Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

Ordinals are a numbering system for all Satoshi's (small unit of a Bitcoin) on the Bitcoin network. They can be referenced in a few different ways, such as the block.satoshi or just a decimal number. In reality, this gives every satoshi a serial number.

The ordinals themselves can have interesting rarity metrics. There are events that happen on Bitcoin with different rarity metrics. Blocks, difficulty adjustments, halvings, and cycles. This change appears to be an extension on top of the Bitcoin core protocol.

Inscriptions, made of the data after a script, have their own special formatting. First, the OP_FALSE opcode is used to make the script always fail. After that, the data is wrapped in an IF statement that will never execute. The data itself is added via PUSH instructions to create an envelope. With ordinals, ord is pushed first, followed by the content type and data. Different values being pushed, such as 1 for Content Type, signify the data being added on the ordinals.

Inscriptions use the TapRoot script type, which has two transactions: a commit and a reveal. The inscription content is contained within the input of a reveal transaction. The inscription itself it made on the first sat of its input.

The specification appears to have a deploy, mint and transfer for BRC20 tokens. The inscription string being added is minimized JSON. The fields include the type, inscription mark, operation and amount being transferred. Of course, this begs the question - how do we limit the amount of tokens, false transfers and such? I'm still trying to figure this out :)