Claiming the ability to meaningfully assign a serial number to sats is the scam.
No, that's not a scam, it's entirely possible. That's why Ordinals is a protocol, a well-defined way of doing things. Just because you don't need it or like it, doesn't make it any less "meaningful".
Sats are produced in a predictable manner, you can assign a number to each sat produced. Then you need to devise rules that govern what how these assignments follow when coins are split and merged later.
What I'm pointing out that there can be many different ways of doing this, with different rules. So the question is, what (if anything) makes Ordinals the "best" way of numbering sats (other than being the first way)? The answer is, the advertising and publicity built around it.
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It's possible inasmuch as selling lunar plots is also possible. There's also many different ways of partitioning the moon and sell the plots to credulous people, yet it's clearly still a scam.
Pretending you're able to identify individual units of an integer number is not any different.
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I just take issue with calling the protocol itself a scam. It's just an algorithm/technology.
It's like calling a coordinate system of the Moon a scam. It's not, even if multiple coordinate systems can exist. Selling plots based on that coordinate system is the scam.
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It's calling them scarce that's the scam, they taking peoples bitcoin for few Sats. 1 Sat = 1 Sat, there are no rare Sats more rare than others in contrast you may endup paying more to use those so called "rare sats"
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To reiterate, no one can track and "tell apart" the five number ones that comprise the integer 5 (to pick a random example) like "ordinal theory" claims to do.
Indeed, the algorithm itself is nonsense/a scam.
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Your statement is false. You can absolutely track them, if you establish a convention/algorithm for the creation, merging and splitting.
Example:
  • Alice mines 50 sats. They are assigned numbers from 1 to 50. Alice owns sats 1-50.
  • Alice sends 30 sats to Bob (output 1), with 20 sats change back to themselves (output 2). We establish a convention that we track splits by output number in a transaction. Alice now owns numbers from 31 to 50 (change) and Bob 1-30.
  • Bob and Alice (order matters) coinjoin 10 sats each to Charlie. Alice now owns 41-50 (change), Bob owns 11-30, and Charlie owns a single UTXO of 20 sats that cointains 31-40 and 1-10 (determined by order of inputs into the coinjoin).
  • Charlie sends 15 sats to Dexter. Because the order of sats in his UTXO matters, Dexter will receive sats 31-40 and 1-5 while Charlie will have a change of 6-10.
As you can see, it's perfectly fine to track these numbers around as they flow through the network. They do not exist in Bitcoin's code but rules can be established to create a layer on top of Bitcoin. Just like people just exist but are assigned social security numbers at birth according to certain rules. Just like coordinate systems are put on celestial bodies.
Bitcoin is not perfectly fungible. If it were, chainalysis would be impossible.
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If you actually look in detail what a bitcoin transaction is, sats are just an integer number annotated in each transaction output. Again, you cannot identify the individual units that compose an integer number.
You can pretend you can, of course. But it's not the same thing as actually being able to.
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I just showed you how. I'm not pretending. You can take any UTXO and point out the lineage of every single sat that composes it, back to the block it was mined in. It's called chainalysis. If you just add a convention by numbering them, you get Ordinals.
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No, you can’t. You are pretending. “By convention”. There is no convention of ordering of sats!
It’s made up nonsense. There is a chain of discrete Satoshi unit denominated value transferred in each UTXO, from a previously unspent transaction. The Bitcoin protocol ensures that value cannot be created from nothing by ensuring that UTXO cannot be spent again. Even If you could make 1 sat txs, and track them as individual sats, they would perfectly fungible, as you could not tell which sat a 1,1->2->1,1 is. The protocol expresses value of some sats, not individual sats.
Blockchain Analysis works by tracking value transfers, not individual sats! The sat can be fungible by the protocol and still represent a node in a value transfer - it’s a ledger. Do not confuse the Bitcoin protocol with made up imaginary nonsense from Twitter.
You are welcome to try to consider each bitpattern that makes up a number in memory, but that’s not how computers work. The number 7 stored in a byte of memory is just 00000111, it is not every bit pattern that makes up 0-7.
This is all magic bullshit thinking that is spamming and destroying value.