BTC response to Ordinals will be yet another demonstration of centralized power

a year ago

The emergence of BTC Ordinals, which allow for the inscription of additional information onto individual “satoshis” or “sats” (the smallest transactable unit on Bitcoin-based networks), has finally brought the NFT craze over to BTC.

This has injected some much-needed hype into the Bitcoin-derivative network following an ugly 12 months for the network and the wider industry. Transaction volumes have hit all-time highs, and— in true BTC fashion—so have mining fees.

Ordinals have been highly divisive. Some decry the congestion caused by sending so much traffic through the inherently-limited BTC blockchain, while others have heralded the added attention brought to BTC by NFTs as ‘bullish.’

It’s lucky, then, that the BTC network is fully decentralized so that the response to this highly controversial development does not depend on the lucky few individuals with the centralized power to make changes to the BTC network. This is especially lucky since lawmakers and regulators are now recognizing that centralized blockchain projects likely amount to illegal securities offerings, and the courts are now entertaining the possibility that centralized blockchain developers are fiduciaries who owe strict obligations to those using their products.

Yes, it’s lucky indeed that BTC is decentralized… right?

Except…BTC is centralized

Except that’s not true at all: BTC is centralized, and BTC core developers are proving it in their response to the Ordinals craze. Those in whom that centralized power resides are already taking steps to nip in the bud what has become a fairly well-received revolution within BTC, as seen from the BTC developer mailing list.

“If the volume does not die down over the next few weeks,” wrote mailing list subscriber Ali Sherief, “should we take action?…Although this community has a strong history of not putting its fingers into pies unless absolutely necessary – an example being during the block size wars and Segwit – should similar action be taken now?”

Luke Dashjr, one of BTC’s most respected core developers, chimed in:

“Action should have been taken months ago. Spam filtration has been a standard part of Bitcoin Core since day 1. It’s a mistake that the existing filters weren’t extended to Taproot transactions. We can address that, or try a more narrow approach like OP_RETURN (ie, what “Ordisrespector” does). Since this is a bug fix, it doesn’t even really need to wait for a major release.”

Another of BTC’s most well-known developers, Peter Todd, added:

“Miners are making millions of dollars from these inscription transactions. Miners can and do run their own nodes and interconnect to each other. Many people like myself will continue to run nodes that do not attempt to block inscriptions. And of course, the current flood of BRC-20 transactions embed very little data in the chain per transaction and could easily be adapted to use OP_RETURN or any number of other data embedding schemes; if they were modified to embed no data at all they wouldn’t be much smaller, and I’m sure you’d still be complaining that they were... Source

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