Beyond Runes: How Much Do You Know About These BTC Ecosystem Terms? (I)

In the recent Bitcoin halving event of 2024, the Runes protocol notably stole the spotlight. Buyers offered extraordinarily high gas fees to aggressively purchase BTC inscribed under the Runes protocol, enabling miners to achieve historically impressive earnings despite the coin price stagnating and blockchain rewards halving. Many people began to delve deeper into the Bitcoin ecosystem from this point. Moving forward, BITMARS will launch a column for our miner friends to introduce important terms in the BTC ecosystem, helping everyone understand the BTC ecology and the current happenings, to better strategize for the future.

1.Satoshis
The smallest unit of Bitcoin, with 1 Bitcoin equaling 100,000,000 satoshis. Due to the potentially high value of Bitcoin, satoshis provide a smaller currency unit that enables microtransactions.

2.Rare Satoshis
Rare Satoshis is not an official term within the Bitcoin network but emerged after the creation of Ordinals, associated with specific block times in Bitcoin that hold collectible value. The constituent unit of Bitcoin is the satoshi, and each Bitcoin is composed of one hundred million satoshis. The scarcity and uniqueness of a satoshi can be determined by ordinal theorists, whether it’s a Bitcoin mined by Satoshi Nakamoto, the first satoshi of a particular block, or a satoshi used to buy pizza.

3.Ordinals
The Ordinals protocol focuses on minting NFTs on Bitcoin’s smallest unit—satoshi, leveraging Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade. This allows each satoshi to represent a unique digital asset. Ordinals utilize the inherent features of the Bitcoin blockchain, enabling each satoshi to uniquely represent a digital asset, bringing Ethereum-like NFT functionalities to the Bitcoin network without any additional layers or tokens.

4.Casey Rodarmor
Casey Rodarmor is a programmer and Bitcoin developer, and the creator of the Ordinals and Runes protocols. By developing the Ordinals protocol, Casey introduced a new way to store and transmit non-monetary data (such as digital art) directly on the Bitcoin blockchain. Without Casey, the Bitcoin ecosystem as we know it would not exist.

5.Runes
Runes is a new Bitcoin protocol developed by Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Bitcoin Ordinals. Unlike Ordinals, which are used for issuing NFTs, Runes is used for issuing fungible tokens on the Bitcoin network. It allows users to directly create, mint, and transfer tokens within Bitcoin’s UTXO model, independent of any centralized services or intermediaries. Runes have been optimized on the BRC-20 protocol, combining the originally separate minting and listing transactions into a single transaction.

The BTC ecosystem is becoming increasingly diverse and profound. The emergence of new technologies, protocols, and innovations can potentially create new opportunities. Join us next time as we continue to explore “Beyond Runes: How Much Do You Know About These BTC Ecosystem Terms? (II)”.

This concludes the BTC ecosystem terminology section organized by BITMARS for our miner friends. Stay tuned to learn more. BITMARS is a globally renowned crypto miner trading company. We provide comprehensive, professional, timely, and cost-effective mining machine purchasing and hosting services to maximize your profits!