Recursive inscriptions: Bitcoin ‘supercomputer’ and BTC DeFi coming soon

Published

8 months ago

August 23, 2023

admin

Earlier this year, Ordinals — a unique inscription on the smallest unit of a Bitcoin, called a Satoshi — emerged as a controversial new development. Dismissed by some as spam and embraced by others as a way to bring BRC-20 tokens and NFTs to Bitcoin, the technology stimulated a flurry of developments.

Now there is excitement around “recursive inscriptions,” which is a very confusing yet potentially much more powerful development. Recursive Inscriptions essentially promise to allow more complex functionality to be built on Bitcoin’s blockchain, akin to smart contracts on Ethereum.

Some believe recursive inscriptions could see Ordinals develop from NFTs and “digital artifacts” to underpin a full-blown DeFi ecosystem on Bitcoin very soon. Others are confident it will enable Bitcoin to take on decentralized storage provider IFPS. One person Magazine spoke to believes it will eventually lead to an interconnected supercomputer being built on-chain.

Danny Yang, a Stanford PhD, creator of OCM Dimensions and Bitcoiner since 2013, says recursive inscriptions unlock the next evolution of Bitcoin:

“People won’t believe it when it’s presented to them now. It’s not going to operate exactly like Uniswap, but other high-value digital assets will emerge on Bitcoin. That’s what Ordinals and recursive inscriptions will evolve into. They will become a new form of programmable assets and code.”

These tech developments — while at a very early and speculative stage — are making Bitcoin interesting again. A Bitcoin maxi friend complained to me that I never write about Bitcoin. In truth, there’s been very little new to write about until recently.

“That’s pretty true,” Yang agrees.

85% of on-chain bitcoin transactions in the past 24 hours are ordinals related

EIGHTY FIVE PERCENT

the main usecase of the bitcoin chain is ORDINALS pic.twitter.com/PCZt4if5jf

— Udi Wertheimer (@udiWertheimer) August 20, 2023

Recursive support switched on in June

Yang has worked on recursive inscriptions since February in the form of Bitcoin generative NFT collections OCM Dimensions and OCM Genesis. He inscribed both of those innovative collections on Bitcoin in February (along with compression and 3D programming libraries) before anyone understood the significance of what he had done.

Yet OCM Dimensions was only publicly launched on June 15, the day that recursive inscription support was turned on for Ordinals.com. Yang explains to Magazine:

“You have to show something before people start listening, and finally, after months of beating the drums about the significance of recursive inscriptions on Bitcoin, people are starting to get it after we showed what was possible with OCM Dimensions — the first 3D, high resolution, animated and interactive work on Bitcoin.”

For now, the smart contract-enabled Ethereum blockchain is the home of more developer activity than anywhere else, and it dominates the DeFi sector. Until this year, the idea of building a genuine smart contract — the self-executing code used as building blocks for programmable money ecosystems — was not possible on Bitcoin.

But some now say Ordinals and recursive inscriptions could see a DeFi ecosystem emerge on Bitcoin fairly soon. It’s not going to be easy, though.

Bitcoin Ordinals is a big deal. I’ve been building on Bitcoin for over ten years, and Ordinals is the most significant development in recent years. Don’t get distracted by the monkey JPEGs talk, and do learn why the Ordinals Protocol is important. 👇🧵

— danny huuep (@huuep) June 20, 2023

What are Ordinals and recursive inscriptions?

Ordinals allow you to uniquely identify a satoshi or a sat. A satoshi is 100 millionth of a Bitcoin. Identifying a fractionalized part of a Bitcoin means creating NFTs on Bitcoin or creating a provenance certificate on-chain is now possible. The idea of NFTs on Bitcoin, the most decentralized OG chain, is tantalizing for some.

Recursive Inscriptions are difficult to understand but have heaps of potential. (Pexels)

In January 2023, developer Casey Rodarmor released the Ordinals protocol, creating Bitcoin NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain. Rodarmor found an unintended loophole in the taproot scripts that command lines of Bitcoin code.

The Ordinals’ protocol creator argues that such NFTs are now “complete,” as the token and related images are stored on the Bitcoin blockchain rather than side chains or using off-chain storage systems like most Ethereum NFTs. Digital artifacts on Bitcoin are truly immutable.

