With the industry-renowned Ordinals completing the Jubilee upgrade at Bitcoin block height 824544, Cursed Inscriptions has officially become a swan song.
I have been following Cursed Inscription since May. In this tweet, I try to summarize the past and present of Cursed Inscription. None of the projects mentioned below constitute investment advice, DYOR.
1/ What is a curse inscription?
The birth of the curse inscription was a beautiful misunderstanding, a romance unique to programmers.
In April last year, Casey, the founder of Ordinals, found some bugs in Ordinals, which caused some inscriptions (of various types) to not be indexed. The Ordinals team called these inscriptions "cursed", and in order to avoid conflicts with existing inscription numbers (all positive numbers), the team gave these cursed inscriptions "negative numbers", starting from -1, so cursed inscriptions are also called negative inscriptions.
At that time, Casey listed the types of curse inscriptions:
1) A burning transaction contains multiple inscriptions
2) Inscriptions that are not the first input in a burn transaction
3) Multiple inscriptions exist on one satoshi
4) An unrecognizable opcode was used during burning, such as OP_66
In the Ordinals system, the inscription number is very important. Many NFT projects are valuable because of their high numbers. For example, Sub 10K refers to a collection of inscriptions numbered within 10,000, and the current floor price is as high as 0.0735 BTC. At present, the number of Ordinals inscriptions (including BRC-20) has exceeded 53 million, all of which are positive numbers.
There was another episode. In September last year, Casey wanted to abandon the inscription numbering to reduce development and maintenance costs. But this would undoubtedly erase some narratives related to the inscription numbering, so this proposal was strongly opposed by the community. In the end, Casey compromised and continued with the Ordinals inscription numbering. The tweet at the time: https://twitter.com/_0xSea_/status/1708297030056181984
However, the cursed inscription is a bug after all, so the Ordinals team will definitely fix it at some point in time. If it is not fixed, it will add extra costs to the development and maintenance of Ordinals in the long run.
2/ Repair and upgrade of curse inscriptions
Last November, Casey said that the bug of the curse inscription would be fixed at block height 820512. However, due to some reasons, it was delayed to block height 824544, which is today, and this upgrade was completed, also known as Jubilee.
For this upgrade, the Ordinals team had to check more types of curse inscriptions one by one and repair them, which took a lot of time. In the process, more types of curse inscriptions were discovered and re-sorted, so the numbers of some curse inscriptions would change.
3/ Impact and consequences of repair upgrades
The process of repairing and upgrading is called Bless by the Ordinals team. Simply put, after the bug is fixed and upgraded, the inscriptions that were originally cursed due to various vulnerabilities will be "blessed" and become normal positive inscription numbers. The cursed inscriptions will be out of print.
Inscriptions that have previously been given negative numbers will continue to be negative (cursed) inscriptions.
In this way, negative inscriptions (curse inscriptions) become a limited and scarce edition with a certain hype value.
If the inscription is likened to engraving on banknotes/gold, the curse inscription is like a wrong banknote. When printing, the printing factory may have a malfunction or bug, resulting in the appearance of "error notes", and many people in the private sector collect or speculate on them.
In terms of quantity, there are about 500,000 cursed inscriptions and 800,000 uncommon sats. Cursed inscriptions are even rarer than uncommon sats.
4/ Curse Inscription Token Target
There are some NFT collections of cursed inscriptions, such as Cursed Bitcoin Punks, Cursed Pokemon, etc., which have received considerable attention. There are two main tokens, in chronological order, -crsd and -tap, both deployed by Benny. Let's talk about them separately.
5/ About -crsd
As far as I know, -crsd is the first cursed BRC-20 token with a total supply of 21 million, which will be minted on May 25, 2023. However, since the Ordinals development team has not yet perfected the index, and domo called on the community to lock the ord version to 0.9.0 in October, it has been unable to transfer or trade.
However, a few things that happened recently gave -crsd a glimmer of hope. First, after Ordinals completed the Jubilee upgrade, they should have indexed the types and numbers of all curse inscriptions; second, there have been a lot of discussions about the BRC-20 upgrade recently, and the current conclusion is that Unisat and domo have reached a consensus and will upgrade accordingly, so BRC-20 should also be compatible with curse inscriptions; third, Unisat has mentioned in a tweet that they will support curse inscriptions, source: https://twitter.com/unisat_wallet/status/1739632188617015543
But overall, -crsd cannot be transferred at present, and there is no transaction price and market value information.
6/ About -tap
-tap is the leader of the Curse Inscription token. The total supply is also 21 million, and minting will be completed on August 7, 2023. I wrote a long article on August 10, which can be reviewed at: https://twitter.com/_0xSea_/status/1689560490907680768
Now that 5 months have passed, I would like to take this opportunity to update the fundamentals of this project:
1) -tap is a cursed inscription token based on Ordinals, but it is not part of BRC-20. -tap has had a relatively active community consensus basis, circulation and price in the past five months. The current OTC and exchange prices are between 1.25-1.5, and the market value is less than 30 million US dollars.
2) In addition to the attributes of the Curse Inscription token, -tap is also the first token of Tap Protocol (BRC-20 Improved Protocol), which is earlier than $tap. Tap Protocol has completed a financing of 4.2 million US dollars, with the participation of many institutions, and will airdrop $tap tokens to -tap holders.
The NAT project that was very popular some time ago was also issued based on Tap Protocol. However, the infrastructure of Tap Protocol is still relatively poor and lacks a native trading platform. Ordinals Wallet already supports the query and transaction of multiple assets on Tap Protocol.
Currently, -tap has been listed on the centralized exchange SuperEx, and some transactions are also conducted over-the-counter (OTC).
7/ About transfer
Since Ordinals no longer generate curse inscriptions, the previous -tap transfer method is no longer applicable. After actual testing by @shep_eth and I, we can use the new method to transfer. Please refer to his article (which has been updated today): https://paragraph.xyz/@shep/tap-token-ransfer
The past six months have been the outbreak period of Ordinals and BRC-20, and also the embryonic period of Curse Inscriptions. Today’s Jubilee upgrade has given Curse Inscriptions a new lease of life. I believe that in this round of bull market driven by BTC ETF and BTC Inscription Ecosystem, Curse Inscriptions will inevitably appear in the future.
This article is analyzed from: (You can learn from it)
https://twitter.com/_0xSea_/status/1743512063593546052/photo/3
