Inscribing a font onto the blockchain

chankdiesel

I'm testing out a new way to distribute a new OFL font online via inscribing it on the bitcoin blockchain. The font is called "Bitbet" and it's inscribed onto the blockchain using the ordinals protocol. The font is also known as ordinal inscription #83351629 and you can check it out over here:

https://ordinals.com/inscription/83351629

You can download the font by clicking on the "content" link on that page. The font comes with the SIL Openfont License (which they use for all Google Fonts) which allows for unlimited use and rights to redistribute and modify if you'd like.

The smallest divisional unit of a bitcoin is called a satoshi, and there's 100,000,000 individual satoshi per bitcoin. So an interesting thing is that any individual satoshi can be separated into its own place and get a little data included on it. And it's all recorded into the publicly shared and open blockchain for anybody to access. That data can be a font file. The Bitbet font comes in TTF format and takes up just 23k in file size so it fits onto a single satoshi pretty easily.

So the single satoshi located at spot number 262009510385081 contains all the font data for the Bitbet font in a readily available public database, backed up on multiple servers across the world, forever. Pretty neat!

In addition to the font, I've also inscribed a number of images of the font in action, so people can see what it looks like. This is done using the "parent/child" feature of ordinals, where the font file is the parent and the images made using the font are the children. You can see 16 of the children images over here:

https://ordinals.com/children/7fa3e94d64f96f76817357e6630425a966852d1c93bf7463adb9f45da2790f49i0

Give it a look and let me know what you think.

I've mostly done this just to test out if it can be done, but it is also available to developers to use in other projects and is listed in the "ordinal public goods" repository which is a list of js libraries and other resources inscribed on bitcoin, including fonts. You can see all those resources available for ordinal builders in the public goods repo over here:

https://github.com/jokie88/ordinalpublicgoods

Hope that's not too much info. It's kinda complicated, but the download works seamlessly. I think it's a pretty exciting way of getting a new OFL font out to people for free. Still testing out exactly how it all works, but my first impression is that it went pretty well. Hope you enjoy it!

-chank

chankdiesel

and shoutout to my artist friend Coldie who suggested I try this as a new way of getting new fonts out to blockchain builders to make new things. I thought it was a crazy idea to inscribe fonts onto bitcoin, but turns out it works pretty well!

also much appreciation to the team at Gamma.io who helped guide me through the technical process of making it happen.

John Hudson

Do you think there are any particular benefits to this distribution approach? The novelty is interesting, and the long-term availability is noteworthy (although I would hesitate to use the word ‘forever’).

But am I right in thinking that this long-term availability also implies stability in the sense that once inscribed into the blockchain this font is a fixed data point, which cannot be modified or replaced? That, along with the lack of build sources or tools and no mechanism for issue tracking or pull requests, seems like an unhelpful limitation on an OFL project.

Ray Larabie

Is that idea that free font sites would share the content link rather than hosting the font? Is this aimed more at developers and blockchain enthusiasts rather than your typical graphic designer?

Thomas Phinney

Issues around version control seem to me to be the biggest problem with this.

Well, aside from figuring out what value the Bitcoin blockchain approach provides... it is amusing as an exercise, but I don’t really see a great benefit.

Simon Cozens

I can theoretically see the advantage in distributed, immutable hosting. But we had that - it was called BitTorrent. BitTorrent gives us a good model of what this kind of hosting is useful for: large content that needs to be downloaded from multiple nodes at once, and illegal content that doesn't want to be identified with a particular node. For other types of content, BitTorrent wasn't useful, because clicking a link on a web site was just so much more straightforward.

chankdiesel

John Hudson said:

Do you think there are any particular benefits to this distribution approach? The novelty is interesting, and the long-term availability is noteworthy (although I would hesitate to use the word ‘forever’).

I don't know if there's any particular benefit yet, so yeah I am mostly attracted to the novelty aspect of it. Just trying to see if it can be done and what the implications and limitations are. It's kinda like etching your name onto a grain of rice; maybe I can open a booth at a flea market giving away "itty bitty blockchain fonts."

I think OFL fonts are an interesting concept, but I don't know if there's any reward for the creators, other than maybe lots of exposure. And I don't know if a big corporate entity like Google should be the primary source for OFL fonts. Might be nice if there was some decentralized non-corporate source for hosting and distributing OFL fonts. And it might be nice if bitcoin could be used for something other than a store of value, like maybe it could be a storage place for data, too. But that would only be sensible if there was an unlimited free energy source to power it all, but that ain't happening any time soon.

