Bitcoin Community Discusses Solution For Validation Bug In Inscription Process

Several potential solutions are being discussed to address a code bug detected in the Bitcoin-native Ordinals protocol. This bug has failed to validate more than 1,200 entries. More than 66% of participants in a Twitter poll favored adding missed inscriptions later instead of retroactive reshuffling.

The Ordinals community is actively debating whether to add these inscription requests retroactively. Almost all members are in favor of their reintroduction. Until version 0.5.1 of the protocol, the bug originated from the fact that the indexer function of the protocol only tallied inscriptions from the initial input of a submitted transaction.

On April 10, a well-known member of the Ordinals community, who goes by the Twitter handle “Leonidas.og,” presented a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of each solution. A few days after “very ordinary,” a GitHub user initially brought the issue to light on April 5, this came.

A bug was found in the ordinals protocol that caused ~1,200 inscriptions that should have been valid to not get included. The first of these "orphan" inscriptions happened just before inscription number 420,285. The bug was caused by the ordinals protocol only counting…

— Leonidas (@LeonidasNFT) April 10, 2023

One solution involves choosing a block height to index “orphan” inscriptions retrospectively from inscription numbers 420,285 onwards. They identified the first instance of an orphan inscription approximately here.

Leonidas Og acknowledged that the reshuffling could lead to other complications. Still, he believed it was the purest solution as it would ensure that the ordinal protocol aligned with the logical ordering on-chain.

We currently have 1206 “hidden” inscriptions that are not indexed due to https://t.co/VZHCNaBmw0 – join the discussion on GitHub on this interesting consensus and decentralized protocol evolution issue

— ordinally (@veryordinally) April 10, 2023

Leonidas.og explained that the other option is to leave the validated inscription numbers unchanged. They can then select a specific block height to include these orphan inscriptions in the future.

The Impact Of  The Code Bug On Bitcoin Ordinals Protocol

The current protocol would not alter the existing inscription numbers. This means that approximately 1,200 unassigned items would not receive official inscription numbers. The market would determine their valuation as ‘misprints’.

“Yilak,” a member of the GitHub community for Ordinals, argued that there was no need to alter the order. This was because only a small percentage of registration holders had been affected.

Leonidas Og created a Twitter poll indicating that, as of now, 67.5% of 1,266 voters favor retaining the inscription numbers without any changes.

According to data from Dune, a crypto analytics platform, the number of Bitcoin addresses with a balance exceeding zero surpassed one million on April 8. After creating a record high of over 76,300 daily new addresses on April 4, they achieved this milestone shortly after.

Related Reading | Bitcoin And Gold Correlation Surges Amid Banking Instability, Outpacing Stocks

The Bitcoin network deems ordinals as digital assets similar to nonfungible tokens. These assets can include images, PDFs, videos, or audio in their composition.