Bitcoin community discusses solutions to Ordinals protocol bug 

After discovering a problem in the inscription validation process, the community behind Ordinals — a bitcoin-based NFT — has come out with a potential fixes discussion in which a poll was held.

The Ordinals community is discussing whether or not specific inscription requests should be placed back into the game retrospectively, even though virtually all of its members agree that these requests should be included again.

In a tweet dated April 10, a prominent Ordinals member who goes by the Twitter handle Leonidas.og summarized the benefits and drawbacks of each potential solution. This came a few days after the issue was initially brought to light on April 5 by the GitHub user.

The first option entails picking a block height to retrospectively index the so-called “orphan” inscriptions, beginning with the number 420,285 and moving forward. This is approximately the location where the first orphan inscription was found.

Leonidas says that is the ‘purist’ approach since it indicates that the ordinal’s protocol would accurately mirror the logical ordering on-chain despite the possibility that the reorganization “may generate additional issues.”

The other option is to refrain from altering the inscription numbers that have already been approved and instead choose a block height that will allow these orphan inscriptions to be added in at a later point in time, according to him.

“This would not affect any of the already used inscription numbers. Therefore the 1,200 orphans would not be given inscription numbers formally in the protocol. It would be up to the market to decide whether or not to value them as “misprints.”

Leonidas.org on Twitter

Another member of the Ordinals GitHub community, who goes by the name Yilak, claimed that the order should not be changed since only a few inscription owners had been adversely affected.

The poll results

Around two-thirds of those who participated in a poll on Twitter believe that the missing inscriptions need to be inserted later rather than a retroactive reshuffling of the order of the inscriptions.

According to the poll developed by Leonidas.og, 67% of the 1,682 people who voted supported not modifying the inscription numerals as of press time.

There have been over 1,200 inscriptions that have not been verified as a direct result of a flaw in the code intrinsic to the Ordinals protocol used by bitcoin. There are a few potential remedies that are currently being considered.

The protocol’s indexer function only counted inscriptions in the first input of a transaction submitted up to and including version 0.5.1 of the protocol. This was the source of the issue that occurred.

Ordinals are considered the equivalent of NFTs in the bitcoin network because they are digital objects. These could be in the form of photographs, documents, videos, or even audio files.