“Now you can own the actual art, not just a contract that points at a piece of art stored on centralized databases,” says Carlo Fox, an “Ordinals OG” since February who created the Nakamoto Whales series. NFTs, as we know them on Ethereum and on other chains, are more like digital ownership certificates than actual on-chain art, and Ordinals change that.

“I got super excited for Ordinals for a few reasons: for one, we now can create and own on-chain art that is truly immutable. When you understand the ramifications of this, it’s huge. Half the time, NFTs as we know them are stored on AWS, centralized, and controlled by creators who can turn your art into pictures of turds at any time.”

Ordinals allow you to store any type of data on the most decentralized blockchain, and no one can modify it. “Ordinal artifacts may be most likely of any on-chain data to exist 2,000 years from now. That’s meaningful, and I think it is particularly relevant when in the context of important works of art, literature and science. I believe that Ordinals will become the premiere destination for the most coveted and important on-chain art. It’s akin to carving a statue out of gold,” says Fox.

So the business case for high-value NFTs minted on Bitcoin makes sense. Using the new tech to create cool 3D art for OCM Dimensions helped Yang’s company Metagood sell the idea of launching tokens on Bitcoin Ordinals to Asprey Studios and the Italian car company Bugatti recently.

But OG Ordinals could only hold 4MB of data, and that is one reason why recursive inscriptions have emerged.

Fox launched the Nakamoto Whales Ordinals collection: (Twitter)

Recursive inscriptions = Bitcoin cloud computing

At its most basic recursive inscriptions let you record stuff associated with a particular Bitcoin and enable smart contract-type functionality — Yang says they could have been called programmable inscriptions. By interlinking data through a series of calls (a contract for a sell order, for example), it’s possible to extract that data to run more complex processes anchored on Bitcoin blocks.

This enables recursive inscriptions to function like a distributed data repository, like putting AWS cloud on Bitcoin.

Recursive Inscriptions 101

TL;DR
A recursive inscription calls data from prior inscriptions. Could be an image or some script which massively saves data/fees

Brandon Marshall (@marshallmixing) tweeted about his website that uses recursive inscriptions

Sounds complicated? Nah,… pic.twitter.com/K3j3sBYNrK

— Doggfather (@DoggfatherCrew) June 13, 2023

Composability — getting disparate projects and protocols to work together seamlessly — is an important part of crypto and one of the main reasons behind the exponential growth of the Ethereum DApp ecosystem.

Recursive inscriptions mean that even the most complex data sets, like video files and audio files, could now technically be hosted on Bitcoin. With a one-time cost to inscribe, data could be hosted forever on the most immutable and decentralized network in the world.

Recursive Inscriptions use data inscribed elsewhere on new inscriptions, cutting down on storage requirements. (Pexels)

Inscriptions are like data legos, enabling data to be taken from somewhere else and built upon. In computer science, that’s where the phrase recursive comes from, as recursive inscriptions are a mechanism that extracts data from existing inscriptions and utilizes that data within new inscriptions.

Recursion is a fully on-chain process that uses scripts to combine various other on-chain data sources. These can include image layers, audio, code or other data sources. Individual scripts of code merge these layers together through recursion.

Recursive inscriptions use data inscribed elsewhere on new inscriptions, cutting down on storage requirements.

Fox uses the example of PFP art. Instead of uploading thousands of unique images (which can be prohibitively expensive), you can upload 200 and use scripts to combine them via the fully on-chain recursion process. The possibilities this offers are only just being explored.

This is powerful because recursive inscriptions enable new types of applications that were not possible before it. Applications like on-chain AI couldn’t be done on the base layer of Ethereum, but NewBitcoinCity builder Punk 3700 believes they could now be done on Bitcoin. He’s been playing around with “Perceptrons,” an early on-chain AI experiment on Bitcoin.

He explains that “it wasn’t possible to store the AI neural net models on-chain together with the artworks. So we split the AI models into different inscriptions and compose them at runtime.”

Inscriptions an important development for human freedom?

One of the most fascinating elements of recursive inscriptions is that once the data is on the blockchain once, you can simply refer to it again and again, vastly cutting down storage costs and block space utilization.

“Inscriptions are now reusable,” explains Punk 3700, “You can inscribe a very large code library like p5.js once, and other developers can reference that p5.js library at run time without inscribing it again.”

