Luke Dashjr, one of the leading developers on Bitcoin, has just published a tweet in which he reaffirms that Ordinals is “an attack” on Bitcoin exploiting “a flaw” that needs to be fixed. But what is it really? Can Ordinals registrations, NFTs and BRC-20 tokens really disappear? We explain.
Luke Dashjr takes on Ordinals
For the past few days, as the Bitcoin (BTC) price has risen to new highs, the network has been particularly congested. Transaction fees can approach $15 for a single transaction.
Against this backdrop, Luke Dashjr, one of Bitcoin’s leading developers, put the blame on the notorious Ordinals listings. According to him, they exploit “a flaw in Bitcoin Core that allows them to spam the blockchain” :
PSA: “Inscriptions” are exploiting a vulnerability in Bitcoin Core to spam the blockchain. Bitcoin Core has, since 2013, allowed users to set a limit on the size of extra data in transactions they relay or mine (`-datacarriersize`). By obfuscating their data as program code,…
– Luke Dashjr (@LukeDashjr) December 6, 2023
For your information, Bitcoin Core is the most widely used client software in the world for implementing a complete Bitcoin node. According to Luke Dashjr, this vulnerability was corrected in the previous update of Bitcoin Knots (a competing client software developed solely by himself), thus enabling registrations to be blocked.
In addition, the Ocean Mining mining pool, also owned by Luke Dashjr, has confirmed that it will no longer validate blocks containing transactions linked to Ordinals.
Internet users were quick to express concern about the future of Ordinals. To the question “If this bug is fixed, does that mean that Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens will no longer exist?”, he simply replied “Correct”. But what does it really mean?
Ordinals, a real “attack” on Bitcoin?
As basic as it may sound, the Ordinals protocol is simply based on the intrinsic workings of Bitcoin. More specifically, it exploits features enabled by the two SegWit and Taproot updates. Let’s take a look at how this works.
The SegWit update, dating from July 2017, profoundly altered the structure of transactions on Bitcoin. Specifically, the idea was to move part of the transaction data (the witnesses) into a separate database (or seggregated), hence the name Seggregated Witness (SegWit) for this update. Without going into detail, this has enabled block sizes to be increased from 1MB to 4MB.
As for Taproot, this 2021 update has (vulgarly and among other new features) made it possible to integrate light and complex pieces of code into the witness data part of transactions. By combining these two features, Ordinals therefore makes it possible to store lightweight data in a Bitcoin transaction and associate it with a certain satoshi.
Although Luke Dashjr doesn’t question either SegWit or Taproot, this “flaw” he’s talking about is simply a subtle and unabashed use of them.
Old debates reopened
As early as Bitcoin’s launch in 2008, it was possible to include comments in a transaction. For the record, this is how Satoshi Nakamoto was able to insert the front-page headline of The Times newspaper into genesis block.
Nevertheless, while the first initiatives aimed at exploiting this possibility quickly saw the light of day (colored coins or the Omni protocol in 2012), some developers warned of a hijacked and risky use of blockchain. As a result, in 2014, a soft fork of the network reduced the limit to 80 characters in this comment field, calming tensions.
So, by proposing to store data in the Bitcoin blockchain, the Ordinals protocol has reopened years-old debates about Bitcoin’s real usefulness.
On the one hand, there are those who believe that Bitcoin should only be used for monetary purposes and should not become a database in which anything can be stored (in short, the anti-Ordinals). On the other, those who believe that everyone has the right to use it as they please (and that Ordinals should not be restricted).
The end of Ordinals?
The blocking of registrations by the Bitcoin Knots software and the Ocean Mining mining pool is obviously not something to be taken lightly. Nevertheless, the future of Bitcoin is dictated by users, and the Ordinals trend doesn’t look set to go away.
Users seem willing to pay significant fees for registrations, and Bitcoin miners have every incentive to accept them, since they bring in more revenue. As long as the market demands them, there will be miners ready to validate them, and Luke Dashjr’s initiatives won’t ban them for good.