So yeah, for now I'm just playing around, testing the process and inviting discussion to see what the longterm viability and utility of this might be.

John Hudson

I think OFL fonts are an interesting concept, but I don't know if there's any reward for the creators, other than maybe lots of exposure.

That presumes that OFL font licensing is not funded. All but one of the typeface families we have released under OFL has been fully funded, by which I mean that both the development work and the rights ‘liberation’ were paid for (in most cases by different parties). The only one that wasn’t was one that I was able to spin-off from a funded project at minimal effort.

And I don't know if a big corporate entity like Google should be the primary source for OFL fonts. Might be nice if there was some decentralized non-corporate source for hosting and distributing OFL fonts.

Pretty much all the OFL fonts available through the Google Fonts service—which is primarily a webfont hosting service, not a libre font distribution platform per se—are also available through other channels, mostly operated by the people who made the fonts. GitHub is the most common channel, so yes that is centralised and corporate, in the sense that it is a single platform owned by Microsoft, but git is a set of protocols that isn’t limited to that platform. Those protocols are version control mechanisms, which is what you don’t have when you etch your name on a grain of sand.  

chankdiesel

John Hudson said:

Do you think there are any particular benefits to this distribution approach? The novelty is interesting, and the long-term availability is noteworthy (although I would hesitate to use the word ‘forever’).

But am I right in thinking that this long-term availability also implies stability in the sense that once inscribed into the blockchain this font is a fixed data point, which cannot be modified or replaced? That, along with the lack of build sources or tools and no mechanism for issue tracking or pull requests, seems like an unhelpful limitation on an OFL project.

I'm still doing my research and trying to figure out exactly how "fixed" it is. there is an option to overwrite an existing ordinal, which might allow for updates, but I haven't tried it yet. There's also an option to "burn" an ordinal, which makes it so you can't make any more child inscriptions from it, but I don't know if that deletes the content or not. And I also heard if you send an ordinal to a regular bitcoin wallet address it removes the inscription and it's just a regular clean satoshi again, but I don't know exactly what happens when you do that, because I haven't tried it yet.

Build sources could be stored as child inscriptions underneath the font parent ordinal. But I'm not sure what file types are allowed in inscriptions. Mostly people just use it for inscribing jpgs, pngs and JSON objects. I just started do this this month and I'm still doing my research as to how it might all work and what kinds of file types can be inscribed.

I'm planning on extending the character set and updating the font a bit and inscribing the updated font as a grandchild of the original inscription. I was gonna try to do that next week and see how it goes. If I could make the grandchild updated font inscription, then burn the original font inscription that might make for some version control. But I don't know exactly how the burn mechanism affects child or grandchild of that burnt inscription.

chankdiesel

Ray Larabie said:

Is that idea that free font sites would share the content link rather than hosting the font? Is this aimed more at developers and blockchain enthusiasts rather than your typical graphic designer?

Just sharing the content works like magic, right? So easy! I don't know exactly where the data is stored, but I think you just proved it works.

For now, yeah, this is aimed almost exclusively at blockchain enthusiasts, particularly for my artist friend Coldie who suggested I give it a try. There's a thing called "recursion" where an inscription can reference other inscriptions to build bigger things, but I haven't tried using that yet. In theory this inscription data could be embedded in other inscriptions to create new objects out of a group of existing inscriptions.

But the typical graphic designer would have no interest in any of this, as they don't care much about blockchains, and even worse there's a large segment of graphic designers who actively despise bitcoin. 

So yeah, it all seems kinda pointless because blockchain builders don't know anything about paying for fonts, and typical graphic designers don't have any interest in the blockchain. So I'm working on building fonts in the Venn diagram where almost nobody cares about any of it, but it's fascinating to me to see what the possibilities are.

chankdiesel

Thomas Phinney said:

Well, aside from figuring out what value the Bitcoin blockchain approach provides... it is amusing as an exercise, but I don’t really see a great benefit.

When I started giving away free fonts at my website way back in the 90s it was just an amusing exercise, but it turned out to be a pretty good way to launch my career and get more people interested in my fonts.

Sometimes the amusing exercises turn out beneficial, and sometimes they're just silly, but hey, ya gotta try new things if you wanna do something new and exciting. If it all turns out pointless I can just fail and move on to the next idea. Just trying something new to see how it goes.

Ray Larabie

I entirely understand it, Chank. It's like those people who run Doom on a microwave oven—unexplored territory. I love it!