Bitcoin Ordinal: Innovation or Disruption?

“Bitcoin will heal itself. Satoshi is alive. Core will listen to your requests and fix Ordinals bugs in a timely manner. “If that is what Satoshi means.” – Max Kaiser

Total ordinal inscription on the Bitcoin blockchain On December 15, it hit a whopping 48 million., accounting for approximately half of all daily BTC transactions. Earlier this month, Sotheby’s has announced that it will be auctioning Bitcoin Ordinals.

Ordinals is a protocol for issuing NFTs and alternative tokens on the Bitcoin network. – a feat that most people thought was impossible. Bitcoin ordinal numbers are pure NFTs and exist as native, resident immutable inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain, clogging the network. Conversely, most NFTs at this point are links or references to externalized artifacts. Therefore, space utilization is light.

Bitcoin Ordinal Debate: Innovation or Disruption? Sparks fly in the cryptocurrency arena

These Bitcoin-based NFTs have sparked considerable controversy. It is threatening to split the Bitcoin community through another hard fork. A Bitcoin hard fork occurs when a chain “forks” into two different chains due to disagreements over protocol rules.

If the debate over Bitcoin Ordinals actually leads to another Bitcoin fork, it will look a lot like the last one. Proponents of Ordinal, which may include Bitcoin miners, may decide to create a competing Bitcoin chain (Bitcoin Ordinal) where they can experiment with larger block sizes and all the complex features that come with it. The theoretical Bitcoin ordinal blockchain can have ordinal as well as stablecoins, tokens, etc.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a Bitcoin fork designed to increase block size for faster transactions, and there is also Bitcoin Satoshi’s Bison (BSV), which sought to expand Bitcoin’s scalability.

Criticism of ordinal numbers such as “the high priest of Bitcoin” max kaiser Lukedashjr, OCEAN CTO and Bitcoin core developer; Treat Bitcoin Ordinals as spam on the Bitcoin network. The core developer team has assigned Bitcoin Ordinals the identifier CVE-2023-50428, recording its credentials as follows: vulnerability (“Incomplete pattern matching”) This is the developer’s explanation for “wasted resources/DoS”.

“Inscriptions” is exploiting vulnerabilities in #Bitcoin Core to spam the blockchain.” Rukdashir wrote In your post about

Additionally, OCEAN, Jack Dorsey’s newly launched Bitcoin (BTC) mining pool, updated its mining software to exclude Bitcoin ordinal transactions from generated blocks. Adam Back, CEO of blockchain technology company Blockstream, said Bitcoin supporters “can’t stop JPEGs from Bitcoin.” In El Salvador, Ordinal is considered a security.

Luke Dashjr claims that Ordinals exploits a recently fixed vulnerability. Bitcoin Core Fork Bitcoin Knot. His view is that the vulnerability allowed Ordinals to circumvent Bitcoin’s restrictions on additional data in transactions. It does this by obfuscating the inscription data into program code.

Bitcoin core developers plan to make changes in Bitcoin Core v27. Recognized bugs can be repaired. A pending change in Bitcoin Core v27 will break the creation of new ordinal numbers. Existing ordinal numbers remain the same.

History seems to be starting to repeat itself as powerful factions dig into their respective positions (either pro or anti-Ordinal inscriptions). The Bitcoin block size debate began in 2016. In August 2017, the debate resulted in the final BTC fork, creating Bitcoin Cash. The current discussion centers around the same issue: transaction throughput.

This growing controversy could lead to a Bitcoin fork. The last Bitcoin fork was in August 2017. Segregated Witness (SegWit), a change to the Bitcoin transaction format that removes witness information from the block’s input fields, was launched amid much controversy, particularly on the Bitcoin subreddit and Bitcoin forum BitcoinTalk. Satoshi Nakaomoto started it.

In case of a hard fork due to inscription, miners may not follow the plan devised by Bitcoin’s core developer team because they make money from Bitcoin’s ordinal fees. This means that miners are naturally not the final arbiters of whether to adopt such changes.

When Ordinals become popular in early 2023, the online Bitcoin community will question whether the new applications Ordinals provide will be a net benefit to the network or whether they will be a burden by using the network for unintended purposes. There was soon a divide as to whether it was possible.

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Bitcoin Ordinals proponents are interested in how the protocol can be used to expand the use of Bitcoin beyond financial transactions. Bitcoin Ordinal use cases can also be applied to security tokens or stablecoins on the Bitcoin blockchain, Bitcoin-based smart contracts, etc.

Bitcoin Core developers may have already been debating how to fix the recognized Ordinal bug. These technical controversies take time to resolve. They probably have two legitimate options. One is to increase the Bitcoin block size, which seems unlikely given Bitcoin developers’ reluctance to do so in the past 2015-2016. Bitcoin block size debate. You could also try a “fix” at the protocol level, but this could result in a hard fork where BTC is split into two or more chains.

What is certain is that the opponents of Bitcoin ordinal numbers are: passionate. Developers will not sit on the sidelines as Ordinals will have a significant impact on network dynamics, which they perceive to be a protocol issue.

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