Bitcoin Core Dev Requests Spam Filter To Kill BRC20

One of the core developers of Bitcoin, Luke Dashjr, has issued a call to action to put an end to the Ordinals and BRC20 meme coin craze. Dashjr is one of the world’s most prolific Bitcoin developers and has been involved in the development of Bitcoin Core since 2011 (over 12 years) and probably one of the biggest critics of Ordinals.

Bitcoin Core developer calls for spam filter

Today, the Bitcoin blockchain continues to be congested. There are currently 414,000 transactions in the mempool waiting to be added to a block, with an average medium priority transaction fee of $13.46. As Bitcoinist reported, Ordinals and BRC20 are the main reason for the state of the network, in part because they were coded extremely inefficiently.

Dashjr considers Bitcoin NFTs and tokens a spam attack. According to him, measures should have been taken “months ago”, as he write in an email. He argues that “spam filtering has been a standard part of Bitcoin Core since day 1.” In addition, he says, an error was made in the software because the existing filters were not extended to Taproot transactions.

To recall, Bitcoin Ordinals and BRC20 tokens as they exist today are only enabled by the Segregated Witness (SegWit) and Taproot updates to the protocol in August 2017 and November 2021 respectively. It is also important to note that neither the patches were designed for the specific purpose of Ordinals.

However, as each update increased the amount of arbitrary data that could be stored in a block on the chain, it became possible to store images, videos and other data on the BTC blockchain via scripting. Since no limits were implemented, this can now be exploited.

But according to the kernel developer, the problem can be solved with a bug fix. “We can address that, or try a narrower approach like OP_RETURN (ie what ‘Ordirespector’ does). Since this is a bugfix, it doesn’t really even have to wait for a major release,” says Dashjr, who let to: “We already have pruning. It’s not an alternative to spam filtering.”

Mixed reactions

The email is currently being widely shared in the crypto community, with mixed reactions. Ethereum supporter Ryan Berckmans, referring to the block size war in 217, spoke of a “civil war” between BTC core developers, miners and Ordinals supporters.

Glassnode’s Chief Analyst “Checkmate” so it’s not a civil war, but “an email from a very ideological Bitcoin developer.” AND Jameson Lopp added: “LOL at anyone trying to claim that Luke is representative of someone other than Luke.”

Kraken Product Manager for NFTs, Washington Sanchez, shared a similar opinion, commenting:

Luke is waging a 1 man jihad against Ordinals, I doubt the other developers will take him seriously based on their precious comments that Bitcoin worked as expected if people submitted valid transactions.

Ultimately, it remains to be seen how the free market will decide. Are people willing to pay huge fees for Bitcoin NFTs and meme tokens (which were presumably created by people looking to get rich quick), or will the hype die down?

At press time, BTC was trading at $27,586.

Featured image from iStock, chart from TradingView.com