Several solutions are now being discussed to fix a code bug found in Bitcoin’s native Ordinals protocol that prevented more than 1,200 signatures from being validated.
Although almost everyone in the Ordinals community agrees that these subscript requests should be re-run, there is still debate among community members regarding whether or not they should be added retroactively.
The error was due to the fact that the indexing function of the protocol only counts the captions that were included in the first input of the transaction up to version 0.5.1 of the protocol.
A prominent Ordinals member known on Twitter as “Leonidas.og” tweeted on April 10 summed it up the advantages and disadvantages of each solution. This comes a few days following the issue was first reported on April 5 by GitHub user “veryordinally”.
The first solution involves selecting a block height that retroactively indexes the so-called “orphan” subtitles starting with subtitle number 420,285. This is roughly where the first orphan inscription was identified.
“This seems like the ‘purist’ solution because it means that the Ordinal protocol correctly matches the logical order on the chain.” explained Leonidas.og, despite admitting that the rearrangement “may cause other complications”. “The alternative is to not change the already authenticated caption numbers and choose a block height to insert these orphaned captions at some point in the future.” Leonidas.og explained. “This would not change the existing subtitle numbers, so the approximately 1,200 orphan subtitle numbers would not be officially assigned a serial number in the protocol. It would depend on the market whether this is “valued as a false identifier or not”.
Voting is still going on to fix the Ordinals bug
Another Ordinals GitHub community member, “Yilak”, argued that the order should not be changed since only a fraction of the caption owners were affected.
According to a Twitter poll created by Leonidas.og at the time of writing, 67.5% of 1,266 voters support not changing the caption numbers.
On April 8, data from the Dune cryptoanalysis platform according to the number of Bitcoin Ordinals captions exceeded 1 million. This comes just days following April 4th, when new daily captions hit a new record of 76,300.
Ordinals are digital artifacts on the Bitcoin network, similar to NFTs. These can contain unique collections of images, PDFs, video or audio formats.
