Exclusive Interview with the Founder of Bitcoin NFT Bringing Fun Back to Bitcoin

Bitcoin
Is attempting NFT again.
First came colored coins in 2012, designed to represent all types of non-bitcoin assets on Bitcoin.
Then in 2014 came Counterparty, built as a derivative of Bitcoin, allowing for the creation and trading of digital assets backed by its XCP token. Counterparty is where “Rare Pepes” (NFTs inspired by the Pepe the Frog meme) were born in 2016, long before the Ethereum NFTs we know today.
This time, it’s Ordinal NFTs and Inscriptions, implemented by the Ordinal protocol developed by Casey Rodarmor.


Rodarmor has been working in technology since 2010. He has worked at Google for a while, then briefly at Chaincode Labs, doing some nominal work on Bitcoin Core (the main code implementation of the protocol). After taking over from River Financial founder Alexander Leishman last year, he is now a co-host of the San Francisco SF Bitcoin BitDevs.
Bitcoin BitDevs originated in New York City and is a community that holds monthly meetups to discuss the more technical aspects of Bitcoin. Rodarmor’s leadership position in San Francisco indicates his commitment to testing new Bitcoin ideas. Bitcoin BitDevs is an important part of Bitcoin’s grassroots culture.
He told us in our interview that he is now working full-time on Ordinals. The project now has paid interns (Liam Scalzulli and RaphJaph) and a paid Discord Mod.
Rodarmor is a Bitcoin advocate, and no one can tell him otherwise. He got into Bitcoin because he “hates the government” and belongs to the “sound money camp” when it comes to Bitcoin, as he told the “Stephan Livera” podcast earlier this month. He likes Bitcoin because it is a better non-sovereign currency with predictable, sound monetary policy, not because it can enable NFTs.
Nevertheless, he is now best known for enabling the latest iteration of NFTs on Bitcoin.
Motivation
Rodarmor started researching Ordinals in 2022. In our conversation, his personal assistant Erin and Rodarmor’s podcast co-host for “Hell Money” sat on the couch in the background. As Rodarmor adjusted his camera, I also noticed a trap bar dumbbell to his right.
“Do you lift weights often?” I asked. “Yes!” he responded, but unfortunately, lifting things in his apartment makes too much noise. He added that he thinks he has some “very alluring traps.”
He does. Rodarmor looks more like someone who would be developing software full-time.
He first learned about NFTs in 2017 and was not particularly interested in the digital art being created and traded at the time. He briefly had the idea of building a digital art auction house but let it go. Then came Art Blocks, an influential generative digital art project on Ethereum founded by Erick Calderon. Its new aesthetic caught Rodarmor’s attention.
Rodarmor was inspired to use Solidity to develop smart contracts on Ethereum but became frustrated with Ethereum, describing it as a “Rube Goldberg machine.” He did not like the idea of building NFTs on Ethereum, so he abandoned the idea. Then, in early 2022, he had the idea of NFTs again and wanted to figure out how to implement them on Bitcoin.
When he started researching Ordinals, he told me that his inspiration came directly from Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto referred to something called “ordinals” in the original Bitcoin codebase, and the ordinal theory was born from there. (For the technically inclined or generally interested, check out Jeremy Rubin’s comments on the original Bitcoin codebase.)
Part of Rodarmor’s motivation is to make Bitcoin fun again (as he tweeted earlier this year about Bitcoin NFTs). After all, it’s a bear market. In our interview, he certainly seemed cheerful.
Ordinals are very simple, at least in theory. The Ordinal protocol outlines a method for sequentially numbering satoshis, the smallest unit of Bitcoin representing 1/100,000,000 of a Bitcoin. Once satoshis are given a sequence number, users can engrave data on these satoshis to create digital artifacts, a term Rodarmor prefers over NFTs.
In his view, it’s not because these are not NFTs, but because these NFTs are better. Inscriptions are always immutable: art, text, or any inscription data is directly placed on the blockchain. This is different from most other types of NFTs, which tend to store the actual JPG or text file elsewhere and then place a link to that data on the blockchain. Whether or not you care about NFTs, this is a clear upgrade for NFT immutability.
Backlash
Somehow, this seemingly simple technical update comes with quite a bit of inherent seriousness. Some OGs in the field describe Ordinals as an attack on Bitcoin’s original mission of unfettered financial transactions. Those who support Bitcoin hope that Bitcoin can survive. They also tend to own Bitcoin and want their Bitcoin to be secure. Anything that can be interpreted as a threat to the Bitcoin protocol is a threat to the sovereignty of Bitcoin users and holders.
Thus, Rodarmor finds himself at the center of this season’s Bitcoin crisis.
I asked him how he feels about the criticism he has received.
He thinks “the atmosphere is very good now once you know where your critics are coming from.” He was initially very defensive, but once he started spending time having some one-on-one conversations with more thoughtful, considerate critics, they found a lot of common ground. Rodarmor believes that the Bitcoin community is mostly filled with these thoughtful critics. The “yellers for the sake of yelling” are the minority (despite being loud on Twitter).
Among these thoughtful critics, Rodarmor mentioned conversations with Blockstream’s Warren Togami. Togami, who founded the open-source computer operating system Fedora Linux, has a good understanding of open-source projects.
Togami said that if the Bitcoin community decides that different fee rates should apply to different categories of traffic on the Bitcoin network (read: regular financial Bitcoin transactions versus ordinal NFT Bitcoin transactions), then it’s up to them. As a community project, isn’t it for the Bitcoin people to decide and then run code that can add quality of service information (such as transaction priority)? (There’s a technical tweet thread involving this topic.)
Rodarmor believes this approach won’t work. But he hopes in the long run, this is the type of criticism and discussion that’s beneficial for Bitcoin.
From other vocal Ordinals critics, there are concerns about Ordinal NFTs leading to irreversible chain bloat. As inscriptions lead to large blocks, accumulating a significant amount of data over time, it may become more difficult for new node participants to get started. New node participants are crucial for maintaining Bitcoin as a decentralized, permissionless, and robust monetary network—where those without economic majority can still have a say in how Bitcoin operates.
In theory, Ordinal NFTs might increase transaction fees, which would incentivize miners to continue on after large subsidies end. Block rewards are new Bitcoins rewarded to miners for successfully mining blocks. This is the primary way miners currently receive economic compensation.
Miners help protect the Bitcoin network, so when subsidies disappear, transaction fees may need to increase so that miners do not collectively leave the network.
Projects like Ordinals can improve the economics of Bitcoin, helping to address its increasingly serious security budget problem.
I’m not sure if Ordinal NFTs will solve Bitcoin’s security budget problem. But I asked Rodarmor for his thoughts.
His response? “Let’s answer that with action!”