Title: The Yin and Yang of Encryption Spirit in Inscriptions Vs L2

The popularity of inscriptions is really high. Today, I will continue to share some of my shallow understanding of inscriptions.

These days, I participated in the Inscriptions activity initiated by the Particle protocol's People's Alliance, which made me quite interested in the differences and similarities between EVM inscriptions and Bitcoin inscriptions.

Therefore, with my curious nature, I checked their data structures on the Dune data platform.

In general, inscriptions can now be divided into two major categories: Bitcoin inscriptions and EVM inscriptions. Bitcoin inscriptions can be further divided into the following two categories:

• Ordinals and BRC20 protocols that store inscription information in SegWit (a space dedicated to storing signature and script information in the Bitcoin mainnet block) Witness (witness).

Among them, the inscription information of BRC20 is a standardized Json file:

{"p":"brc20","op":"mint","tick":"***","amt":"100000000"}

The key "p" represents the protocol name brc20; The key "op" represents the operation type (the operation types defined by brc20 are deploy, mint, and transfer); The key "tick" represents the symbol of the inscription, limited to 4 characters; The key "amt" represents the quantity of the operation.

Ordinals are currently the most classical and orthodox inscription protocol. BRC20 is based on the Ordinals protocol, and its role is to homogenize the non-homogeneous inscriptions defined by Ordinals, making them tradable homogeneous assets like Erc20 Tokens.

The specific storage location of such inscriptions is shown in the figure below:

• Atomicals (including ARC20), Runes, Pipe, Stamps, etc., protocols that store inscription information in the UTXO containing field.

During the Mint and Transfer processes of BRC20, a large number of UTXOs slightly higher than 546 satoshis are produced. These UTXOs cannot be aggregated for a long time, leading to the UTXO set inflation problem in the Bitcoin mainnet, evolving into a dust attack on the Bitcoin mainnet (Spam Attack).

This is the most important reason why BitcoinCore leader Luke and Ordinals protocol initiator Casey both criticized BRC20.

Therefore, native homogenized inscription protocols such as Atomicals' ARC20, Runes initiated by Casey, and Pipe and Stamps protocols deployed according to Casey Runes documents, choose to store the inscription information in UTXO, maintaining consistency and atomicity with Bitcoin's data structure, and minimizing the impact on the Bitcoin consensus load as much as possible.

Taking the leading inscription of ARC20, ATOM, as an example, its inscription ownership address information is stored in the Output field of 1 UTXO, the inscription information is stored in the hex field, and the information of the inscription opening is stored in the input field.

The specific storage location of such inscriptions is shown in the figure below:

The above is a brief introduction to the data structure of Bitcoin inscriptions, while EVM inscriptions mostly refer to the design specifications of the BRC20 protocol.

The information of EVM inscriptions, in the same structure as BRC20, is saved in the data field of a Transaction.

The specific storage location of such inscriptions is shown in the figure below:

At this point, we can actually give an unofficial, personalized definition of the inscription protocol.

The inscription protocol refers to a blockchain extension scheme that is verified and sorted by off-chain indexers, and submits and stores its state data at a certain location on the blockchain mainnet (Segwit of the Bitcoin mainnet, hex, input, output fields of UTXO, data field of EVM blockchain Transaction).

Wait a minute, why does the definition of the inscription protocol sound so much like L2?

That's right, in my opinion, the abstract architecture of the inscription protocol is the same as that of L2, with some important differences in details:

• Compared with the inscription protocol, the state data changes of L2 need to be verified by the smart contracts (such as the Optimism gateway) deployed on the mainnet of the L2 project;
• The inscription protocol currently does not support VM (virtual machine) and cannot execute functions and methods other than deploy, mint, and transfer defined by the protocol;
• The trust assumption introduced by the inscription protocol is greater than that of L2. ZK-Rollup L2 has ZKP proof mechanism, OP-Rollup L2 has fraud proof mechanism to ensure trustlessness, while the inscription protocol mainly relies on the open source of indexer code and the operation of multiple entities.

Finally, leaving aside these technical details, the design specifications of L2 reflect the core essence (Yang) of the encryption spirit - freedom and trustlessness, while the design specifications of the inscription protocol reflect the opposite (Yin) of the encryption spirit - fairness, fairness, and fairness.

This is why the inscription community holds a tolerant and understanding attitude towards the excessive centralization and introduction of too many trust assumptions in the inscription protocol, while the L2 community is deeply concerned about the centralization of L2 sequencers and the lack of actual deployment of fraud proofs.

Just as in the political ecology of the United States, there cannot only be the Republican Party advocating freedom without the Democratic Party advocating fairness, in the scalability solutions of the encrypted world, there cannot only be L2 advocating freedom without the inscription protocol advocating fairness.

When Yin and Yang are in harmony, there is good fortune.

Above.

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