. "Orderals can finally be composable, and it really is really censorship-resistant content," Leishman commented. Bitcoin Magazine managing director Christian Keroles recently published a culturally themed article on denouncing Roahl Dahl's books, questioning whether minting banned books on the blockchain is worthwhile as a form of preservation.
All in all, the serial number started to change the way Bitcoin advocates use and deal with Bitcoin. Ordinals provide another use case for the Bitcoin network than the first: peer-to-peer cash. Since the introduction of Ordinals, miners have earned more revenue per block, and video game fans can rest assured that Doom games loaded from the Bitcoin blockchain are playable.
