These ideas are a combination of the collective insights from the bitmap community and some of my own.
Bitmap is a vision brought forth by the belief and support of its early adopters. A group that recognized something extraordinary and embraced it.
To those who already hold Bitmap, I aim to offer fresh perspectives and insights for your journey. As well as material to help you onboard others.
For those new to the scene, you’ve arrived at the right place!
And at an early juncture in the promising and long life of Bitmap.
I am here to help you get acquainted with the history, theory, and technology. I’ll go on further to provide some unique aspects and some potential use cases of the Bitmap.
There is a lot to unpack here.
And I will do my best to expose you to the depths of Bitmap in a fun and comprehensive read.
Genesis
In December of 2022, a revolutionary breakthrough occurred when Casey Rodemer created the Ordinal Protocol and granted us the ability to store data on the Bitcoin network.
The upgrade enabled users to inscribe a diverse array of file types and formats.
Etched directly onto a unit of Satoshi or “Sat”, the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin.
Transforming the Sat into a new asset class, an Ordinal Artifact.
Bitmaps fall into this class of asset and reside immutably on the Bitcoin Blockchain.
Meaning, that no human can change, alter, corrupt, or destroy Bitmap or any other Ordinal.
Bitmap was proposed as an idea by an anonymous entity known as Bitoshi Blockamoto. (Obviously a fan of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin)
He was able to recognize a discernible pattern within the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Blockamoto envisioned a decentralized metaverse, where each mined block is a district, and each transaction within a block is a parcel of land within that district.
This was the basis for proposing the bitmap theory and protocol.
A bitmap is much more than a blank canvas of orange squares waiting to be built on.
Each map is the representation of an existing block of data that was mined directly on the Bitcoin Blockchain.
The blocks reference actual transactions, each of which is packed with strings of information and hash. Timestamped, and locked away securely.
Bitcoin is becoming much more than a store of value and a trade ledger.
It is evolving into the most decentralized, secure, and robust database the world has ever known.
Available to the public, maintained by a peer-to-peer network, and costing a one-time storage fee for the blockspace.
.bitmap is taking on a life of its own
At this point, it is important to note:
There is no official “Bitmap Project”.
It has no official roadmap.
No official leader, team, or development firm.
Does this idea seem strange to you anon?
It’s understandable if so.
This may sound counterintuitive when speculating Bitmap’s value and future success.
But in truth, these facts alone make Bitmap very special.
Bitmap is as open-source and decentralized as it gets.
It is simply a proposed idea, adopted and organically developed by a growing collective of believers.
Currently, there are 24,739 of them. A number that is hard to ignore.
Bitmap’s most recent milestone; has been flipping the position on the previous leader of individual holders of a Metaverse asset, the Sandbox.
What makes this data so special?
Blocks on Bitcoin can be viewed as a historical timeline.
Consisting of real-time transaction details and strings of permanent data.
The data for these blocks are pulled and parsed directly from the live mainnet feed of Bitcoin Core.
In the image above, each square is a transaction. Each with its own unique strings of non-arbitrary resources.
Individually and collectively, developers can treat the Bitmap as a base foundation when creating any number of full-stack applications.
Sharing a common and static base level will provide these apps with the opportunity to become interoperable with one another, and inclusive to cross-verse utility.
Allowing the potential for users to maintain self-custody of their assets and identity while exploring the different worlds of the Metaverse.
How can this be scalable? Isn’t Blockspace limited on Bitcoin?
These applications are not required to exist on the blockchain themselves, although they could be.
Web2 and online gaming could easily begin leveraging bitmap to generate content, procedurally generated worlds, and even resources.
It only requires that developers apply the standard protocol, and utilize the data of bitmap as the basis of their foundation.
The Bitmaps themselves, are small and simple text files. Used for tracking ownership and sourcing related block data.
These assets follow the Ordinal theory and protocol, which means:
“First is first, and forever.”
In other words, only the first instance is recognized and indexed as an official Bitmap. They cannot be duplicated, or impersonated.
An additional rule to the .bitmap protocol is that only blocks that have been mined can become a bitmap. Blocks are mined an average every 10 minutes on Bitcoin.
Allowing for a slow inflationary model.
Currently, there are 816387 blocks that have been mined since Bitcoin’s inception in 2009. In another 14 years, there will be double that.
If the total supply sounds oversaturated to you, consider that there is an average of 1 bitmap for every 10000 people. If we are considering these assets to be the base foundation for a decentralized global metaverse, they are actually pretty scarce.
Bitmap was not conceived to be used for a single game or application.
It’s meant to be the foundation for ALL the games and applications.
History Repeats Itself
It is a fact that society laughed at the internet for decades after its origins. Today, it would be a challenge for someone who has regular access to go a day without using it.
I also challenge you to find a major brand that does not have an online presence.
