A cryptic message was written on the Bitcoin blockchain on Sunday — and the enigma it holds has bitcoiners scrambling to figure out what it means, if there's a hidden tease about a hot new Ordinals art project.
The message “10,000 sitting side by side” reads in the original 55,365,041. “A single UTXO, intact inside. Born together, cursed at heart. Coded, Bitcoin art. The message was followed by serial numbers 391481082118 – 391481092117.
In cryptocurrency, the Unpaid Transaction Output (UTXO) refers to the amount of that currency, in this case, Bitcoin, that remains after a transaction. Unused funds are used in new transactions.
The cryptic message has left many in the Orthodox community confused by its meaning. The phrases mean that many NFT projects will have 10,000 different images/assets, but for now, Bitcoiners are left to guess and hunt for clues before any real revelation.
“They didn't really give us a lot of information about what the collection was,” Leonides, an NFT historian and casual collector, told Decrypt.
Like the message from the classic movie, “The Shining,” “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” the message scrolls across the text. “Born together, cursed in their hearts” may be a casual reference to the text's “cursed” parent. A search on Ordiscan reveals an inscription that is tied to another or “parent inscription” -471,460, a tower or monument.
While it may sound like the title of a horror movie or a MacGuffin, Cursed Ordinals, also known as Cursed Texts, Ordinal Inscriptions have made them appear in wallets and marketplaces, where they were first ignored. Cursed ordinals, like towers, receive a negative number until resolved.
“The originals don't index the originals; the newer versions do,” Leonides said. “The issue is because of the text numbers, if you have them indexed by the new copies, it changes the old engraved numbers,” he said, explaining that cursing or negative numbering is the solution.
The so-called “Cursed Ritual” is related to another parent text, 53,383,387, which shows a white door under a black arch.
“We did a Jubilee update a week ago,” Leonidas said, “blessing” the edge issues that cause cursed texts. “So now all new inscriptions get a normal positive number and are not cursed” and all previously cursed texts remain “cursed” with negative numbers…
“So the supply of ~470k cursed texts is now locked forever,” he said.
Since the launch of the Ordinals protocol last January, more than 55 million transactions have been recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain, according to Dune's dashboard.
The Secret Message joins other titles including the seminal first-person shooter Doom Clone and, more recently, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) EP. Standard routines have been used to map artifacts and PFP collections on-chain, as well as deploy funnel tokens on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's popularity has opened up payments on the main blockchain, similar to NFTs found on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. Fees for a single bitcoin transaction reached $37.43 in December, according to Bitinfocharts.
Edited by Andrew Hayward.
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