Bitcoin Ordinals community debates fix after inscription validation bug

A few solutions are being discussed to fix a code bug found in the Bitcoin (BTC)-native Ordinals protocol which has prevented over 1,200 inscriptions from being validated.

While nearly every member of the Ordinals community agrees that these inscription requests should be reincluded, the community is debating whether they should be added retroactively or not.

The bug came from the indexer function of the protocol only counting inscriptions that were in the first input of a transaction submitted up to and including version 0.5.1 of the protocol.

One prominent Ordinals member known on Twitter as “Leonidas.og” summarized the pros and cons of each solution in an April 10 tweet, coming a few days after the issue was first made public on April 5 by the GitHub user “veryordinally.”

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.og (@LeonidasNFT) April 10, 2023

The first solution involves selecting a block height to retroactively index the so-called “orphan” inscriptions from inscription number 420,285 onwards, which is roughly where the first orphan inscription was identified.

“This feels like the ‘purist’ solution because it means the ordinals protocol would correctly match the logical ordering on-chain,” Leonidas.og explained, despite acknowledging that the reshuffling “may cause other complications.”

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

The alternative is to not change inscription numbers that have already been validated and to pick a block height to add these orphan inscriptions in at some time in the future, Leonidas.og explained:

“This would not change any existing inscription numbers so the ~1,200 orphans would not be assigned inscription numbers officially in the protocol. It would be up to the market to value them as ‘misprints’ or not.”

Another Ordinals GitHub community member, “Yilak” argued in favor of not changing up the order because only a fraction of inscription owners have been impacted.

At the time of writing, 67.5% of 1,266 voters are in favor of not changing the inscription numbers according to a Twitter poll created by Leonidas.og.

On April 8, the number of Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions surpassed 1 million according to data from the crypto analytics platform Dune. It came just days after daily new inscriptions hit a record of over 76,300 on April 4.

Ordinals are considered to be digital artifacts on the Bitcoin network, similar to that of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and can compromise of images, PDFs, video or audio formats.

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