Why index should serve as real consensus layer for inscription？

To begin with : Index is a high-frequency term in the context of inscriptions. So, what is index? Why are indexes so vital to inscriptions? Why is it so important for inscriptions to have index on chain?

1/ Hey inscription enthusiasts! You've probably heard the term "index" a lot. No matter project teams or tech experts, they all use this word frequently in the world of inscriptions. But what exactly is it? Why inscriptions couldn’t live without not only blockchain, but also indexes?

2/ The key here is to understand that inscriptions essentially treat the blockchain as a hard drive. They store a new ledger in the "memo" field of existing transaction data, facilitating token issuance. This ledger isn't verified or computed by the blockchain.

3/ Ever wondered what happens if someone transfers assets they don't own or mints already forged tokens? Well, that inscriptions are still submitted on chain, but it's invalid. In other words, the inscription stores a "dirty ledger" on the blockchain, with both valid and invalid data.

4/ So, who's in charge of sorting out valid data and calculating everyone's balance? That's where the "index" comes into play. Of course, the index has to follow a set of rules established by social consensus. For inscriptions, the blockchain is just the DA layer, while the index is the real consensus layer.

5/ The index forks, following consensus forks, and then inscriptions fork. It will occur when wallet providers, browsers, and other index service providers don't coordinate well during index upgrades or have disagreements on index rules.

6/ Bitcoin's BRC20 inscriptions have faced this situation multiple times. Last October, users discovered that major exchanges were running different versions of the Ordinals indexer. Some inscriptions were indexed in the newer v0.9.0 but not in earlier versions, causing inconsistent balance displays for the same account across different clients. After coordination, everyone agreed to adopt v0.9.0 as the standard and freeze subsequent upgrades.

7/ However, in January this year, another big thing took place. The largest BRC20 wallet service provider, Unisat, unilaterally announced an index update, which brought two different sets of index rules to the market once again. The community split into factions—those against the upgrade advocating for a freeze, supporters of a cautious upgrade, and those in favor of coexistence with a fork. The future is unknown.

8/ Now that we could understand that the index is the consensus layer for inscriptions. This consensus is more of a social consensus. Social consensus will become as solid as on chain consensus, while the process of formation tends to be somewhat chaotic. This chaos might result in asset losses for users.

9/ Is there a way to transform social consensus into on-chain consensus? Intuitively, it seems challenging because no inscription can rely on the underlying blockchain to validate its validity. However, there might be an alternative approach: what if we put the index rules on-chain too? For instance, what if we deploy the current consensus version of the Ordinals protocol onto the Bitcoin blockchain?

10/ If we do this, there will be a single valid set of index rules on-chain. Anyone can derive a valid and consistent final state based on on-chain data and rules. Of course, it doesn't entirely eliminate forks; different stakeholders can still upload different index versions. However, this approach, at the very least, could serve as a more effective coordination and confirmation mechanism, reducing chaos in the formation of social consensus.

11/The approach was first raised by the permanent storage provider Arweave, known as Storage-Based Consensus Paradigm (SCP). The first inscription project on the Arweave chain, $ARIS, which embraced this mechanism by uploading its index to Arweave, became the first "pure on-chain consensus" inscription.

12/ The author believes that the potential of the SCP paradigm goes beyond inscriptions. It essentially establishes a brand new L2 model distinct from Rollup.

13/ This model is more flexible than L2; it doesn't have to be in the form of a chain. It can take any form. Web2 services are able to switch directly to Web3 services and add the feature of censorship resistance and immutability through SCP. Additionally, SCP is significantly more efficent in dealing with scaling problem than Rollup, which owns almost the same resource efficiency as Web2.

14/ Currently, it seems that the SCP paradigm is the most promising path for the mass migration of Web2 applications to Web3. The author is optimistic about the "pure on-chain consensus inscription" which $ARIS is working on, representing the transfer of inscription paradigms. At the same time, The author looking forward to the future of SCP, hoping that more developers could use SCP to build more applications in the Web3 ecosystem.

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