Verbiage

Within the Ordinals and broader Bitcoin space, colloquial terms have emerged that may sound a bit daunting to newcomers. In reality, many of these phrases are less scary than they sound and most even have analogs to phrases we've come to know on Ethereum and other chains.

These include:

• Digital Artifact: Generally analogous to what we call non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on other chains, with some nuanced differences. You can read more about what make a digiital artifact a digital artifact here.

• Sat: Short-hand for "satoshi", the smallest unit of Bitcoin. Sats are inscribed and associated with arbitrary data called inscriptions.

• Inscribe: Analogous to "mint." Inscribing means to put data on-chain and associate it to a specific satoshi.

• Inscription: The data being put on-chain and associated with a specific satoshi.

• Ordinals: Refers to the numbering scheme by which individual satoshis are indexed and tracked. The term ordinal/s is often used interchangeably with the term inscription.

• Inscription Number: A number assigned to every inscription in the order it was created chronologically relative to other inscriptions. The first ever inscription is #0, the second is #1, then #2, and so on in perpetuity.

• Inscription ID: A 64-character long hex string often appended with i0 (e.g. 6fb976ab49dcec017f1e201e84395983204ae1a7c2abf7ced0a85d692e442799i0) that acts as a unique identifier for every inscription.

• Recursion: A way of accessing the contents of other inscriptions along with a set of endpoints for accessing other inscription or chain-level data.

• Reinscription: Inscribing on a satoshi that already has an inscription.

• Parent-Child: A scheme for establishing on-chain provenance. The most common use of parent-child is for defining what inscriptions make up a collection.

• UTXO: Acronym for Unspent Transaction Output, which are transaction outputs that can be used as inputs to new transactions. UTXOs are a core building block of what make Bitcoin tick and why data is able to be inscribed on the atomic unit of Bitcoin (sats).

• PSBT: Acronym for Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions. PSBTs are a method by which multiple parties can collaborate on a single Bitcoin transaction.