Bitcoin NFTs and the Ordinals Protocol have sparked a major debate on Crypto Twitter this past week. The launch of the Ordinals Protocol is highly contested between developers, Bitcoin maxis, and NFT-enthusiasts, with each party voicing their strong opinions. To deeper understand the source of this controversy, we must start from the very beginning.
For nearly a decade, Ethereum has been the go-to blockchain network for building decentralized applications and minting NFTs, while Bitcoin has remained the undisputed Godfather of peer-to-peer financial transactions.
Following Bitcoin’s creation in 2009, blockchain technology captivated the bright minds of developers all over the world. This led Canadian software engineer, Vitalik Buterin to propose a new platform in 2013, called Ethereum, which would provide a decentralized environment to facilitate online transactions (A.K.A Web 3.0).
Ethereum was engineered to create a platform that would enable developers to construct decentralized applications (Dapps) and smart contracts. With the Ethereum blockchain, NFTs were able to be widely distributed and traded on the network. NFTs, which are short for “non-fungible tokens”, are cryptographic tokens that can represent a unique piece of digital content stored on the blockchain. These characteristics made Ethereum much more flexible and versatile compared to Bitcoin, which is mostly limited to financial transactions.
Thirty years ago, prior to the existence of cryptocurrencies, Hal Finney (early Bitcoin pioneer), had already discovered cryptographic methods to facilitate the sale of digital assets, which he referred to as “crypto trading cards”. He believed that they would be the key to bringing Bitcoin to the mainstream population.