A mysterious message was written on the Bitcoin blockchain on Sunday – and the riddle within it has Bitcoiners eager to figure out its meaning in case there is a hidden tease about an exciting new Ordinals art project.
“10,000 sats, side by side,” reads the message in Ordinals inscription 55.365.041. “A single UTXO, untouched inside. Born together, cursed in heart and soul. Built with code, Bitcoin Art.” The message was followed by a series of numbers 391481082118 – 391481092117.
In cryptocurrency, Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) refers to the amount of that currency, in this case Bitcoin, that remains after a transaction. The unused money is then used for new transactions.
The cryptic message has left many in the Ordinals community perplexed as to its meaning. The wording suggests a potential Ordinals art or profile photo project (PFP), as many NFT projects tend to have 10,000 different unique images/assets, but for now Bitcoiners will have to guess and look for clues before a real reveal happens .
BREAKING: A mysterious message has just been written on an Uncommon Sat, which appears to have ties to an unrevealed 10K collection enrolled 1 hour before the anniversary
Post → https://t.co/LvKQuQsrrG
Older → https://t.co/Sf7vqH5jhf
Kids → https://t.co/BYC78QH0iH pic.twitter.com/SBRYZtiFhW— Ord.io (@ord_io) January 15, 2024
“They haven’t really given us much information about what the collection actually is,” pseudonymous NFT historian and Ordinals collector Leonidas said. Declutter.
Like the message “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” from the classic film “The Shining,” the message scrolls repeatedly through the inscription. “Born together, cursed in heart” is a possible reference to the “cursed” parent Ordinal of the inscription. A search on Ordiscan shows that the inscription is linked to another or ‘parent inscription’, -471.460, depicting a tower or obelisk.
While it may sound like the title or a MacGuffin of a horror movie, Cursed Ordinals, also known as Cursed Inscriptions, refers to Ordinals that the Ord indexer originally overlooked, preventing them from appearing in wallets and marketplaces. Cursed ordinal numbers, like the rook, receive a negative number until resolved.
“The original version of the Ordinals indexer didn’t catch them; the newer versions do,” Leonidas said. “The problem is that when you include the inscription numbers in new versions, the old inscription numbers are rearranged,” he said, explaining that swearing or giving the inscription a negative number was the solution.
The so-called “cursed ordinal number” was linked to another parent inscription, 53,383,387, which showed a white door under a black arch.
“We just had the Jubilee upgrade a week ago which ‘blessed’ the edge cases that cause cursed inscriptions,” Leonidas said. “So now all new inscriptions made in strange ways are given a normal positive number and are not cursed,” explaining that all previously cursed inscriptions remain “cursed” with negative numbers… forever.
“So the stock of approximately 470,000 cursed inscriptions is now blocked forever,” he said.
Since the launch of the Ordinals protocol last January, more than 55 million entries have been minted on the Bitcoin blockchain, according to a Dune data dashboard.
The cryptic message joins other inscriptions, including a clone of the groundbreaking first-person shooter Doom, and more recently a Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulator. Ordinals have also been used to inscribe artworks and PFP collections on-chain, and to create a standard for staking fungible tokens on Bitcoin.
The popularity of the Bitcoin equivalent of the NFTs found on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains has caused fees on the leading blockchain to skyrocket. According to Bitinfocharts, the cost for a single Bitcoin transaction in December was $37.43.
Edited by Andrew Hayward