“This is super exciting because we start seeing a community-driven public infrastructure being built out.” This means more complex inscriptions are being created at a fraction of the cost.

“Essentially, any type of data can be an inscription. The most rudimentary use case combines multiple data sources together, and every piece of it can live on-chain. On-chain data might be able to communicate with each other, and data could be realized over time.”

Fox explains further: “The best way to think of it is anything you can do locally on a computer and have all little pieces live together in different files and work together.”

He gives examples like “open-source libraries, all on-chain,” meaning important research papers on Bitcoin, with citations on recursions on-chain, meaning major discoveries can be published on Bitcoin blocks for time immemorial. Javascript packages can be inscribed on Bitcoin. Essentially, a tiny internet that’s developed to live on Bitcoin can’t be taken down, building and building until one day it has created “an interconnected supercomputer living on Bitcoin.”

The public hasn’t grasped the significance of these developments, says Fox.

The Ordinals Timeline — The Ordinals timeline. (OrdinalsBot)

Politics

The Tories are expecting a pounding at the local elections – but could Labour have the harder job?

Published

1 hour ago

April 28, 2024

admin

The Tories are expecting a pounding at the local elections - but could Labour have the harder job?

Thursday’s local elections have been pencilled in as a day of peril for Rishi Sunak for so long, it’s hard to remember when Tory turbulence – and maybe even a leadership challenge – was not expected after 2 May.

Most council seats up for election were last contested in 2021, the high watermark of Boris Johnson’s political prowess, when the Tories were benefiting from a vaccine bounce.

Since then, the party has plunged in the polls after ploughing through two prime ministerial downfalls.

But in the Politics At Jack And Sam’s podcast, Politico UK editor Jack Blanchard and I explore whether it might be Labour who have the harder job to do if they don’t clean up some of the highest profile races, with Tories winning in long-time Labour areas.

👉 Listen above then tap here to follow Politics at Jack at Sam’s wherever you get your podcasts 👈

Thursday’s local elections see 107 councils, 10 high-profile metro mayors and a parliamentary by-election in Blackpool South.

Unusually, both Tories and Labour are broadly setting their expectations in the same place and, by also studying the work of Sky analyst Professor Michael Thrasher, we’ve been working out what might happen.

They both expect the council elections to see decent Labour seat gains and much bigger Tory losses, with the Tories specifically endorsing Thrasher’s analysis that they could be on course for 500 losses. That’s half the candidates they’re putting up.

It’s worth pointing out that of the 107 councils up, the Conservatives only control 18, so there aren’t many for them to lose outright.

They both say that the metro mayor contests could be the most important races of the night, and they both think it’s fairly likely Ben Houchen will win, meaning the Tories will hold on to the mayoralty of Tees Valley.

Labour deny suggestions they have been pulling resources from the seat, but concede victory will be hard.

West Midlands on a knife edge

Figures in both main parties think the West Midlands metro mayor race is on a knife edge, and that Tory Andy Street will probably win this, but they’re both not sure.

If that happens, it could be down not only to Street’s independent campaign which emphasised differences with Sunak, but also to George Galloway protege the youthful lawyer Akhmed Yakoob who is campaigning on Gaza, splitting the Labour vote.

Labour think they will pick up East Midlands, although while the Tories concur, they hope that their candidate, MP and council leader Ben Bradley, gets at least a decent showing.

Meanwhile, though the new North Yorkshire mayor, which encompasses Rishi Sunak’s seat, will probably go Tory, there are some positive signs for Labour.

I’m told while Labour are hopeful the new North East mayoralty will be taken by Kim McGuinness (who they’re more proud than some candidates), the ex-Labour mayor Jamie Driscoll, who was suspended, is a wild card that could disrupt the party’s efforts.

Both parties expect the Tories to lose the parliamentary seat of Blackpool South.

So what if this is the outcome – as both parties seem to be signalling?

There’s no doubt the results will be bad for the Tories, losing so many foot soldiers. Maybe the odd council.

But one of the biggest consequences in this election cycle is how Tories in parliament respond to this, and what they decide to do about it – if anything.

If they hang on to Tees Valley and/or West Midlands, they can claim some Red Wall success. Even if those candidates had campaigns very independent of Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives.

