According to CryptoPotato, the rise of the Ordinals in 2023 has caused tensions within the Bitcoin community, particularly due to the surge in transaction fees. A contributor to Taproot Wizards, a collection featuring inscriptions by Bitcoin Ordinals, claims to have devised a method for Bitcoin enthusiasts to disapprove of Ordinals inscriptions. The script, designed by Rijndael, prompts nodes to reject blocks containing inscriptions. If the economic majority of nodes adopt this stance, miners may choose to build on a chain tip without inscriptions or sell within a smaller market.
Although Ordinals introduced new use cases to Bitcoin, they have also led to increased costs and delayed settlements for transactions on the network. Over the past year, the average transaction fee has surged by more than 25 times. As a result, several Bitcoin maximalists have expressed disdain for Ordinal inscriptions, denouncing them as spam, an attack, a scam, and a misuse of resources. Earlier this month, advocate Adam Simecka declared Ordinal inscriptions to be a scam, creating a rift among Bitcoin enthusiasts and predicting that this trend would lead to a hard fork – a new iteration of Bitcoin – that is destined to ultimately falter.
Prominent Bitcoin proponent and Hashcash creator Adam Back voiced disapproval of Ordinals, citing their lack of space efficiency. Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr criticized these inscriptions for their capacity to spam the blockchain by taking advantage of Bitcoin’s Segwit and Taproot upgrades in unintended ways. Dashjr has proactively taken steps to filter out Ordinals transactions from his personal Bitcoin node and his mining pool’s node, stirring controversy within the community and leading to accusations of censorship.
