NFTs in Pop Culture: 'The Simpsons' vs. Elon Musk, and Bitcoin & Litecoin's Ordinals Revolution

In the past week, both "The Simpsons" and Elon Musk sparked conversations about NFTs. In a recent episode, "S35 E5 Treehouse of Horror XXXIV," "The Simpsons" dedicated the entire show to the world of NFTs, delivering a hilarious take on the subject. In a comical twist, Homer turned Bart into an NFT, and Marge embarked on a rescue mission in the whimsical "block train." The comedic highlight came when Homer transformed himself into an NFT valued at around $100 million, only to witness it plummet to zero.

On a separate note, Elon Musk joined the Joe Rogan podcast last week, delving into the intricacies of NFTs. Musk touched on the fact that NFTs on Ethereum employ URL pointers rather than directly storing data on the blockchain. "you should at least encode the JPEG in the blockchain" - Elon Musk

In contrast, Bitcoin and Litecoin stand out by preserving the actual file data on their respective blockchains. This practice has an inherent advantage, as these operate on decentralized global networks that facilitate easy data retrieval. Notably, Litecoin boasts an impressive track record as the longest-running blockchain with 100% uptime, consistently processing transactions for over 12 years, with an average block time of just 2.5 minutes, 4x faster than Bitcoin.

Early this year, both Bitcoin and Litecoin developers introduced an innovative concept known as "ordinals," which generated significant interest on both networks. Remarkably, Litecoin temporarily outpaced Bitcoin in the creation of new addresses during this period as users were racing to inscribe early artifacts and mint tokens such as BRC20 and LTC20.

So, what exactly are Bitcoin ordinals? In essence, they function like serial numbers assigned to units of Bitcoin, known as "sats," the smallest denomination of the cryptocurrency. These ordinals enable the attachment of data, including text, images, audio, or digital artifacts, to individual sats through "inscriptions." The storage capacity for these inscriptions is up to 400kb per inscription or 4MB when working with a Bitcoin miner. This combination of ordinals and inscriptions gives rise to Bitcoin artifacts, akin to digital collectibles, reminiscent of trading cards.

The interest in Bitcoin ordinals has been such that even Fidelity has published an informative article on the topic. To delve deeper into this concept, you can explore the article on Fidelity's website here: https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/bitcoin-ordinals

Not to be outdone, Litecoin developers successfully implemented the Bitcoin ordinals code, introducing "Litecoin L' Ordinals." As a result, Litecoin now possesses the capability to store data on its blockchain. Litecoin offers some advantages over Bitcoin, including faster transaction speeds, increased capacity, and significantly lower network fees as litecoin has more block throughput. Furthermore, setting up a Litecoin node to inscribe is considerably quicker than running a Bitcoin node from scratch, making it an ideal network for creating, developing, and building upon.

Another easy place to get started inscribing on Litecoin is at Litescribe.io and offers a web3 wallet (litescribe chrome extension wallet) that supports litecoin L' Ordinals now. If you want a Litecoin ordinals wallet on your mobile (iOS and Android) you can download stack wallet to view and receive your litecoin ordinals. The stack wallet creator was recently on the 84 million podcast and he discusses privacy such as Litecoin MWEB and litecoin ordinals.