bitcoin-dev
Purely off-chain coin colouring
Posted on: February 2, 2023 14:22 UTC
A proposed Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) suggests creating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) based on tracking the identity of individual satoshis.
A standard for associating some data or right with such an identity is required to create NFTs, which can be transferred by a bitcoin transaction. The "ord" tool defines "inscriptions" to fill this gap providing a way of including mime-encoded data in a taproot witness.However, it is suggested that inscriptions can be moved entirely off-chain, and a protocol can create an asset offchain and associate it with an ordinal. Implementing this approach allows all the "inscription" data to be entirely off-chain, and nothing needs to happen on-chain at all, except transferring ownership to someone else. This makes it cheap to create a new NFT and doesn't impose an outsized overhead on people who aren't interested in your inscriptions.For things that have real intrinsic value, like equity rights in a company or bragging rights for supporting an artist, this seems like a viable approach. The "inscription" approach might still be desirable for broadcasting information that might otherwise be subject to heavy censorship. Presuming that the censoring entity isn't also willing and able to censor bitcoin itself. It's not clear that there are any "rights" to be owned for such a case. Also, claiming ownership of such information would presumably make you a target for the censor.The email discusses the creation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their potential impact on existing tokens. It explains how someone could create an NFT and assign it to the same ordinal/sat as an existing NFT, making it impossible to discard one without discarding both. This is something that can be done through writing a patch to ord and composing a nostr message, but cannot be prevented even if disliked.The email also highlights the advantages of Liquid's multi-asset model for semi-fungible tokens. Instead of acting like a stable coin with a fixed value, a utxo with 1M sats inscribed to represent rights to $1 worth of USDT would be worth $500+0.01BTC, which changes as the value of bitcoin changes.Overall, the email provides insights into the possibilities and limitations of NFTs and compares them to Liquid's multi-asset model for semi-fungible tokens. It also suggests that colored bitcoins are largely unavoidable and something that must be dealt with rather than avoided or prevented. The nostr-nfts-on-btc world still optimizes bitcoin transactions for the same thing - transfer of value. It's just that, in some cases, some sats are valued differently than others - perhaps my uninscribed sats are worth 0.025 cents each, but you have a particular inscribed sat that's worth $100k.