Some workarounds are being discussed to fix a code bug found in Bitcoin’s (BTC) native Ordinals protocol that has prevented more than 1,200 signups from being validated.
While almost everyone in the Ordinals community agrees that these signup requests should be reintroduced, the community is debating whether or not they should be added retroactively.
The error came from the protocol’s indexing function only counting entries that were in the first entry of a transaction sent up to and including protocol version 0.5.1.
A prominent Ordinals member known on Twitter as “Leonidas.og” summarized the pros and cons of each solution in a tweet on April 10, just days after the affair it was first made public on April 5 by GitHub user “veryordinally”.
An error was found in the ordinal protocol that caused ~1200 entries that should have been valid to not be included. The first of these “orphan” inscriptions occurred just before inscription number 420,285. The error was caused by the ordinal protocol only counting…
— Leonidas.og (@LeonidasNFT) April 10, 2023
The first solution is to select a block height to retroactively index the so-called “orphaned” entries starting at entry number 420.285, which is roughly where the first orphaned entry was identified.
“This feels like the ‘purist’ solution because it means that the ordinal protocol would correctly match the logical order in the chain,” Leonidas.og explained, despite acknowledging that the reorganization “may cause other complications.”
We currently have 1206 “hidden” entries that are not indexed due to https://t.co/VZHCNaBmw0 – join the discussion on GitHub on this interesting topic of consensus and decentralized protocol evolution
– ordinally (@veryordinally) April 10, 2023
The alternative is to not change the registration numbers that have already been validated and choose a block height to add these orphaned registrations at some point in the future, Leonidas.og explained:
“This would not change any existing registration numbers, so the ~1,200 orphans would not be officially assigned registration numbers in the protocol. It would be up to the market to assess them as ‘print errors’ or not”.
Another member of the Ordinals GitHub community, “Yilak” argument in favor of not changing the order because only a fraction of registration owners have been affected.
Related: Bitcoin Ordinals Daily Signups Rise Due to ‘BRC-20 Tokens’
At the time of writing this report, 67.5% of 1,266 voters are in favor of not changing registration numbers according to a Twitter poll created by Leonidas.og.
On April 8, the number of Bitcoin Ordinals signups surpassed one million according to data of the Dune cryptanalysis platform. It came just days after new daily registrations hit a record of more than 76,300 on April 4.
Ordinals are considered digital artifacts on the Bitcoin network, similar to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and can compromise images, PDFs, video, or audio formats.
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