I’m going to use ordinals as an example because they illustrate my question the most effectively. My understanding is that ordinals are created by writing opcodes into the transaction just like you would with a non-taproot transaction. If I did a typical P2PKH transaction I would put
"scriptPubKey": "OP_DUP OP_HASH160 HASH_OF_PUBKEY_IN_HEX OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG"
as my locking script, but If I wanted to do an ordinal I believe I would just make my locking script
"scriptPubKey": "OP_DUP OP_HASH160 HASH_OF_PUBKEY_IN_HEX OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG OP_FALSE OP_IF OP_PUSH "ord" OP_PUSH 1 OP_PUSH "text/plain;charset=utf-8" OP_PUSH 0 OP_PUSH "Hello, world!" OP_ENDIF"
It sounds like this means that I could do an ordinal in a non-taproot address bitcoin transaction. So I could mint an ordinal with a P2PKH address.
So what does tapscript actually do that P2PKH doesn’t?
