Original text: "A Brief Analysis of BTC Stamps: The New Trend of Bitcoin NFT"

Author: Azuma

There’s a new trend in the world of Bitcoin NFTs.

A new Bitcoin NFT implementation called BTC Stamps (Bitcoin “stamps”) has been born, and in the first 20 days of its introduction, the number of NFTs minted through this method far exceeded the Ordinals we are already familiar with. Data at the start. (For information on Ordinals, please refer to "Ten Thousand Characters Interpretation of Ordinals: From Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System to NFT Infrastructure, the Paradigm Evolution of Bitcoin Consensus")

Source of group slices: Bitcoin Frontier Fund partner trevor.btc

BTC Stamps was created by anonymous developer Mike In Space!. According to the Github information submitted by him, the implementation mechanism of BTC Stamps is to embed image data in base64 format into the transaction output on the Bitcoin chain, thereby permanently The corresponding image data is saved on the currency chain.

Specifically, the user needs to first encode the binary content of the image into a string in base64 format (the base64 encoding of the image means that the image data can be encoded into a string, and then the string can be used instead of the image address), and then Add the prefix "Stamps:" before the string, and then use the Counterparty protocol to broadcast the entire text content to the Bitcoin chain. The content will be segmented but numbered one by one to facilitate upper-layer applications to reversely decode to the original Image content.

A concept is involved here - the Counterparty protocol. The Counterparty protocol was actually born as early as 2014. “Rare Pepes”, now regarded as the pioneer of NFT (the term NFT did not even exist at the time), has used this protocol. Its characteristic is that it can be used in the blank spaces of Bitcoin data blocks. Write data to embed data into native Bitcoin transactions.

It is worth mentioning that 99% of Counterparty transactions generally use the OP_RETURN data encoding method, but the data embedded based on this method can be "deleted" by the Bitcoin full node, so it is not suitable for the NFT direction that emphasizes permanent storage. . However, in the case of BTC Stamps, due to the uniform length of the base 64 string, the corresponding Counterparty transaction will default to the P2SH type. This type of transaction needs to split the data and embed it into multiple transaction outputs (the larger the content, the larger the content created. The more output), and cannot be "deleted" by the Bitcoin full node, thus achieving permanent storage of image data.

As for the C-side experience of BTC Stamps, there are two points that require special attention.

First, from the perspective of the cost of data uploading, Mike In Space! recommends users to choose the image specification of "24x24 pixels, 8 color depth PNG or GIF" in the Github database, which is also the native resolution of the head project CryptoPunks.

The second is that all BTC Stamps NFT will be numbered according to the transaction timestamp (so the most important thing may not be the image content, but the number). The numbering starts from 0 and will continue indefinitely, but the embedded invalid or unrecognizable Transactions with base64 strings will not be recognized.

Stampchain data shows that as of 1:30 on April 6, Beijing time, 8,220 BTC Stamps NFTs have been minted, and most of the image content is directly copied from the original image of CryptoPunks.

Taken together, BTC Stamps provides a new implementation form for all players interested in Bitcoin NFTs. Compared with Ordinals, there are some obvious differences.

According to the analysis of the Bitcoin ecological development team Trust Machines, the biggest advantage of BTC Stamps compared to Ordinals is that its data storage is based on the simplest transaction output, so Bitcoin full nodes have "no choice" but to choose to save BTC Stamps, while OP_RETURN and "witness data" (the solution adopted by Ordinals) have the possibility of being "deleted" by all nodes.

However, BTC Stamps also have obvious disadvantages compared to Ordinals. The most important point is that the cost of BTC Stamps is higher than that of Ordinals, which also causes BTC Stamps to limit the specifications of the original pictures in order to limit costs; in addition, Ordinals also supports other file types besides pictures, such as text, audio, and video. Even applications, etc., as long as the size does not exceed the 4 MB block limit, which is something that BTC Stamps cannot do for the time being.

The development of Bitcoin NFT is still in its very early stages. Both BTC Stamps and Ordinals are not yet mature enough. Whether the two will ultimately be better or worse, or whether they will move towards different application directions based on different characteristics, will all It has become a key aspect of the future development of Bitcoin NFT. Odaily Planet Daily will also continue to accompany everyone and continue to track the development trends of this segmented track.