so protocol

Bitcoin Ordinals

Casey Rodarmor’s 2023 theory of numbered satoshis, without which Doginals is an orphaned word.

Updated 2026-09-114 min readordinals · bitcoin

Author
Casey Rodarmor
Public software
January 2023
Unit
satoshi
A gold coin under an engraving needle

Ordinals assign each satoshi a serial number from the order it was mined and transferred, then inscribe data onto those sats using Taproot witness envelopes. Rodarmor shipped the practice in January 2023. The culture that followed — profiles as JPEGs, then BRC-20 — is the culture Apezord ported, under constraint, to Dogecoin.

Theory, briefly

Money is fungible until you number it. Numbering does not change consensus. It changes conversation: this sat is the first of a block, that sat carries a punk, those sats were rare because of a palindrome. Doginals inherits the conversation and swaps the noun.

Sources

Primary texts for this chapter. The full index lives on Doginals sources.