Intro to Bitcoin Ordinals with Hiro

In this episode of DevNTell, Narb welcomes Ryan Waits from Hiro to provide an introduction to Bitcoin Ordinals. Ryan, a developer advocate with a strong engineering background in the Ethereum and Bitcoin/Stacks ecosystems, explains the difference between ordinals (a numbering system for individual satoshis) and inscriptions (the data or digital assets attached to those satoshis). He highlights the challenges of building on Ordinals, such as data integrity during blockchain re-orgs and managing vast amounts of data. To address these issues, Ryan introduces several Hiro tools, including the Ordinals Explorer, the Ordinals API, and Ordhook, a powerful client indexer that extracts and streams inscription information from Bitcoin nodes. The episode includes demos of these tools and discusses the practical uses of Ordinals, like NFTs and BRC-20 tokens, ending with a call to explore Hiro's documentation and join their community for further learning and support.