How Casey Rodarmor Put Millions of Files on Bitcoin

Every satoshi has a number. That single change is what made it possible to put files on Bitcoin.

I work in the crypto self-custody space, and the question people who have held BTC for years still ask me is whether you can really put files on the chain. Since January 2023 the answer is yes. Provably, on-chain, secured by every block mined on top.

TL;DR

Casey Rodarmor launched Bitcoin Ordinals on January 21, 2023 at block 767,430. The protocol assigns a permanent number to every satoshi, then lets you attach arbitrary data to those satoshis inside Bitcoin's witness field. More than 100 million inscriptions exist as of early 2026 per ordinals explorer aggregators. Runes replaced BRC-20 as the dominant fungible token standard on Bitcoin's base layer, and inscription fees set record miner revenue at the 2024 halving block.

What Casey Rodarmor actually built

Every satoshi has a number. That is the entire idea.

Rodarmor published the Ordinals protocol and launched it on mainnet on January 21, 2023 at block 767,430 (per CoinDesk and CryptoGlobe). The protocol assigns a unique sequential identifier to each of the roughly 2.1 quadrillion satoshis that will ever exist, ordered by when they were mined and tracked as they move through the UTXO model. Satoshi number zero came from the genesis block. Every sat mined since holds its own permanent position in that sequence.

Numbering alone gives collectors of historically significant satoshis something to chase. Pair it with inscriptions and you get something the Bitcoin community had not seen before.

The code lives at github.com/ordinals/ord (the repository moved from github.com/casey/ord after launch). Current lead maintainer is raphjaph.

How inscriptions embed data on Bitcoin

An inscription uses an OP_FALSE OP_IF ... OP_ENDIF envelope inside a Taproot script-path witness. The mechanism is documented at docs.ordinals.com/inscriptions. Arbitrary bytes get wrapped in a witness script that Bitcoin's consensus rules treat as valid but unexecuted. The data goes to chain. Every full node stores it. No pointer, no hash of a remote file. The actual bytes.

Two upgrades made this economically viable. SegWit (2017) introduced witness data with a 75% fee discount per BIP141. Taproot (2021) removed the 10,000-byte script size limit that previously capped witness scripts. The practical file size ceiling now sits near 4 MB, bounded by Bitcoin's block weight limit. Bitcoin Core enforces a lower standardness cap of 400,000 bytes per transaction for relay, though miners can accept larger.

Inscription #0 was created on December 14, 2022 at 20:32 UTC, before mainnet launch, as a pixel-art black-and-white skull image (documented at rareordinals.art). Mainnet inscriptions began with the January 21, 2023 protocol activation.

Permanence is the value proposition. An inscription is not a link that can break. It exists on Bitcoin the way a transaction exists on Bitcoin, secured by proof-of-work, immutable for as long as the network runs.

Bitcoin inscriptions versus Ethereum NFTs

The comparison to Ethereum NFTs comes up immediately. Here is what is actually different.

An Ethereum NFT stores metadata plus an off-chain pointer. The actual image lives on a server or IPFS. If the server goes offline or IPFS pinning lapses, only the token record stays on-chain. A Bitcoin inscription stores every byte inside the transaction. If you want provably permanent, censorship-resistant ownership of a specific artifact, that distinction is the point. Bitcoin inscriptions suit trustless permanent artifacts. Ethereum NFTs suit programmable applications with royalties and composability.

For the broader context see NFTs and Tokens on Bitcoin.

Satoshi rarity tiers

The Ordinals handbook at docs.ordinals.com defines six rarity tiers based on the significance of the block a satoshi came from:

• common: any sat not the first of its block
• uncommon: first sat of each block
• rare: first sat of each difficulty adjustment period
• epic: first sat of each halving epoch
• legendary: first sat of each cycle (alignment of halving and difficulty adjustment)
• mythic: first sat of the genesis block (one exists)

"Vintage satoshis" refers to satoshis from the first 1,000 blocks per the ord handbook. Collectors recognize the category based on age rather than block position. These are community usage terms, not formal handbook tiers. The first known transfer of Bitcoin from Satoshi Nakamoto to Hal Finney happened at Block 170 on January 12, 2009, a 10 BTC transfer. Block 78 is commonly attributed as the first non-Satoshi-mined block. The pizza transaction sits in block 57,043 on May 22, 2010 (10,000 BTC for two pizzas, Laszlo Hanyecz). Those blocks carry premiums among rare satoshi collectors.

For the complete rarity mechanics see satoshi uniqueness and digital ownership.

Recursive inscriptions

On June 12, 2023, recursive inscriptions merged into the ord codebase via PR #2167 at github.com/ordinals/ord. A recursive inscription references content from other inscriptions through a /content/<inscription-id> path. Builders compose on-chain artifacts without duplicating data. A collection can share a base image stored in one inscription rather than copying it across thousands of mints.

BRC-20: the proof-of-concept token standard

Once inscriptions existed, developers tried to build fungible tokens on top of them. On March 9, 2023, pseudonymous developer domo published the BRC-20 specification. BRC-20 uses JSON-formatted inscriptions to deploy, mint, and transfer fungible tokens on Bitcoin's base layer. Deploy, mint, and transfer operations each need a separate inscription transaction.

BRC-20 shipped as experimental and the inefficiency showed. Each transfer required two inscription transactions. The balance accounting depended on off-chain indexers. The pattern flooded the mempool during peak demand. In May 2023 BRC-20 activity drove Bitcoin transaction fees to multi-year highs. The experiment proved something useful: real fee-paying demand existed for fungible tokens on Bitcoin's base layer. Rodarmor took note.

Runes: the UTXO-native successor

On April 20, 2024, the same day as the fourth Bitcoin halving at block 840,000, Rodarmor launched the Runes protocol. The first halving in 2012 cut the block reward from 50 to 25 BTC. The second in 2016 cut it from 25 to 12.5. The third in 2020 cut it from 12.5 to 6.25. The fourth on April 19, 2024 at block 840,000 cut it from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC.

Where BRC-20 encodes token data in inscription witness scripts, Runes encodes token data in the OP_RETURN field of a transaction output. That is a Bitcoin-native approach that works cleanly with the UTXO model and skips the inscription bloat. Basic accounting does not rely on external indexers. Rune tokens get issued ("etched"), minted, and transferred more efficiently than anything BRC-20 offered.

Block 840,000 generated record miner fees. The average transaction fee hit roughly $127.97 per CoinDesk and total block fees set a new record. That is a live demonstration of what demand-driven inscription activity means for miner revenue in a post-subsidy environment.

By 2025 Runes had become the dominant fungible token standard on Bitcoin for new projects. BRC-20 tokens still trade on secondary markets, but new issuance largely moved to Runes over roughly 18 months.

What ordinals mean for miner revenue

Bitcoin's block subsidy halves every four years. Eventually it reaches zero, at which point Bitcoin's security depends entirely on transaction fees. That is one of the biggest open design questions in Bitcoin's long-term economics.

Ordinals and Runes gave the question a partial real-world answer. During peak inscription periods, ordinals activity drove fees to levels that financial transfers alone would not have reached. Block 840,000's record fees were not speculation. They were demonstrated market demand for Bitcoin block space beyond pure value transfer.

Inscription and Runes fee demand also does not correlate directly with BTC price. A collector inscribing an artifact, or a developer launching a Runes token, pays fees regardless of market conditions. That diversification is what Bitcoin's long-term security model needs as the subsidy declines.

Whether this volume holds across multiple halvings is still an open question. The proof-of-concept is on-chain and auditable.

CVE-2023-50428 and Bitcoin Core 30.0

Luke Dashjr submitted CVE-2023-50428, published by NVD on December 9, 2023 with CVSS score 5.3 MEDIUM (availability-only impact, Status: Disputed). The CVE argued that inscription data embedded via the OP_FALSE OP_IF envelope exploited a bug in Bitcoin Core's -datacarriersize filter that was meant to cap non-financial data in transactions.

