Raph, the newly appointed Chief Maintainer of the Bitcoin protocol Ordinals, recently merged the "Recursive Inscriptions" proposal (#2167) by Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Ordinals, into the Ordinals code on GitHub. According to developer Leonidas.og's interpretation, inscriptions can now use the special "/-/content/:inscription_id" syntax to request the content of other inscriptions.
This simple change unlocks many powerful use cases.
For example, rather than inscribing 10,000 JPEG files for a PFP collection individually which would be quite expensive, you could inscribe the 200 traits from the collection and then make 10,000 more inscriptions that each use a small amount of code to request traits and programmatically render the image. The result is the same. Artwork is stored on the chain in a more efficient manner. By using this approach, Bitcoin Apes can save over a million dollars in transaction fees.
Furthermore, it becomes possible to completely inscribe many code packages on the Bitcoin chain since the code is called in text form, resulting in a small size. This allows the size of inscriptions to surpass the 4MB block size limitation of Bitcoin.
Leonidas.og stated:
The most complex pieces of software are just a bunch of code compiled together after all. Now it becomes possible to put a complex 3D video game fully on-chain on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is essentially getting an internal internet where every file can request data from the other files on Bitcoin.