What are Bitcoin Recursive Inscriptions?

Recursive inions (Recursive inions) is a new type of inscription based on the Ordinals protocol. It was first proposed by Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Ordinals, and was officially updated and incorporated into the Ordinals protocol in June.

**The biggest difference between recursive inscriptions and other BRC inscriptions is its "self-reference" feature, that is, recursive inscriptions can "request" the content of other inscriptions through a special syntax. **

Since this grammar (code) itself is a text type and takes up very little space, the size of the inscription can break through the 4 MB limit of the Bitcoin block, and users can also create inscriptions on the Bitcoin chain at a lower cost , and achieve more complex functions.

At the same time, recursive inscriptions can make inscriptions refer to each other, breaking the previous situation that each inscription is independent and unrelated. Through the combinable feature, it opens up the possibility of free combination between inscriptions.

**How does recursive inscription work? **

In the past, if a 10K PFP project was to be issued, the project party needed to prepare 10,000 image files in advance, and then upload these images to the Bitcoin network one by one by inscription to generate the so-called "inscription".

In this process, in addition to the heavy workload, due to the block capacity limitation of the Bitcoin network, the size of each picture must be limited to a small range to control the cost of inscription, which means that the project party will Had to sacrifice picture quality. Even so, the actual cost of printing such 10,000 pictures is very high.

The **recursive inscription method is to first extract all the features from the Collection for inscription, where each inscription represents each feature in the picture, and then create 10,000 recursive inscriptions, each recursive inscription uses "/content /" code to request the picture on the "characteristic inscription", and finally present the complete picture through programming. **

Element features on Doodles (example)

Take Doodles on Ethereum as an example. Although there are 10,000 Doodles issued, there are actually only 265 element features. Assuming that they are placed on the Bitcoin network, using the method of recursive inscriptions, the project party only needs to inscribe 265 "characteristic inscriptions" , and then by arranging and combining and then requesting content, such a 10K series of pictures can be generated.

Therefore, compared with the direct inscription method, the method adopted by the recursive inscription not only requires fewer pictures to be inscribed, but also occupies much smaller block space (the size of the feature picture is much smaller than the complete picture), and the final project deployment and user The cost of casting is also greatly reduced.

Some people also use "movable type printing" to explain recursive inscriptions. Before printing with movable type, 100 slates were required to print a 100-page book, which was time-consuming and labor-intensive. typesetting and printing, the 100-page book here is the complete picture of the Collection, and the font library is the "feature collection" engraved separately.

In addition, the design idea of the recursive inscription is similar to the Generative BRC-721 (GBRC-721) protocol we mentioned when we introduced the Ordinals family. The difference is that the recursive inscription is more low-level and has a wider range of applications in the future.

Meaning of the recursive inscription

The significance of the emergence of recursive inscriptions is not only to reduce costs and save space, but the greater significance lies in the composability it brings, which will allow the Bitcoin ecosystem to have more possibilities. **

Since the information entered by the recursive inscription itself is text (code), it occupies a very small space, and the requested data can theoretically be infinite, so the pictures generated by the recursive inscription are undoubtedly far more refined than those based on other existing protocols. At the same time, the recursive inscription broke through the 4 MB block limit of Bitcoin, so other large files such as videos, 3D files, games, etc. may also be issued on the Bitcoin network.

In addition, now that composability is achieved, in turn, dismantling the inscription, that is, an operation similar to NFT fragmentation, can also become a reality, which will also greatly enrich the NFT gameplay on the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Moreover, recursive inscriptions can request data from other "file libraries" on the Bitcoin chain through a piece of code, databases can access each other, and Bitcoin will become a "local area network". With the improvement of the composability of inscriptions, domain names will not only be Linking an address, but more things can be mounted, does this mean that a completely decentralized network that will never be shut down can be established based on recursive inscriptions?

All in all, recursive inscriptions have injected new vitality into the narrative of Bitcoin ecology, but the performance limitations of the Bitcoin network itself are still flawed. It is still unknown how much impact recursive inscriptions can have and how much consensus they can form. After all, even Ordinals The protocol itself has been resisted by Bitcoin core developers, but isn’t innovation coming out step by step in the face of unknowns and controversies?