Introducing Bascii Protocol

Introduction

Bascii (pronounced “bask-y”) marries bitcoin ordinals and ASCII art to create an experimental new bitcoin metaprotocol exclusively for immutable, on-chain ASCII art. 

Background

Among the earliest forms of artwork on the Internet, ASCII art uses fonts to create visual or text-based imagery. By standardizing an approach to publishing ASCII art as inscriptions, we can:

• Pay homage to the internet’s earliest cypherpunks and artists

• Create a new subgenre for PFPs, art collections and artfully-formatted text on-chain

• Take advantage of ASCII’s lower kb size to embed more economical artwork on the bitcoin blockchain

• Collectively agree to set of rules that creates a subgenere of inscriptions dubbed Basciis

• Number all Basciis in chronological order (i.e. the first Bascii is Bascii #0, the second is Bascii #1, etc.) to create a unique subset of inscriptions. Hopefully, this inspires the launch of additional metaprotocol subsets with their own numbering schemes.

Inspiration

Anyone can mint ASCII art on bitcoin right now without needing to follow the conventions outlined above. It raises a question: why bother with a new standard at all?

Several reasons:

1. When I first threw the idea for BRC-20 into the world, I thought it was too utopian and naive to work. Domo formalized the idea into a spec, and BRC-20s are now a multi-billion-dollar token category. We can’t know how something will be received until we’ve tested it in the wild.

2. I’m fascinated by the fact that creativity tends to expand when you impose restrictions upon it. Many forms of poetry, for example, have rigid rules dictating rhyming schemes and even the number of syllables per line. And yet, much of the world’s most profound literary art comes from the genre. ASCII art is similarly limited to characters on a keyboard. Despite that limitation, ASCII artwork can often be profoundly powerful and moving.

3. The Bascii Protocol creates predictability and standardization, which makes it easier for third parties to build interesting applications on top of it.

4. Ordinals have the potential to be more than a catch-all basket for any random data type. With the adoption of metaprotocol functionality, ord is morphing into an ecosystem of interoperable standards (see more in the conclusion below).

5. It’s a fun experiment (not an investment opportunity!). If it proves successful, it could spark ideas for other interesting metaprotocols on bitcoin. It could also be used in other ways on other chains as well (i.e. doginals, solana inscriptions, twitscriptions, etc.).

Protocol Design

The Bascii protocol takes advantage of a new feature in ord versions 0.10.0+ dubbed metaprotocols. The “metaprotocol convention” uses the following format within ord clients to minimize the size of data payloads:

<metaprotocol>, [op]

This allows us to declare that a given ordinal inscription is a Bascii in the ord client at the moment the inscription is created.

To inscribe a Bascii within the latest ord client, users can input the following command (the metaprotocol declaration, “bascii,” should be all lowercase as shown):

ord wallet inscribe --fee-rate <FEE_RATE> --metaprotocol=bascii --file <text file containing your artwork>

A complete command in ord would look like this:

ord wallet inscribe --fee-rate 100 --metaprotocol=bascii --file "C:\artwork.txt"

By declaring the metaprotocol within the ord inscription envelope, indexers can ignore all other types of inscriptions when indexing Basciis.

Alongside the metaprotocol declaration, all Bascii mints should include a text file that contains the relevant ASCII artwork. Users can optionally include metadata with artwork (such as the piece’s name, description and traits) by using ord’s built-in metadata functionality. Simply save all relevant metadata in a .json file and reference it with the inscription as follows:

ord wallet inscribe --fee-rate <FEE_RATE> --metaprotocol=bascii --file <text file containing your artwork> --json-metadata <json file containing your artwork’s metadata>

A complete command in ord would look like this:

ord wallet inscribe --fee-rate 100 --metaprotocol=bascii --file "C:\artwork.txt" --json-metadata "artwork-metadata.json"

The metaprotocol and metadata would then be displayed directly on ordinals.com in the fields below the artwork. Please note that all artwork metadata should adhere to OpenSea’s Metadata Standards for potential integration with marketplaces. The following screenshot shows what Opensea’s metadata structure looks like:

Note that the OpenSea specification also includes interesting attributes such as background_color, which creators can set to change the visual presentation of their Basciis. Ideally, this metadata would be honored by explorers, wallets and marketplaces.

Once a Bascii is created, it can be transferred without the need to reference the metaprotocol. Transferring it should follow the same procedure as transferring any inscription. For example:

ord wallet send --fee-rate <FEE_RATE> <ADDRESS> <INSCRIPTION_ID>

Indexers should be able to recognize this transfer as the inscription will have already been tagged as a Bascii at the moment the piece was minted.

Ordering Basciis

Much like ordinals themselves, each published Bascii is intended to be assigned a number that corresponds with the order in which it was inscribed on-chain. The first Bascii to be inscribed would be Bascii #0. The second would be Bascii #1, etc.

Note however that this ordering will not be maintained on-chain, but rather it will be up to indexers to use on-chain data to identify each Bascii to assign it a “Bascii #.”

As a test, Bascii #0 has already been minted.

You can view the complete content/artwork here, and see the metaprotocol designation here (outlined in green below). 

Please note that a prior test Bascii should be ignored by indexers as it included a deprecated “mint” operation.

Bascii specifications

The minimum requirements to mint a Bascii are:

1. A .txt or .json file containing ASCII artwork (allowable text types are: 'text/plain;charset=utf-8', 'text/plain', 'application/json')

2. Tagging the file as a Bascii at the moment of inscription by using the --metaprotocol=bascii command in ord (“bascii” should be all lowercase)

The following features are optional:

1. Users can include metadata (such as a name, description, rarity traits, etc.) that adheres to OpenSea’s Metadata Standard. Learn more about ord’s metadata support here. You can include that metadata as a json file as described in the “protocol design” section above.

2. Collections of Bascii artwork can be managed per ord’s parent-child inscription process.

Conclusion

Basciis are a simple experiment designed to create a standard method for publishing, swapping and collecting ASCII artwork on bitcoin.

It could be used to create lower-cost PFP collections, publish illuminated text and enable even non-artists to make eternal art (thanks to ubiquitous image-to-ASCII art converters available online including the ASCII Art Archives tool and burgeoning AI ASCII art generators).

By utilizing ord’s new metaprotocol functionality, Basciis minimize load on indexers and create a new “sub-genre” of ordinals-based artwork. Bascii’s exclusive numbering system means each piece would have a unique Inscription # as well as a unique Bascii #. This moves us toward an evolving vision of ordinals not as a singular catch-all publishing platform but instead as an ecosystem of multiple protocols dubbed metaprotocols. I’m convinced this will lead us to places we can’t yet conceive of.

Copyright: Negative
Author: Redphonecrypto
Credits: Huge thanks to @domodata who offered invaluable insights on the protocol design (simplifying it to maximize the newest and most advanced features in ord). Domo has also built a dashboard tracking Bascii mints on geniidata.com. Thanks as well to @nondualrandy for acting as a sounding board!