Ordinals Project Inscribes Largest-Ever File on Bitcoin Network

Bitcoin inscriptions project OrdinalsBot has minted what it says is the largest file ever on the oldest and most valuable blockchain: the last in a collection of 1,500 “Pizza Ninjas.”

It’s part of a phenomenon in the Bitcoin development community known as “four meggers,” which are files that take up an entire block on the network.

They are called four meggers because they are almost 4 megabytes (MB) big (the maximum size of each block of transactions on Bitcoin). Ordinals collectors consider them valuable due to their visibility on the blockchain.

“There’s more than just bragging rights behind wanting to have the largest file on Bitcoin,” said Toby Lewis, co-founder of OrdinalsBot. “Four meggers will be on the Bitcoin blockchain forever and they already hold significant market value.”

Bitcoin inscriptions, similar to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Ethereum, were made possible by the Ordinals protocol. It allows data to be “inscribed” onto individual satoshis, or “sats” (the smallest unit of BTC at 1/100,000,000 of a full bitcoin), making each one unique and potentially valuable.

To build on MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor’s analogy of Bitcoin as real estate in a cyber Manhattan, minting a four-megger is the equivalent of buying an entire skyscraper rather than a single office or apartment.

Almost 4 MB

Pizza Ninja No. 1500 is 3.969429 MB in size and was mined at block 873,893 at 05:57 UTC (00:57 a.m. ET) on Dec. 9 by BTC miner MARA Holdings (MARA).

To be clear, it’s not technically possible to inscribe a file of exactly 4 MB, but the term four meggers is given to files larger than 3.5 MB.

“By the constraints of the blockchain, you’re never going to get a file of exactly 4 MB because there’s always some transactional overhead,” OrdinalsBot’s other co-founder, Brian Laughlan, told CoinDesk in an interview.

“People come to us and say, ‘I want to have the largest file ever inscribed,’ so we look at the current largest and try to squeeze every single byte to beat it,” he said.

This could be compared to track and field events, where athletes attempt to beat the 100-meter world record by 0.01 seconds or the long jump record by a centimeter or two.

The first Runestone, also minted by OrdinalsBot and MARA in February in anticipation of the Runestones airdrop, was the largest file at the time and was subsequently auctioned for 10 BTC ($972,000).

Pizza Ninja #1500

The ninja in question is “Ralf,” a playable character and antagonist in the on-chain Ordinals game Pizza Pets. The file is an interactive app built with HTML and JavaScript, which allows anyone to use it in any digital medium, something which is “nearly possible” to do on Ethereum, according to Pizza Ninjas co-founder Trevor Owens.

“All the data is just raw on-chain, which you can’t do in a smart contract on Ethereum very easily, because it has its own programming language and you can’t just put HTML and JavaScript in there to make an application,” he told CoinDesk.

Ordinals have been a controversial topic among many in the Bitcoin community because of concerns that they clog the network and drive up transaction fees. However, they can also honor the culture and history of the original cryptocurrency. By attaching uniqueness to individual satoshis, developers could draw attention to certain niches of the Bitcoin world, much like putting historical artifacts in a museum.

For example, all of the Pizza Ninjas are inscribed on satoshis from the 10,000 BTC that Laszlo Hanyecz exchanged for two pizzas on May 22, 2010, believed to be the first time anyone used bitcoin to pay for goods.

Pizza Ninja #1500 is inscribed on a “black uncommon pizza sat.” Black uncommon sats are the last satoshis of each individual block. Therefore the black uncommon pizza sat is the last sat of the block on which the pizza transaction was recorded.

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