bitcoin-dev
Purely off-chain coin colouring
Posted on: February 2, 2023 14:30 UTC
In a recent discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Anthony Towns raised the idea of moving inscriptions off-chain in reference to Casey Rodarmor's ordinals, which track the identity of individual satoshis throughout their lifetime.
The FAQ on the Ordinals website rejected the idea, stating that content on IPFS is not guaranteed to continue to be available, and centralized web servers may disappear at any time. However, RGB and Taro already implement an off-chain data model based on Proofmarshal work, which is irrelevant to Ordinals as it will never have such a large market. Towns argues that publishing data on-chain offers a clear benefit to the Ordinals community as the complete set of Ordinals and their inscriptions is easy to extract and will be available as long as Bitcoin block data itself is available. Further discussion of this topic would be a waste of everyone's time, according to Towns. He also criticized advocating for the use of Nostr in a protocol designed to support valuable collectables expected to be owned for a significant amount of time, stating that it has no clear data persistence model and no blockchain to make archiving messages possible.