Inscription first originated on the Bitpoint chain.

BRC-20 is a token standardization protocol established on the Bitcoin ecosystem. Though currently experimental, it has proven to be successful and widely accepted.

The total number of Bitcoins is 21 million, and the smallest unit of Bitcoin is the "satoshi" (sats).

The mechanism of the Bitpoint chain is 1 Bitcoin = 100 million satoshis.

If one Bitcoin is compared to a gold bar, then one satoshi is like one hundred-millionth of a grain of gold.

Initially, Bitcoin could only be used for buying and selling transactions, but the advent of inscription has given it new hype opportunities.

Inscription is defined as a new market for speculation.

Inscription (NFT) stands for Non-Fungible Token. The character for inscription represents engraving, so it’s easy to associate with its function, which is to engrave some text onto Bitpoint. You can inscribe your desired content onto the smallest unit of Bitcoin, the "satoshi." This could be an article, a few words, an image, or even a song. Thus, a group of people artificially created this market, ordinals being a notable example.

However, inscription is a rather cumbersome thing. For each transaction, it must be stripped from the original satoshi and inscribed onto a new one, then transferred in the form of Bitcoin.

BTC Block

As the leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin's block generation is very slow. Everyone knows Binance Chain's block speed is one block every three seconds, and another chain produces two blocks per second. Each transaction is completed within a block, accompanied by block generation.

Bitcoin's block time is typically once every 10 minutes.

This can lead to congestion in the block, akin to a bottleneck. Normally, it would take 10 minutes for a wave of people to pass through, but if the crowd is large, it becomes crowded.

If you are willing to pay more, you can jump the queue. Even with a second for two blocks, you can't pay fast enough.

With the Bitpoint chain, as long as you're willing to pay, you can be at the forefront.

Therefore, their speculation in inscriptions brings heat to the Bitpoint chain, and the biggest beneficiaries are Bitcoin miners. Bitcoin miners mainly provide nodes, receiving Bitcoin as a reward and bribes (extra payment) from increased Bitcoin transaction volumes.

Before the popularity of inscription, a transaction cost 5, but when the inscription market became busy, the cost of a transaction rose to 500. For miners, this is a good thing, and for market manipulators, it's also beneficial as everyone's costs increase, and the transaction fees might be more expensive than the inscriptions themselves.

Inscription Leader Ordi

In inscription, the leader is Ordi, derived from the first four letters of ordinals. It has seen the most increase, with a single piece costing a few to several tens of dollars, then rising to tens of thousands of dollars in a month. This led to the hype around inscriptions, with various types of four-letter inscriptions emerging, and then expanding to domain NFTs and other trinkets, though none reached the level of Ordi.

Such things have low initial costs but are given a great space for speculation by the rise of the inscription market, like Bored Apes and Red Beans.

This set of inscription protocols was initially called BRC20. Due to various reasons, including being outdated, it was upgraded to BRC21, BRC30, BRC1155, adding some features, but overall, it was more of the same. Other chains learned and developed their versions, like LTC2 on Lite Chain, ETH20 on Ethereum Chain, etc., but only ETHs took off.

Summary:

Inscription is roughly like this: simply put, it's about 21 million limited grains of sand. You write something on these grains and then speculate with them. These grains can still be split, with each grain dividable into one hundred million smaller grains.