Improving Ordinal Decentralization
Why Bitcoin Burials are just built differently.
GM all!
The first thing you should ask yourself when building something in NFT land is very simple: why am i doing this and how can i make it novel, relevant and unique.
This simple yet powerful mantra has always been our north star from the beginning and guided each decision during the design and development process.
We’ll forgive you if right now you’re thinking “dude it’s just tombstones on the blockchain, tone it down with the hype”; but hopefully by the time you’re done reading this post you’ll have a better understanding of why we think our approach is the right way forward.
The truth is Bitcoin Burials would not have been possible on any chain other than Bitcoin and not just because of the overarching theme but due to the truly groundbreaking properties offered by Ordinal Theory and the Inscription methodology devised by Casey Rodarmor.
Ordinals are distinctly different from your standard NFT fare on Ethereum and other EVM compatible chains. Their stark simplicity and apparent lack of features embodied by the absence of smart contract capabilities is actually what makes them so elegant and functional.
You see, there’s a decomposing corpse that has been stinking up the NFT industry since its birth and is rarely (if ever) addressed because most players definitely do not benefit from bringing it up: most NFTs are not as immutable and decentralized as you probably think they are.
It’s an uncomfortable truth that while previously not widely acknowledged has recently been in the spotlight due to the brazen actions taken by the Goblintown project on ETH that have sparked an intense debate around this thorny issue.
Most NFTs are only exist on chain as code and a token that represent ownership of an asset - be it an image, an art piece, a treasured music sample or something else entirely - that is actually stored off-chain and can in most cases be deleted, altered or tampered with at will by its creator.
Now that is not to say that ALL NFTs are necessarily bad at this as some collections went to extreme lengths to avoid these pitfalls and live up to the decentralization and immutability promises of NFTs and we congratulate them for it.
But for the average collector it’s a very difficult space to navigate and unless you’re a very technically inclined fellow and are able to determine the inner workings of a prospective collection for yourself it can be very difficult to get straight answers and determine which is which.
Ordinals change all this by setting a very clear and universal baseline:
ALL THE ART IS ON CHAIN.PERIOD.NO EXCEPTIONS.NO COMPLEX DUE DILIGENCE REQUIRED.
And yes some purists might put forward the argument that since the underlying binary data for Ordinals is actually stored inside Witness data it could be potentially prunable and not entirely worthy of the term on-chain.
But the fact remains that the permanence, provenance and immutability properties it offers are vastly superior to 99% of offerings on other chains that take advantage of let’s say IPFS or Arweave to store asset data.
If you want to find out more these excellent deep-dives offer a nice primer and we highly recommend giving them a read.
But going back to Burials,in Ordinal land there are no smart contracts, no deployers, no proxy contracts, no Owner functions, no concept of “pauseability” or “metadata lock/freeze functions”.
It’s a world away from the intricate and complex landscape on other chains and one where the average collector has a lot more visibility into exactly how his holdings are stored and preserved.
Until now there was a missing piece to the equation tho, the ever important metadata.
Storing the art on chain is a giant leap forward but then you also want to complete the immutability and decentralization puzzle by ensuring that the data for each piece is also strongly linked to it in a way that is not susceptible to alterations or reliant on a trusted 3rd party - be it the creator or a marketplace - and their infrastructure.
At Bitcoin Burials we have come up with unique and ingenious way to store metadata INSIDE the image itself. Now, we won’t claim we’re geniuses here, as in the end we “just” repurposed a very old and decidedly Web2 standard - EXIF - to embed the metadata inside the asset itself in a way that is easy to parse, display and human readable to boot.
It might look like a small improvement and yet it unleashes a myriad of use cases and strongly enhances our ability to fulfill what is ultimately the raison d'etre for NFTs.
You don’t have to trust us in any way,shape or form, heck you don’t even need to rely on our continued existence.
We can get hacked, we can stop paying bills for critical infrastructure or simply disappear (not that we ever would ofc) and our collector will still be able to fully enjoy the collection for as long as Bitcoin itself keeps ticking along.
Ok, now that we have shed some light on the technical side of things on to the actual collection itself.
The first thing that we set out to achieve was having something that is steeped into Bitcoin lore and that Bitcoiners and OG Cryptonauts would feel an instant connection with.
Paying homage to Bitcoin’s sheer resilience,tenacity and unsurpassed capability to withstand attacks leveled by well funded, resourceful and determined adversaries both on the technological, economics and societal front quickly emerged as a clear theme for us.
Why not make a fun collection celebrating Bitcoin’s supposed imminent death as predicted by journos, pundits, economists, politicians and tech gurus the world over for the past decade and a half?
Thankfully our job to catalogue the countless hit pieces against btc was made immensely easier by the folks over at 99bitcoins.com who over the years have painstakingly curated what is the largest archive of Obituaries predicting Bitcoin’s demise anywhere on the internet.
The dates engraved on each Burial are not left to chance, each one corresponds to a scathing takedown of Bitcoin and the crypto industry as a whole randomly selected from the archive.
Each headstone has an indelible link to a specific piece of Bitcoin’s history and some outlandish claim by a public figure about its impending doom that failed to materialize.
It is incredibly fun going down this rabbit hole and there is something deeply satisfying about reading a Bitcoin obituary made by some self styled expert and doubly so when the original url it points to yields a 404 page not found because their shitty blog or digital publication has long since gone under and disappeared from the web meanwhile we're inscribing their word salads predicting Bitcoin's demise on Bitcoin itself to shame them for all eternity.
We are excited to share our labor of love with you and welcome new frens to our awesome Discord community of like minded individuals on this epic journey to document and rediscover Bitcoin’s history and celebrate its resilience and the countless obstacles it has overcome over the years.
Join us as we swing open the cemetery gates and accompany Bitcoin to his final resting place at https://bitcoinburials.com