A few options are being considered to address a code fault discovered in the Bitcoin $30,136 -native Ordinals protocol that has impeded the validation of over 1,200 inscriptions.
While nearly every Ordinals community member agrees that certain inscription requests should be reinstated, the community is divided on whether they should be inserted retrospectively.
The problem was caused by the protocol’s indexer function only counting inscriptions in the first input of a transaction submitted up to and including protocol version 0.5.1.
In an April 10 tweet, one famous Ordinals member known on Twitter as “Leonidas.og” detailed the benefits and downsides of each approach, just a few days after the issue was originally made public on April 5 by the GitHub user “veryordinally.”
The first option involves choosing a block height to index the so-called “orphan” inscriptions from inscription number 420,285 onwards, which is roughly where the first orphan inscription was identified.
“This feels like the ‘purist’ solution because it means the ordinals protocol will correctly match the logical ordering on-chain,” Leonidas.og explained, even though the reshuffling “may cause other complications.”
The alternative is not to change inscription numbers that have already been validated and to choose a block height to add these orphan inscriptions in at some point in the future, according to Leonidas.og: “This would not change any existing inscription numbers, so the 1,200 orphans would not be assigned inscription numbers officially in the protocol.” It would be up to the market to determine if they should be classified as “misprints.”
Another Ordinals GitHub community member, “Yilak,” stated that changing the order was unnecessary because only a small percentage of inscription owners were affected. According to a Twitter survey published by Leonidas. og, 67.5% of 1,266 voters are in favour of not modifying the inscription numerals at the time of writing.
According to statistics from the crypto analytics platform Dune, the number of Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions topped 1 million on April 8. It happened just days after daily new inscriptions surpassed 76,300 for the first time on April 4.
Ordinals, like nonfungible tokens, are considered digital artifacts on the Bitcoin network. They may include photos, PDFs, video, or audio files.
