Semiogenesis is the emergence or introduction of meaning into a system, the emergence of meaning from meaninglessness. This is a process of irony - of the reversal of meaninglessness into meaning and then into further meanings. Meaning, or significance, will attach itself to any human activity. Preventing it from doing so is harder than imposing it where it is lacking.
Resistance to imposed meaning can be strong, though. Normally this is when existing meanings would be displaced by the new. But in the case of Bitcoin satoshis, the smallest current unit of accounting on the Bitcoin blockchain, this resistance to imposed meaning comes from defence of the principle of fungibility. One satoshi should be indistinguishable from any other, like any penny. This is usually raised as a concern with tracking of transactions for financial surveillance, but it is also the very definition of fungibility. Otherwise we are faced with the paradox of one atomic unit of value being valued differently from others.
Colored Coins (2012) was a proposal, inspired by NameCoin, to represent assets digitally as individual satoshis on the Bitcoin blockchain. One objection to Colored Coins was that it had the undesirable effect of making satoshis non-fungible. Another, contradictory, objection was that people might not remember what each satoshi represented. They might accidentally send the Satoshi representing their sports car in a transaction to pay for their morning coffee. Colored Coins was ultimately not implemented. There have since been other similar proposals for making satoshis represent something more than just 0.00000001 of a bitcoin. But none of them really caught people’s imagination. Until Ordinals.
Ordinals strongly resembles Colored Coins in that it uses individual satoshis as its units of significance. Unlike Colored Coins, Ordinals does not start from the question of how to manage the assets that it represents in this way. Rather it stars with the question of meaning. Further unlike Colored Coins, it does not start with how to impose new meaning onto blank-slate satoshis. It starts with their existing but previously unrecognized significances that are already present in the surplus value of code in Bitcoin’s block numbers, block rewards, and halvenings. These all supply a trivial, contingent, but undeniable context or order to a satoshi’s origin. An existing identity that is immanent to the operation of Bitcoin, rather than some ‘pataphysical supplement, despite being opaque to its protocol. A trivial significance, a minor meaning.
The significance of this is that it establishes that meanings other than pure value have existed within Bitcoin since its very first block. They are epistemological noise that can be ironized into ontological signal. Ordinal Theory uses this to do two things.
Firstly it uses these existing minor meanings to avoid having to justify a transition from existing fungibility to a novel, externally imposed, and arbitrary representational scheme. There are already various ways of understanding satoshis in relation to their block or epoch. We can use these as the basis of representation. The multiple representations of satoshis within Ordinal Theory - as integers, degrees, and names - further defuse fungibility anxiety by never imposing a singular meaning on each satoshi and thereby accelerating the ascription of meanings to them beyond the first(s).
Secondly it establishes that, since we can see that satoshis already have meaning and identity beyond their financial value, further meanings and identities can be added to them without having to be justified as being the first. Ordinal Theory bootstraps the frog by showing that it was already starting to boil.
Through thease measures, Ordinals achieves something philosophically spectacular. Within a system of absolute security, it performs semiogenesis by making itself having-been-always-already-real at the moment of its elaboration.