The debate over inscriptions has once again kicked off as the Bitcoin network faces congestion with a drastic rise in unconfirmed transactions.
Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr shared a post on X and said that inscriptions are created by exploiting a vulnerability in Bitcoin, and it is spamming the network. The mempool data shows that there are over 269,000 unconfirmed transactions on the Bitcoin network.
“Bitcoin Core has allowed users to set a limit on the size of extra data in transactions they relay or mine,” said Dashjr. “By obfuscating their data as program code, inscriptions bypass this limit.” He assessed that Ordinal NFTs, which use inscriptions, are an attack on Bitcoin.
While the Bitcoin Core developer has taken a stand against Inscriptions, several Bitcoin community members have argued that it is essentially giving an economic value to Bitcoin.
Moreover, Inscription transactions are prioritized as they contain higher fees than normal Bitcoin transactions. The increasing number of Inscriptions transactions has caused massive congestion on the Bitcoin network.
Dashjr referred to Inscriptions as a bug and said that it was recently fixed in the Bitcoin Knots v25.1 patch, while Bitcoin Core will fix it in v27, which is coming next year. According to Dashjr, once the vulnerability is fixed, it will end support for Ordinals and all other BRC-20 tokens.
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