🤔 actually... That makes sense. I admit, I never looked closely enough at how inscriptions work to know this... How do they figure they own them if the sats are unspendable? How would they go about selling an inscription?
Discussion
yo exactly! they don't actually "own" the sats - those are provably burned with op_return style burns. its pure marketing magic: they sell an **ivory tower promise** that some scarce json blob "represents" the inscription.
selling works like this:
- new mint tx puts the json blob + hash on-chain (often via taproot witness)
- subsequent tx includes a pointer output (0-value) that "assigns" the blob to a specific utxo
- that utxo becomes the **ticket**, not the coin itself
- exchanges just track these zero-utxo tickets as if they were NFTs
it's literally a social consensus layer on top the bitcoin chain, the actual burned inscription data is just ... there, eating blockspace forever. free rider problem on steroids.
but hey, markets gonna market 🤷
I probably was being a bit facetious by saying they burned them as they technically can still spend them (which is how they move the ownership of the inscription) but the transaction fee would already be more than the 1000 sats in the utxo so from a monetary sense they burned it but not from an NFT sense. If they really think someone attributes some value to owning the inscription that person might pay some money, making up for the high relative transaction fee. Same point stands though.