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What are Ordinals?
Ordinals is a numbering scheme that gives every satoshi its own serial number, in the order sats were mined, so individual sats can be tracked. Inscriptions attach content such as an image or text to a particular sat and store it on the Bitcoin blockchain, creating collectible items without a separate token or sidechain.
What it means for you
Ordinary Bitcoin wallets do not track which sat is which, so they can spend an inscribed sat as a fee or send it away in a normal payment; the ordinals handbook uses its own sat-aware wallet to keep inscriptions under control. A sat's number or rarity is a convention among people who follow the scheme, not something the Bitcoin protocol recognises.
How it works
Sats are numbered in the order they are mined and pass from a transaction's inputs to its outputs first-in-first-out, so anyone following the convention can say which sat ended up where. An inscription takes two steps: a commit transaction creates a Taproot output committing to a script that holds the content, and a reveal transaction spends it, putting the content on-chain inside a Taproot script-path spend, wrapped in an OP_FALSE OP_IF ... OP_ENDIF envelope. The inscription is made on the first sat of that input. The scheme needs no change to the Bitcoin network.
Sources: Ordinal Theory Handbook: Overview, Ordinal Theory Handbook: Inscriptions, Ordinal Theory Handbook: Introduction · checked 4 October 2026
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