especially early ordinals, are certainly of historical interest.
Many ordinal theorists favor the latter view. This is not least because the
ordinals were independently discovered on at least two separate occasions, long
before the era of modern NFTs began.
On August 21st, 2012, Charlie Lee [posted a proposal to add proof-of-stake to
Bitcoin to the Bitcoin Talk
forum](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102355.0). This wasn't an asset
scheme, but did use the ordinal algorithm, and was implemented but never
deployed.
On October 8th, 2012, jl2012 [posted a scheme to the same
forum](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117224.0) which uses decimal
notation and has all the important properties of ordinals. The scheme was
discussed but never implemented.
These independent inventions of ordinals indicate in some way that ordinals
were discovered, or rediscovered, and not invented. The ordinals are an
inevitability of the mathematics of Bitcoin, stemming not from their modern
documentation, but from their ancient genesis. They are the culmination of a