Ordinals Are Immutable Once Confirmed

Ordinal immutability is conditional. An inscription is immutable only after its transaction achieves sufficient Bitcoin confirmations. This is a function of the underlying Bitcoin consensus, not a unique property of the Ordinals protocol.

The guarantee is probabilistic, not absolute. A 51% attack or a chain reorg can theoretically alter the chain's history. This risk is identical for a Bitcoin payment and an Ordinal inscription; the data layer inherits the security of the settlement layer.

Evidence: The Bitcoin network has never experienced a successful deep reorganization of confirmed blocks, making inscriptions as practically immutable as any other on-chain Bitcoin transaction. This is the same security model trusted by Bitcoin-native protocols like Lightning Network and RGB.

Inscriptions are consensus-validated data. An Ordinal's content is embedded directly into a transaction's witness field, making it an immutable part of the Bitcoin blockchain's state. This differs from sidechains or Layer 2 solutions like Stacks or Lightning, where data security is derived, not native.

Finality is probabilistic but absolute. Once buried under sufficient proof-of-work, an inscription's immutability is a function of Bitcoin's Nakamoto Consensus. Reorganization attacks are economically infeasible, unlike the social consensus reversals possible on chains like Ethereum (e.g., The DAO fork).

The cost of erasure is the cost of attacking Bitcoin. To censor or alter a confirmed inscription, an adversary must execute a 51% attack on the entire network. This security budget, currently over $20B in hashpower, is the highest cost-to-censor of any data layer.

Inscriptions are permanent state. Bitcoin's consensus rules treat inscribed satoshis as legitimate UTXOs. Once confirmed, this data is immutable and replicated by every full node forever, unlike temporary mempool data or prunable sidechains.

The bloat is structural. This creates a permanent state burden that diverges from Bitcoin's original design as a minimalist settlement layer. It forces all future participants to store art and memes, increasing hardware requirements for node operators.

Censorship is technically impossible. Full nodes validate all rules. A node attempting to filter specific data patterns, like those from Ordinals or BRC-20 tokens, would fork itself off the network, as it would reject valid blocks from miners.

Evidence: Bitcoin's UTXO set grew over 15% in 2023, largely driven by ordinal inscriptions. This directly increases the sync time and storage cost for new nodes, a tangible metric of the protocol's evolving cost of participation.