Partnered With:

Luke wants to censor the Ordinals inscription, who in the Bitcoin community is for it and who is against it?

Jaleel加六and others2Authors

Read this article in 13 Minutes

What many people don’t know is that in the Bitcoin developer community, there are different voices and positions on how to deal with Ordinals and inscriptions.

Author: Jaleel and Luccy, BlockBeats.

Since the launch of the Ordinals protocol, Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr has been consistently opposed to it. Dashjr's opposition to the protocol can be traced back to a tweet in February of this year, stating that "the Ordinals protocol is an attack on Bitcoin." This opposition was also seen as an uncertain factor in the development of the protocol during the first wave of enthusiasm for it.

In May, Luke Dashjr wrote on his Github account that he was very annoyed by the hype around BRC-20 and meme coins, "Immediate corrective measures need to be taken to address Ordinals, and these measures should have been provided long ago."

His recent statement indicates that the Ordinals inscription represents an internal error in the system, and he advocates seeking a solution in the upcoming Bitcoin Core full node software. It is reported that Luke Dashjr's latest mining pool, Ocean, has also stopped processing transactions related to Ordinals. In addition, he also stored Ordinals as a vulnerability and uploaded it to the US National Vulnerability Database, registered as CVE-2023-50428.

"《Can inscriptions disappear? How much power do Bitcoin Core developers really have?》"

His position has caused significant criticism from various levels of the Bitcoin community. However, what many people do not know is that there are also different voices and positions within the Bitcoin developer community on how to handle Ordinals and Inscriptions.

Bitcoin developers who disagree with Luke

Previously, in emails sent to other Bitcoin developers and miners, Dashjr proposed integrating a "spam filtering" mechanism into Taproot transactions to prevent the spread of Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens in the Bitcoin network.

Luke Dashjr said, "Action should have been taken months ago. Spam filtering has always been a standard part of Bitcoin Core. It was a mistake that the existing filters were not extended to Taproot transactions, as this was a bug fix that did not actually require waiting for a major release." However, many Bitcoin developers have different opinions on this proposal.

Peter Todd

One of the key opposing voices comes from Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd, who opposes Luke Dashjr's proposed fix. Peter Todd believes that miners are unlikely to give up this source of income. Reviewing these transactions will only encourage the development of private memory pools, which is harmful to small miners and makes fee estimation unreliable.

In addition, in an email sent by Dashjr, Peter Todd mocked this move in a tweet, "Wake me up when Luke really succeeds in stopping an Ordinals inscription. No matter how many angry emails developers send, they don't have that kind of power."

Peter Todd believes that it is reasonable to classify fraud related to Ordinals, such as false advertising, as a crime. However, there is no reason to prohibit trade itself, and people should be able to trade what they want.

Peter Todd has been contributing code to Bitcoin Core since April 2012 and has made significant contributions to the development and promotion of Bitcoin. In terms of the number of commits, as of now, Peter Todd ranks 39th among Bitcoin Core code contributors.

Peter Todd's main contributions include several important Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs): including BIP 65, BIP 125, and BIP 63. In addition to these technical contributions, Todd also serves as an advisor to Coinkite and has played an important role in multiple Bitcoin-related projects. His work is not limited to the technical level and also includes contributions in security research.

Interestingly, Todd is known for his role as the "chief opponent" in the Bitcoin community, holding critical views on the security and technical aspects of Bitcoin's development process.

Sjors Provoost

Similarly, Bitcoin contributor Sjors Provoost also disagrees with Luke Dashjr's approach, believing that it may not incentivize the use of less invasive methods to release "spam". He emphasizes that Luke Dashjr's method may not necessarily encourage programmers to adopt less invasive methods. Instead, it may prompt them to seek more innovative ways to circumvent the proposed filters. Sjors Provoost encourages programmers to explore innovative solutions to bypass the proposed filters.

Sjors Provoost has been a Bitcoin developer since 2014 and has been working in the Bitcoin industry ever since. Since 2017, he has been active in the field as a contributor to Bitcoin Core, also known as the "shadowy super-coder". He is one of the most active reviewers in the Bitcoin Core project, reviewing and testing the contributions of other developers, which has been a bottleneck for the development of Bitcoin Core.

Sorting by number of submissions, as of now, sjors ranks 16th in the Bitcoin Core code contributor rankings.

Antoine Poinsot（darosior）

Antoine Poinsot, also known as darosior in the technical community, is a well-known and active Bitcoin developer who has been contributing code to Bitcoin Core since 2018. He is also a co-founder of the Bitcoin custody solution Revault and the Bitcoin wallet Liana, and has made contributions to the Bitcoin Core and Lightning Network's first implementation solution, the C-lightning project. He is also the Chief Technology Officer of Wizardsardine.

Sorting by number of submissions, as of now, darosior ranks 35th among Bitcoin Core code contributors. It seems that darosior does not support Luke.

In the GitHub discussion, Bitcoin developer Retropex supports Luke and says, "Glozow Luke added these tests a few weeks ago, and now it's time to review this pull request. You are responsible for the memory pool, and the state of the memory pool is very bad, with no less than 200,000 garbage transactions."

darosior replied to Retropex, saying: "Stop using this kind of language. No one needs to explain to you or anyone else how to use this software or the Bitcoin network. Your contributions to this forum in the past have made me doubt your prospects for success, but I would advise you to think twice before posting: your comments are not only foolish, but also potentially harmful."

Support for Luke's limited inscriptions

Meanwhile, there are also developers in the Bitcoin community who support Luke's restriction on inscriptions.

Giacomo

Giacomo Zucco is an active Bitcoin protocol and Lightning Network protocol advisor and educator. He is involved in multiple projects, including BHB Network, BTCTimes, Relai, BCademy, and Notarify, dedicated to promoting the development of Bitcoin. In addition, Zucco has been involved in projects such as GreenAddress, AssoBIT, BlockchainLab, and Bitcoin Magazine. He is active in the Bitcoin community as an educator, advisor, entrepreneur, and geek, supporting projects he believes are important for the future of Bitcoin.

In a conversation with bitcoinmagazine, Giacomo Zucco likened ordinal numbers to a large 'drug market' for Bitcoin. He believes that ordinal numbers are equivalent to a tool for measuring the value of Bitcoin.

They just created a place for exchange.

Because these things are illegal, what ordinal does is to do things that are already legal, basically like

Write pictures and use a very rare and precious asset, namely Bitcoin.

The blockchain is not hyped up for any other reason than technological speculation.