Bitcoin

An ordinal is a convention that anybody can sort of opt into where instead of sat's all being the same and a UTXO just containing fungible sat's, you number the sat's in the order in which their mind starting at zero. And so that initial numbering scheme is combined with a protocol or a convention for tracking them when they move across transactions. So it's just a convention that does not exist on the Bitcoin base layer That lets you pretend as if individual sat's have an identity and individual sat's move from from UTXO to UTXO. They start long and get short because if they start short and get long, all the good ones are stuck in the Genesis