The dispute in the Bitcoin development community ran deep. The core question: should Bitcoin Core's relay policy filter data that is technically valid by consensus but serves no monetary purpose.

Bitcoin Core 30.0 (verified at bitcoincore.org/releases/30.0) resolved the upstream debate via PR #32359 by Peter Todd, raising the -datacarriersize limit from 83 bytes to 100,000 bytes. The release effectively acknowledged that large data payloads in transactions fall within accepted relay policy. v30.0 is the upstream conclusion to the inscription policy debate that CVE-2023-50428 opened.

For the full governance analysis see CVE-2023-50428.

The 2026 ecosystem

Bitcoin Ordinals inscription count exceeds 100 million as of early 2026 per multiple ordinals explorer aggregators including ordinals.com and ordiscan.com. The initial hype phase of speculative minting and mempool congestion settled into a more selective, fee-constrained market.

Marketplaces where inscriptions and Runes tokens trade: Magic Eden Ordinals (the dominant platform), Gamma.io, OKX, OrdinalsBot, Ordinals Wallet, and Magisat (focused on rare satoshis).

Wallets with native Ordinals and Runes support: Xverse, UniSat, and Leather. These wallets handle the technical complexity of managing inscribed UTXOs correctly and stop inscriptions from being accidentally spent as regular satoshi outputs.

Indexers and explorers provide the infrastructure layer: ordinals.com and ordiscan.com track inscription data, ordinal numbers, and Runes balances across the UTXO set.

Early inscriptions carry collector premiums based on sequence position. Sub-1000 inscriptions sit early in a permanent immutable record. That scarcity is chronological and on-chain, not enforced by artificial supply caps.

The ord CLI remains the reference implementation. Key commands per docs.ordinals.com/guides/wallet.html: ord wallet create, ord wallet receive, and ord wallet inscribe --fee-rate <rate> --file <path>. For the full technical walkthrough see how to create Bitcoin ordinal inscriptions.

What ordinals mean for Bitcoin

The standard Bitcoin narrative says it does one thing well and complexity belongs elsewhere. Ordinals challenged that from inside Bitcoin's own rules.

There was no fork. No protocol change. No new sidechain. Ordinals uses Bitcoin's existing mechanics (the witness field, the UTXO model, the transaction structure) in ways that are entirely valid by consensus rules. Miners accept the transactions. The chain processes them. The protocol takes no position on content.

Ordinals showed that Bitcoin's base layer can support permanent arbitrary data storage with zero modification. Programmability is minimal. No smart contracts, no DeFi primitives. You can permanently write arbitrary data to Bitcoin's ledger, attached to a specific satoshi, secured by proof-of-work, and that primitive turned out to have real market demand.

Critics who call inscriptions spam are not wrong that the data serves no role in Bitcoin's financial security model. But Bitcoin's consensus rules define legitimacy by validity, not by function. Valid transactions that pay sufficient fees belong in a block. Ordinals transactions are valid. That argument has largely settled in the Bitcoin development community, even if the aesthetic debate continues.

Three years after launch, Bitcoin Ordinals is infrastructure. More than 100 million inscriptions sit on-chain. Runes replaced BRC-20 as the functional token standard. Marketplaces run. Wallets support it natively. Miners earn fees from it.

Curious about the OP_FALSE OP_IF debate? CVE-2023-50428 covers the formal challenge to inscription policy and what it reveals about Bitcoin governance.

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Further reading

• docs.ordinals.com: Ordinals handbook and inscription specification
• github.com/ordinals/ord: reference implementation, current maintainer raphjaph
• ordinals.com and ordiscan.com: primary explorers
• rareordinals.art: Inscription #0 documentation
• NVD CVE-2023-50428: published December 9, 2023, CVSS 5.3 MEDIUM, Status Disputed
• bitcoincore.org/releases/30.0: v30.0 release, PR #32359, 100,000-byte datacarriersize
• BIP141: SegWit witness data discount (75% fee weight reduction)
• How to create Bitcoin ordinal inscriptions
• Satoshi uniqueness and digital ownership
• Bitcoin halving explained