Since the beginning of the year, Registrations Ordinals are at the heart of activity on Bitcoin. The latter have, among other things, enabled the rise of NFTs and BRC-20s on Bitcoin. However, some developers do not view this new protocol favorably.
The War of the Ordinals
Last week, the developer Luke Dashjr Says Bitcoin Listings Exploit Vulnerability. According to him, these circumvent the limit on the size of the data of a transaction by writing the data in script code.
Obviously, this statement is not unanimous. According to the teams of Samurai Wallet, this is in no way a vulnerability. The latter go so far as to point the finger at censorship carried out by Ocean Mining, the pool created by Luke Dashjr. Since then, the two camps have been at war on social networks.
The situation is getting worse
While Bitcoin developers themselves are struggling to decide on the nature of the registrations, the United States has made a decision.
Thus, the Bitcoin listings were recently added to the US National Vulnerability Database (NVD) as a cybersecurity risk. Just that.
“In Bitcoin Core up to version 26.0 and in Bitcoin Knots before version 25.1.knots20231115, data carrier size limits can be circumvented by obfuscating the data as code (e.g., with OP_FALSE OP_IF), such as this has been exploited in the wild by Registrations in 2022 and 2023.”
Explain recording.
As you may have understood, this is the “vulnerability” raised by Luke Dashjr, on which the community cannot agree.
Being added to the NVD list means that a specific cybersecurity vulnerability has been recognized, cataloged and deemed important for public awareness. The database is maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the United States Department of Commerce.
The spread of discourse regarding the vulnerability may negatively affect the Bitcoin network. Indeed, this could lend weight to Luke Dashjr’s attempts to rid Bitcoin of the Ordinals.
If the “vulnerability” were to be fixed, it could potentially restrict Ordinals registrations on the network.
These debates are reminiscent of those which surrounded Bitcoin during SegWit deployment. Obviously, these debates are necessary to move the network forward in the right direction.