Inscriptions, introduced in January and built upon a 15-year-old ecosystem to host token and NFT projects, continues to attract significant attention within the Bitcoin community. A contributor to the Bitcoin Ordinals art collection, Taproot Wizards, has reportedly found a way for Bitcoin users to reject Ordinals Inscriptions.
Although the claim has garnered attention, it is not expected to be widely accepted. Rijndael, the chief technology officer of Taproot Wizards, shared a Christmas message on December 26, offering a script node as a gift to “save” users from Ordinals.
Rijndael explained that the script node is designed to reject blocks containing Ordinals. He suggested that if a significant economic majority adopts the code, miners would prefer to build on blocks without Ordinals or sell to a smaller market.
Despite the provocative nature of the GitHub repository mocking Ordinals, Glassnode’s lead analyst, James Check, expressed skepticism about the software’s adoption, noting that it may brick nodes by automatically invalidating valid transactions.
Rijndael admitted that creating the software took about 15 minutes and acknowledged that the scenario could be easily circumvented by altering an Ordinals fingerprint.
The debate over Ordinals censorship resurfaced when Bitcoin mining firm OCEAN, led by Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr, began rejecting Ordinals transactions citing denial-of-service attacks and increased mempool congestion risks. While opinions vary, some believe that predictable mempool congestion could benefit Lightning Network transactions and users. However, unpredictable Ordinals transaction volumes could pose future problems for Lightning users. A solution to reduce Ordinals volumes may be implemented in the upcoming 2024 update of Bitcoin Core’s 27th version.