Are Ordinals registrations an aberration, posing a risk to U.S. cybersecurity? Yes, according to developer Luke Dashjr, who is credited with an official report. An update on the subject, and what’s at stake in the Bitcoin (BTC) ecosystem right now.
The Ordinals, a “vulnerability” for US cybersecurity?
It’s the controversy of the moment in the Bitcoin (BTC) ecosystem. Earlier this month, one of Bitcoin’s most closely followed developers, Luke Dashjr, attacked the Ordinals system. He believes that Bitcoin registrations – which can be used as non-fungible token equivalents (NFTs) – are an aberration.
Since then, the debate has raged on, and the Bitcoin ecosystem fears that Ordinals will disappear. This week, however, the controversy took another step forward. On December 9, a Bitcoin network vulnerability was reported to a database in the USA. According to this person, the vulnerability is Ordinals.
The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is a database managed by an institute dependent on the US Department of Commerce. It lists cybersecurity risks in the United States, and has given the Ordinals vulnerability a “medium” severity score.
The person who made the report doesn’t name Ordinals directly, but explains why she thinks the listings are problematic:
The report in question on the CVE website
As a reminder, Bitcoin Core is the most widely used client software for the Bitcoin network. It should also be noted that Luke Dashjr promotes a competing version of the software: Bitcoin Knots, which he develops himself.
Luke Dashjr is the source of this alert?
That’s all it took for reports to emerge that Luke Dashjr was behind the report. According to our CoinTelegraph colleagues, who interviewed him, the developer did ask to generate a CVE number… But he didn’t register the alert per se. That said, he thinks it’s a good idea :
“I think the average score underestimates the impact [of Ordinals], and that it doesn’t consider the long-term effects of a saturated blockchain. “
Luke Dashjr has also implemented a “fix” for Bitcoin Knots. Nodes using it can now no longer validate transactions using the Ordinals protocol.
The debate continues to rage in the ecosystem
The debate is therefore as much political as technological, and highlights differences in philosophy between several historical players in the Bitcoin ecosystem. For some, Ordinals are a threat to the adoption of Bitcoin, which would simply monopolize the network for useless purposes. For others, however, it’s a revolution that demonstrates the dynamism of the ecosystem.
While this debate occupies a major place, it’s important to remember that at Bitcoin, it’s the users and miners who come first. The latter have a pecuniary interest in keeping Ordinals, given the considerable fees they generate. And users’ interest in registration is obvious.
So what does the future hold for Ordinals? For Luke Dashjr, they represent a flaw to be corrected, but for the time being, they don’t look set to disappear. What is certain is that the debate will continue to rage within the ecosystem
