The intent of this piece is to describe a complete case for why Relics is a project in a class of its own amongst ordinals.
Reading the ordinal official documentation, you will notice a recurrent theme around the philosophy/vision of ordinals.
They are digital artifacts.
A dedicated section in the docs is devoted to describe what artifacts are and the imagery conjured up in the docs map very well to Relics.
Imagine a physical artifact. A rare coin, say, held safe for untold years in the dark, secret clutch of a Viking hoard, now dug from the earth by your grasping hands. It…
This paints a image of ordinals as vessels of history, carrying the weight of history, uncovered to allow modernity to experience our history.
When we think of artifacts, we think of stunning pieces in museums, highly scarce, highly coveted elements of our past. We argue that while ordinals do not officially endorse a “vision/aesthetic” for collections built with the standard, there is a undertone. We picture this “official collection” to feel like artifacts like those from old humanity capturing history. Who’s history? Bitcoin’s. Relic is Bitcoin history turned into scarce digital artifacts. Ordinals, a bitcoin standard, envisioned to be the best digital artifact standard, is used by relics to create Bitcoin history digital artifacts. There is poetry to that.
The standard almost demands that a project would exist that tokenizes Bitcoin history. Relic is that project. We believe no other project enjoy such opportunity and demand to exist.
Satoshi Relics is “written” into the official ordinal standard. Satoshi Relics is the most faithful project to the ordinal digital artifact vision.
One might argue we are reading into the theme of the standard too much, but there is technical foundations that back Relic as a canonical Ordinals collection.
In the recursive api specification which powers recursive ordinals, there contains a curious data endpoint:
/r/tx/[txid] // returns the hex data of any transaction.
Relic isn’t just a jpeg inscribed onto Bitcoin. It leverages a core, CANONICAL, part of the ordinal specification to access Bitcoin history and create artifacts from it.
This enshrines Relic as a digital artifact project built with the standard, not simply grafted onto it. We can’t simply drop Relic into another token standard.
Why would the ordinal standard hand Bitcoin history to ordinals if not for a Bitcoin history collection to exist? We see this addition of the standard almost “reserved” for our Relic collection to use. This endpoint feels like an assertion that a transaction based collection needs to exist in the ordinal community. Relics exists to fulfill that assertion.
Satoshi Relics is powered by a part of the ordinal standard that makes Bitcoin history accessible. Satoshi Relics manifests the project that this part of the technical standard was designed for.
All ordinals inherit Bitcoin security. All ordinals inherit the scarcity of UTXOs. Beyond that though, scarcity is arbitrary. Why is there X amount of rare attribute PFPs of a collection? Why not more or less? These decisions are made outside of the scope of Bitcoin and entirely arbitrary.
Satoshi Relics is one of few collections that actually inherits all of its rarity and scarcity from Bitcoin. We, the core team have little to say here; this making the scarcity of Relic’s wholly backed by Bitcoin.
Relic works under a very simple rule: 1 tx = 1 relic. This is sensible given transactions are unique and unrepeatable and so Relics must share this quality. This means there will be only ONE relic for every halvening coinbase transaction. Only one for your first Bitcoin transfer. The genesis transaction will only exist as one ordinal.
Our rarity is arbitrated by cryptography, secured by Bitcoin, appraised by culture. Anybody who sees a Relic will not argue against their scarcity. The scarcity of Relic is as fundamental as Bitcoin itself.
We argue that Satoshi Relic is fully “backed” by Bitcoin as a digital artifact, inheriting all of its scarcity from Bitcoin.
The meme of Relic is simple: Bitcoin history should become digital artifacts on Bitcoin. Contextually, this is a very effective meme. One that would resonate with all Bitcoiners.