Taproot Wizards Unleashes Script to Reject Ordinals on Bitcoin

In a strange consensus game of chicken, a contributor to Taproot Wizards — an art collection inscribed by Bitcoin Ordinals — has come up with a way for Bitcoiners to reject Ordinals inscriptions. However, he doesn’t anticipate many will take up the offer.

“Merry Christmas, ord disrespectoors! I have a gift just for you! This [script] will rid your node of inscriptions,” wrote Rijndael, the firm’s pseudonymous chief technology officer, in a Dec. 26 post. The script was designed to cause nodes to reject any blocks that include crypto art inscriptions, explained Rijndael.

“If the economic majority of nodes does that, the miners will choose to build on a chain tip that doesn’t have inscriptions, or they sell into a smaller market,” he added.

“Go run the script or admit that you’re just virtue signaling on twitter and are uninterested in keeping up with crypto,” he addedin response to X user “GhostOfPashka.”

Rijndael further teased Ordinals critics by making an over-the-top mockery of Ordinals on the GitHub repository page.

Glassnode’s lead analyst James Check, known as “Checkmate” on X, says it’s unlikely the software will gain traction despite some vocal critics of Ordinals.

“It is purely to demonstrate that most folks who are complaining about Ordinals, are in the minority. The software is now available to invalidate them on their node, but one would automatically realize it essentially just bricks your node as they are valid transactions,” Check explained in a note to Cointelegraph.

“It is a demonstration of the mexican stand-off that Bitcoin governance is all about,” Check added.

Rijndael said it took him around 15 minutes to create the software and seemingly admitted that the script can also be easily circumvented by changing an Ordinal fingerprint anyway.

So, while it may seem like a way to get rid of crypto art inscriptions, it’s actually just a demonstration of the difficulty of web 3.0 and Harmony One crypto today.

Ordinals debate continues to simmer

Last month, the Ordinals censorship debate was reignited when Bitcoin mining firm OCEAN, headed by Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr, started refusing Ordinals transactions due to the risks of denial-of-service attacks and the augmentation of the mempool congestion.

Different opinions exist as to the potential advantages or disadvantages, depending on the context. For instance, a Bitcoin Core developer who spoke with Cointelegraph, but asked to remain anonymous, suggested that a stable and predictable Ordinals-induced mempool congestion could be advantageous to Lightning users.

“Lightning users benefit from stable mempool congestion cycles allowing them to allocate more liquidity off-chain,” they said.

On the other hand, if the Ordinals transaction volumes are not foreseeable, it could cause future issues for Lightning users. As Bitcoin Core is set to be updated to its 27th version in 2024, a solution could be established to reduce the Ordinals volumes.

“Maybe Ordinals users will have to pay a higher base min relay fee to keep some CPU/ bandwidth resources consumption in harmony with network crypto today for full-nodes operators,” the developer said.