Bitcoin Core Dev Calls For Spam Filter To Kill BRC20
One of Bitcoin’s leading developers, Luke Dashjr has sent out a call to action to end the Ordinal and BRC20 coin craze. Dashjr is one of the most prolific Bitcoin developers in the world 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 Asks for Spam Filter
Today, the Bitcoin blockchain remains congested. There are currently 414,000 transactions in the mempool waiting to be added to a block, with the average medium priority transaction fee being $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 ineffectively.
Dashjr considers NFTs and Bitcoin tokens a spam attack. According to him, the measures should have been taken “months ago”, as he writes in an email. He argues that “spam filtering has been a standard part of Bitcoin Core since day one.” Furthermore, he says, there was a bug in the software because the existing filters were not extended to Taproot transactions.
As a reminder, Bitcoin Ordinals and BRC20 tokens as they exist today are only made possible by the Segregated Witness (SegWit) and Taproot protocol updates in August 2017 and November 2021, respectively. It is also important to note that none of the updates were designed for the specific purpose of Ordinals.
But as each update increased the amount of arbitrary data that could be stored in an on-chain block, it became possible to store images, videos and other data on the BTC blockchain via script. As no limits were implemented, this can now be exploited.
However, according to the core developer, the issue can be fixed with a bug fix. “We can address that or try a more restricted approach like OP_RETURN (i.e. what the “Ordirespector” does). Since this is a bug fix, it doesn’t even have to wait for a major release,” says Dashjr, who added, “We already have the removal. It is not an alternative to spam filtering.”
mixed reactions
The email is being shared widely in the cryptographic community, with mixed reactions. Ethereum proponent Ryan Berckmans, alluding to the block size war in 217, spoke of a “civil war” between major BTC developers, miners and supporters of Ordinals.
Chief Analyst at Glassnode “Checkmate” he said not a civil war, but “an email from a very ideological Bitcoin developer”. OG Jameson Lopp added: “LOL to anyone trying to claim that Luke is representative of anyone other than Luke.”
Kraken Product Manager for NFTs Washington Sanchez shared a similar opinion, commenting:
Luke is waging a 1 man jihad against the Ordinals, I doubt the other developers will take him seriously based on his precious comments that Bitcoin was working as expected if people were sending valid transactions.
Ultimately, it probably 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 subside?
At press time, BTC was trading at $27,586.
Featured Image from iStock, chart from TradingView.com