The development of the internet will be our best comparison in projecting the upcoming development of the Metaverse.
Only this time, it's likely the be adopted and developed much more aggressively.
I want you to let that sink in.
We already have a view of how it will logically occur.
A bit of research into the history of the internet is all that is needed to clearly predict where this is headed.
The internet was brought to mass adoption by way of standard protocols.
A “standard protocol” is the universal application of a ruleset.
The example best used here is TCP/IP (IP addresses).
Without them, you most likely would never have found this article,
nor shared it on your social media platform (hint hint).
Standard Protocols such as TCP/IP make the internet possible.
It's only logical that the Metaverse will require the development of such standards.
Time to Reboot the Metaverse
It’s an almost cringy term at this point; Metaverse.
And with good reason.
The first several attempts at creating this beast have been by the likes of centralized development firms backed by venture capitalists, and multi-billion dollar organizations.
So far, each version of a metaverse has been arbitrarily assigned its shape, size, and all the assets found within its ecosystem.
These decisions are based on individual visions and agendas.
Of how or why the Metaverse would/could/should be used in the future.
It is not surprising.
The development of a metaverse is next level when it comes to production costs and upkeep. Billions of dollars have already been allocated to its creation. And it's just getting started.
The risk to reward?
Let's just say the juice is worth the squeeze.
The projected market value of one of the most anticipated technologies the world has yet to see is astounding.
The Metaverse has the potential to reach a multi-trillion-dollar valuation by 2030.
That’s a lot of coin…but how can that be? Isn’t it just a big video game?
The valuation is not at all far-fetched when you consider that the Metaverse will include multiple high-dollar industries.
Sectors all across the board will want a piece of the Metaverse pie.
This includes many that exist, and some yet to be discovered.
Here are a few examples of probable industries that stand to benefit from an open-sourced decentralized metaverse.
(in no particular order)
- Education
- Manufacturing
- City Planning, Development, and Infrastructure
- Crisis Prevention
- Workforce Training
- Healthcare
- Entertainment
- Sports
- Travel & Tourism
- Real Estate
- Retail
- Gaming
- Marketing
- Social Media
- E-commerce
- Financial Services
- Asset Trading/DeFi
- AI
The list goes on.
Like it or not, the Metaverse is on the horizon, it will likely will change everything about how we live.
Such novelties have always manifested within our society.
A few paralleled examples are smartphones, the internet, the computer, the automobile, electricity, the printing press, etc.
An introduction to Digital Matter Theory (DMT) and Non-Arbitrary Tokens (NATs)
Let's take this a little bit deeper and introduce you to one of the most exciting and unrealized aspects of .bitmap.
Digital Matter Theory was coined by the team at The Blockrunner Podcast.
A cornerstone of the bitmap community.
One may argue that The BlockRunner has had the largest influence in cultivating the community and teaching bitmap theory.
These gentlemen have both been advocates and developers of the Metaverse pretty much since its inception.
They have been my own personal go-to source and I'm always excited to catch the next episode. I encourage you to tap into them if you haven’t already.
Digital Matter Theory, suggests .bitmap can be used to procedurally seed worlds, content, and even resources in the Metaverse.
Done so by identifying different patterns within the block data instead of a random number generator, or by arbitrary decisions from a developer or team.
An excellent example would be Minecraft. We all know about Minecraft. We know that the world we play in seems to be randomly generated as we explore the server. The content you discover is actually algorithmically determined by random number generation.
What if we instead used data from a block to determine these things? Let's imagine an example to demonstrate:
Maybe the transaction count of a bitmap would determine the parameter. Say the fee amount per transaction would determine the elevation and depth.
While searching the transaction hash string, the game determines that a 5 comes up more than any other number within the string.
Let's say 5 was set to generate a desert biome.
Also found within the hash string are occurrences of “abc” and “123”. Instructing the game to generate iron and gold in the biome.
This would be an example of Digital Matter Theory in action.
This process of selection and distribution is non-arbitrary.
Meaning, it is not the developer who decided it was a desert. Or if there is gold. Or how much gold there is.
These things were determined by the data found within the block,
which was created by random people using Bitcoin at some point in the past.
To expand on this further…
What if the resources were as diverse as the periodic table of elements? And they were spread across the entire plane of .bitmap.
What if these resources were used to craft everything within an MMO-style survival game?
Maybe there are super weapons or vehicles that require Uranium.
What if Uranium was very rare in its occurrence and difficult to mine?
Let's call these resources Non-Arbitrary Tokens (NATs). And then let's say there are hundreds of active games, each with its own ecosystems of NATs.
All of which you have access to with your bitmap.
In the future, who knows?
Your grandchildren may be teaching their grandchildren
how to extract NATs from the family bitmap vault.
Thank you for reading and this can be considered the introduction to Bitmap theory. We continue our journey in our next article:
