One of the world’s most prolific Bitcoin developers and a vocal critic of Ordinals, Luke Dashjr, has issued a call to action to end the Ordinals and BRC-20 token craze. Dashjr has been involved in the development of Bitcoin Core since 2011, spanning over 12 years.
The Bitcoin blockchain remains congested today, with 414,000 transactions in the mempool waiting to be added to a block, resulting in an average medium-priority transaction fee of $13.46. As reported by Bitcoinist, the state of the network is mainly due to the immensely ineffective coding of Ordinals and BRC20.
In an email, Dashjr expresses his opinion that Bitcoin NFTs otherwise known as Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens are a spam attack and argues that measures should have been taken months ago. He contends that spam filtering has been a standard part of Bitcoin Core since day 1st and that the existing filters were not extended to Taproot transactions due to a software mistake.
It is worth noting that Bitcoin Ordinals and BRC20 tokens, as they exist today, are only possible due to the Segregated Witness (SegWit) and Taproot updates to the protocol in August 2017 and November 2021, respectively. It is also important to highlight that neither update was specifically designed for Ordinals.
With every update, the amount of arbitrary data that a script could store within a block on-chain increased, making it possible to store pictures, videos, and other types of data on the BTC blockchain. Since no limitations were put in place by the developers, this is now exploitable.
However, the core developer stated that the issue can be resolved with a bug fix. Dashjr suggested a narrow approach like OP_RETURN or addressing the bug. According to him, as this is a bug fix, it doesn’t need to wait for a major release. He added that pruning is not an alternative to spam filtering, but they already have it.
Amid the chaos it is important to note that twitter suspended Luke Dashjr and the community has been asking Twitter to clarify the issue.
The crypto community is currently sharing the email extensively, and there are varying reactions. Ryan Berckmans, an Ethereum proponent, referred to a “civil war” between BTC core developers, miners, and Ordinals supporters, alluding to the block-size war in 2017.
The chief analyst of Glassnode, “Checkmate,” stated that it is not a civil war but rather “an email from a very ideological Bitcoin developer.” OG Jameson Lopp also added that “LOL at anyone who tries to claim that Luke is representative of anyone other than Luke.” The email is currently being shared extensively in the crypto community, and reactions are mixed.
In the end, it is uncertain how the free market will respond. Will individuals be willing to pay exorbitant fees for Bitcoin NFTs and meme tokens (presumably created by those seeking quick profits), or will the hype eventually dissipate?
