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Bitcoin Ordinals Two Years On — What Actually Stuck

@blockonomist | 2026-05-12 23:58:44 |

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The January 2023 launch of Bitcoin Ordinals — the protocol enabling inscription of arbitrary data onto individual satoshis — triggered a debate about Bitcoin's purpose that hasn't fully resolved. Two years on, with the initial speculative frenzy past, a clearer picture of what Ordinals actually changed about the Bitcoin ecosystem is emerging.

**[Bitcoin Ordinals Two Years On: Ecosystem, Controversy, and What Actually Stuck](/node/1475)** examines the current state of the Ordinals ecosystem: the inscription count (over 70 million as of early 2025), the fee revenue contribution to miners (significant during peak periods, more modest during quiet ones), the emergence of BRC-20 tokens and their limitations, and the Runes protocol that Casey Rodarmor launched at the April 2024 halving as a more efficient fungible token standard.

The "is this spam?" debate among Bitcoin developers has produced real protocol-level responses — discussions about OP_RETURN limits and witness discount policy. The more interesting longer-term question is whether Ordinals changes Bitcoin miner economics in a way that matters for network security as block subsidy continues to decline. The fee market thesis — that transaction fees must eventually replace subsidy as the primary miner incentive — now has an additional data point that didn't exist before 2023.

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