After 15 years of the Bitcoin Genesis Block, it is a good occasion to remember and reveal the relationship of said block with the Ordinals.

The “First Ordinal” in Bitcoin was already in the Genesis Block

Although conceived as a peer-to-peer (P2P) electronic cash network, even before the first transaction was made on the network, Bitcoin’s first known use case was the registration of a newspaper headline.

This inscription was not properly an Ordinal inscription, that is, a Bitcoin NFT, since it was not based on the numbering and classification of satoshis according to the theory created by Casey Rodarmor. However, this first “recording” on the network by Satoshi and the use of it as a data storage system is a fundamental precedent for what would come later.

Satoshi Nakamoto introduced that message in Block Zero or Bitcoin Genesis. As reported by CriptoNoticias, the sentence is an exact reproduction of the headline of edition 69,523 of the English newspaper The Times , published on January 3, 2009. Said first block, from which the network’s accounting record began, only contained the coinbase transaction, with which the first 50 BTC in history, considered mythical according to the Theory of Ordinals, are created.

One of the features of Ordinals , the numbering system for tracking and transferring individual satoshis, is that it allows the registration of arbitrary data directly on the Bitcoin network. 

In the present context, “arbitrary data” does not mean dull, useless, or unimportant information (although Ordinals’ detractors understand it as such). Leaving aside the issue of the social value given to these tokens, “arbitrary” in this context means that the registration in a satoshi, the minimum unit of bitcoin (BTC), can be done in various formats: text, video, audio, code, image and GIF, as long as it is encrypted in hexadecimal format, as happened in the Genesis Block.

Satoshi knew the power of recording information in Bitcoin

Ordinals have different properties than NFTs that circulate on other chains such as Ethereum or BSC, which use smart contracts or are hosted on external servers. This causes traditional NFTs to be deleted and/or censored.

Ordinals, on the other hand, are recorded directly in the Bitcoin ledger. As long as the Bitcoin network exists, registrations will exist, hosted  in the nodes of the network. Their registration in Bitcoin makes them uncensorable.

Elaborate and well-thought-out arguments can be shared, for and against, the Ordinals: that they allow the creation of immutable collector’s goods that do not depend on fallible third-party servers and are prone to extinction or vulnerable to theft; that congest Bitcoin and make monetary transactions more expensive, making the network unviable; that have no intrinsic value nor exist or have use in real life; which are vital for the future of the network since they will finance the activity of the miners when the last Satoshi is mined.  

Whatever position is taken, there is no doubt that Satoshi Nakamoto , the founder of bitcoin, used the possibilities of the infrastructure he built to bequeath, through a slightly arcane message, a philosophical guideline to posterity; That founding act demonstrates that the virgin Bitcoin protocol already had latent properties for more than just hosting money, and that the Ordinals phenomenon is nothing more than development energy channeled through channels that, although hidden, were open and waiting to be identified and explored.