Casey, founder of Ordinals, releases Runes documentation to introduce the monument upgrade mechanism

Casey Rodarmor, founder of the Bitcoin NFT protocol Ordinals, released the Runes document on the X platform. According to the document, Rune allows Bitcoin transactions to etch, mint, and transfer Bitcoin-native digital goods. While each inscription is unique, every unit of the rune is identical; they are interchangeable tokens suitable for multiple uses. Other highlights include: -Rune protocol messages, called Runestones, are stored in the Bitcoin transaction output; a transaction can only have one Runestone at most, and Runestones can etch a new rune, cast an existing rune, and convert the rune into Runes are transferred from the input to the output of the transaction, and the transaction output can carry any number of runes in balance. - Runes are formed by etching, which creates a rune and sets its properties. Once set, these properties are immutable; -The rune etcher can choose to allocate the etched rune units to himself. This allocation is called premine; -A rune may be publicly minted once, allowing anyone to create and allocate units of that rune for themselves. Public minting is subject to the terms specified at the time of etching, and can only be activated when all terms are met; the number of times a rune can be minted is its upper limit. Once the cap is reached, casting will shut down; -Runestones can become deformed for a number of reasons, including non-pushdata opcodes in the runestone OP_RETURN, invalid variants, or unrecognized runestone fields. Malformed Runestones are known as cenotaphs, and runes entered into the cenotaph trade are destroyed. Coins from transactions with monuments count toward the minting cap, but minted runes are destroyed. Monuments are an upgrade mechanic that allow runes to be given new semantics, changing how runes are created and transferred without misleading non-upgraded clients as to where the runes are, as the latter will see that the runes have been be destroyed.