原文作者： William M. Peaster
原文标题：Bitcoin Ordinals versus NFTs
原文来源：Bankless
编译:Yvonne,火星财经
The optimism surrounding the Ordinals appears to be close to an all-time high.
Currently, three of the top six NFT collectibles by market capitalization exist in Bitcoin form through inscriptions: Runestones, NodeMonkes, and Bitcoin Puppets.
As some of you may know, I've been following and writing about Ordinals since it first came out in January 2023.
From the early days to the present, I have always considered the standard to be one of the most compelling tokenization methods Bitcoin has ever seen. I appreciate that it has opened up new cultural frontiers and become a great new driver of demand for Bitcoin block space.
However, Ordinals aren't perfect. When it comes to immutable digital assets, no one method is perfect. However, as the popularity of Ordinals has skyrocketed, I have recently seen comments that because of Ordinals, "Ethereum NFTs are meaningless".
But in fact, Ordinals has distinct advantages and disadvantages compared to Ethereum NFTs and smart contract chain NFTs. So, what are the technical advantages of both sides? Let's break it down.
First of all, Ordinals currently outperforms other competitors in terms of price, on-chain storage. As you can see from the comparison chart below for Chainleft, they have the highest cost-to-permanence ratio of any NFT method at the moment.
However, ownership of Ordinals is tracked off-chain via indexers – any smart contract chain NFT is more powerful in this regard, such as Ethereum NFTs, Solana NFTs, and more.
Conversely, many smart contract chain NFTs use off-chain storage, but not all. On Ethereum, on-chain storage has become cheaper with new methods, and the use or mix of on-chain and off-chain technologies is largely limited by your imagination, and Solana compressed NFTs are not technically off-chain, which is worth mentioning.
In addition, smart contract chain NFTs are also superior in speed, with transactions settling much faster than Bitcoin, and they are also typically much less expensive to transact, except in the case of massive congestion such as Ethereum.
While recursive inscriptions are a pathologically dynamic pathway, inscriptions are not "state aware" and lack the programmability and expressiveness of an ETH NFT's on-chain runtime.
In particular, this on-chain expressiveness is arguably the most interesting thing about the NFT medium today. Here, the possibilities for "always-on" are endless, and projects like Terraforms wouldn't be as possible without taking advantage of this medium. The lack of this potential is no small disadvantage for the Ordinals.
On the flip side, though, it's safe to assume that there are more NFT attack vectors on smart contract chains, so in general, Ordinals definitely have an edge in terms of risk.
Zooming in, Ethereum NFTs are far ahead of all other ecosystems in terms of tools and use cases. From borrowing NFTfi, to playing JPGs on Nifty Island, to building libraries with Deca or Decentraland, Voxels, and more, you'll get more great build resources anywhere, and you can do more with NFTs anywhere.
Finally, with proof-of-stake, any smart contract chain NFT is more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly than Ordinals. It is estimated that Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, Avalanche, Algorand, Cardano, and Polkadot will collectively emit around 4,935 tons of CO2 in 2023.
Even combined, it accounts for only 0.000014% of global annual emissions, which is much lower than Bitcoin's CO2 emissions over the same time period – this is the reality.
Yes, there are pros and cons to all NFT approaches, and any analysis will prove it, and I like to see more and more multi-chain NFT ecosystems. But what I'm trying to say here is that the claim that Ethereum NFTs are now meaningless compared to Ordinals is grossly overblown.
Ordinals do better in some ways, and smart contract NFTs do better in others, both of which have a place in the crypto economy. Ordinals may be the most talked about in terms of current attention, but overall, smart contract NFTs are still more attractive in terms of technical capabilities.
So, what's the bottom line? Both paths have a bright future, and more creators will weave them together, as Nate Alex did with Natives. In the coming years, we also look forward to further improvements in our infrastructure to improve the overall user experience.