Rebels are gearing up

The rebels are gearing up with their 100 day “policy blitz” plan – they’ve said that to me – with or probably without Rishi Sunak, but I think they know this might not being the moment they hoped.

If both Street and Houchen win – I don’t think the rebels think there’s a chance letters go in, even though the rebels still think Tories will get annihilated at the general election.

Remember, you need 53 MPs to send letters of no confidence to Sir Graham Brady, and they’ve got two publicly.

Then there’s Labour. Labour will do well objectively, but again, there are sky-high expectations given recent polling.

Labour this year have done a more concerted effort on expectation management than I’ve seen in years ahead of this election, and they’ve told us very plainly that they were going to concentrate in the East Midlands, West Midlands and Tees Valley.

And that the mayors are the best guide to what’s going on.

They add that they’re doing this for the very simple reason there are lots of Parliamentary seats in the same geographical area, so you get double bubble – you’re campaigning for the GE too.

But now they now expect to lose one, maybe two of those races, Tees and West Midlands and there could be a decent Tory share of the vote in a third, the East Midlands.

So that doesn’t feel that great against what they were pointing to a few weeks ago.

Then look at council seats. If they gain net 350 seats – that’s the same improvement as last year, and not necessarily on course for Blair-style wins seen in some polling recently.

And then there will be the National Equivalent Vote, coming at the weekend from Thrasher and Rallings, which takes the local results and projects those voting figures into a nationwide vote estimate.

This had Labour on 30% in 2021, when they didn’t do so well, then 35% in 2022 and 36% last year. Does it go up? By how much?

Labour say they’re sure they will have a good story to tell whatever happens. But oddly, they may have the harder job, which is perhaps why some Labour figures are more jittery than their Tory counterparts.

Let’s see if that remains true in a week.

The full list of metro mayor elections and candidates

Tees Valley: Ben Houchen (Conservative), Chris McEwan (Labour), Simon Thorley (Lib Dems)

West Midlands: Andy Street Conservative, Richard Parker Labour, Sunny Virk Lib Dems, Siobhan Bridget Harper-Nunes Green Party, Elaine Ruth Williams Reform UK, Akhmed Yakoob Independent.

North East: Guy Renner-Thompson Conservative, Kim McGuinness Labour, Aidan King (Lib Dems), Andrew Gray (Green), Paul Donaghy (Reform UK), Jamie Driscoll (Independent)

East Midlands: Ben Bradley (Conservative), Claire Ward (Labour), Helen Tamblyn-Saville (Lib Dems), Frank Adlington-Stringer (Green), Alan Graves (Reform UK), Matt Relf (Independent)

Greater Manchester: Laura Evans (Conservative), Andy Burnham (Labour), Jake Austin (Lib Dems), Hannah Katherine Spencer (Green), Dan Barker (Reform UK), Nick Buckley (Independent)

Liverpool City: Jade Louise Marsden (Conservative), Steve Rotheram (Labour), Rob McAllister-Bell (Lib Dems), Tom Crone (Green), Ian Edward Smith (Independent)

South Yorkshire: Nick Allen (Conservative), Oliver James Coppard (Labour), Hannah Kitching (Lib Dems), Douglas James Preston Johnson (Green), David Bettney (Social Democratic Party)

West Yorkshire: Arnold Eric Craven (Conservative), Tracy Lynn Brabin (Labour), Stewart Golton (Lib Dems), Andrew Varah Cooper (Green), Bob Buxton (Yorkshire Party), Jonathan Richard Tilt (Independent)

York and North Yorkshire: Keane Charles Duncan (Conservative), David Skaith (Labour), Felicity Claire Cunliffe-Lister (Lib Dems), Kevin Foster (Green), Paul Haslam (Independent), Keith Graham Tordoff (Independent)

London: Susan Mary Hall (Conservative), Sadiq Khan (Labour), Rob Blackie (Lib Dems), Zoe Garbett (Green), Howard Cox (Reform UK), Amy Gallagher (Social Democratic Party), Count Binface (Count Binface for Mayor of London), Brian Benedict Rose (London Real Party), Femy Amin (Animal Welfare Party), Nick Scanlon (Britain First), Natalie Denise Campbell (Independent), Tarun Ghulati (Independent), Andreas Christoffi Michli (Independent)