Bitcoin developers call to block Ordinals, BRC-20 tokens from the network
The meme coin and NFT trading phenomena on Bitcoin caused by Ordinals has led to a massive increase in transaction fees and blockchain congestion.
Now at least one developer has offered a solution.
Luke Dashjr, a leading Bitcoin code contributor on Github, emailed other Bitcoin developers and miners asking them to implement “spam filtering” as part of Taproot transactions to block Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens.
“Action should have been taken months ago,” he wrote. “Spam filtering has been a standard part of Bitcoin Core since day 1.”
The developer wrote that a change must be imposed either through a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) or as an update to the network’s Core client that node operators and miners run to validate transactions.
Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) are formal proposals voted on by node operators and miners to introduce updates and changes to the protocol, or related processes.
Dashjr noted in the email that the filter can be implemented immediately as a “bug fix” and not have to wait for a “major release” or soft fork.
Bitcoin Core is a free and open source software client for the network that serves as the reference implementation for the Bitcoin protocol. Currently, the software is running the latest version, 22.0, without any filter.
Bitcoin Twitter Weighs In
Founder of DeGod’s NFT project Frank shared the email, which drew harsh criticism from people on Crypto Twitter.
A remarkable one respond came from Washington Sanchez, the NFT product manager at Kraken, who called Dashjr’s attempt to block development a “1-man jihad against the Ordinals.”
“I doubt the other developers will take him seriously based on their precious comments that Bitcoin worked as expected if people submit valid transactions,” he said.
Refuting any claims that Luke represents the entire developer community, James Loppson, CTO of Casa, responded saying“LOL at anyone trying to claim that Luke is representative of someone other than Luke.”
In a separate discussion on the public Bitcoin forum, bitcointalk.org, some members expressed dismay at using Bitcoin for purposes other than transferring value. However, an urgent need to add an Ordinal filter was not obvious.
One developer suggested that “the developers seem to agree that this is an important issue, but also that they’re not actually going to do anything about it.”
“It’s up to the rest of us to create Layer 2 implementations,” they said.
