Is Bitcoin’s inscription still secure? Who opposes and who supports it?

Is Bitcoin's Security Still Reliable? Current Perspectives and Opinions

Source: Daoshuo Blockchain

Recently, a Bitcoin client developer named Luke made a statement online, suggesting that the inscription of Bitcoin is an attack on the Bitcoin network initiated by users exploiting a “vulnerability” in the Bitcoin client. The forging of the inscription causes the Bitcoin blocks to become too large, thereby affecting the entire network. Luke claims that he will solve this problem, and once the new version of the client is launched, all Bitcoin inscriptions (Ordinals) will be cleared.

This statement immediately caused a stir in the entire community, as it touched on the interests of many parties.

Firstly, the existing holders of inscriptions and numerous project teams developed around the inscriptions oppose this.

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Secondly, the major miners who have also profited heavily from the rise of inscriptions.

During the fervor of inscriptions, miners were able to earn fees from inscription forging and transactions that sometimes exceeded the block rewards of Bitcoin.

With the upcoming Bitcoin halving next year, miners will likely rely on fees even more to maintain profitability.

Therefore, immediately after this statement was made, there were prominent miners expressing their opposition.

In the current Bitcoin network, popular client software includes: Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Node, Btcd, Bitprim, Bitcoin Knots.

Luke, who made this statement, primarily maintains the Bitcoin Knots client. This client is currently adopted by the Ocean mining pool, and Luke is also the CTO of this pool. Ocean pool is also supported by Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter. This mining pool generally takes a negative stance towards inscriptions. So, it is not surprising that Luke made this statement.

However, the Bitcoin network is not solely determined by the Bitcoin Knots client. Miners can choose their preferred version from the aforementioned client software for installation.

Even if Bitcoin Knots completely opposes inscriptions, as long as other clients continue to support inscriptions and receive support from the majority of miners, inscriptions will not be eliminated.

According to data available online, Bitcoin has a total of 17,476 client nodes, among which only 76 nodes run the Bitcoin Knots client. It is evident that Knots has no advantage in the entire Bitcoin network, not even a fraction.

Of course, this event could also escalate to the most extreme scenario: developers, miners, and the community being unable to reach a consensus, resulting in a Bitcoin fork.

After the fork, there will still be a struggle to determine which chain will be recognized as the genuine Bitcoin. It is not easy to determine in the short term whether Luke or those who support his viewpoint will dominate in this struggle.

So no matter which angle you look at it from, overall, I think the possibility of all inscriptions being wiped out is the smallest, there is a possibility that the existing inscriptions will be preserved but future inscriptions will no longer be supported, and the possibility of both current and future inscriptions continuing to be supported is the greatest.

In addition, this incident also illustrates the importance of decentralization for underlying infrastructure. In this case, it is precisely because Bitcoin’s clients are not monopolized and there are a variety of choices that miners will not be forced to choose only one, so the probability is high that inscriptions will continue to exist in the Bitcoin network.

By the way, similar cases have also occurred in the history of Ethereum’s development. In the early years, due to the diversity of Ethereum clients, even if one of the clients was attacked by hackers and shut down, the entire network still operated stably.

I remember in the online discussions in September and November, I shared my views on the security of inscriptions, and I specifically compared the security differences between inscriptions (Ordinals) and Bitcoin STAMPs.

Theoretically, Bitcoin STAMPs are safer than inscriptions because they directly attach data to UTXOs, while inscriptions write data in witness data. And witness data can theoretically be deleted by miners, or miners can choose not to retain witness data after verifying segregated witness transactions.

However, in practice, as long as one miner still retains witness data, inscriptions will continue to exist in the Bitcoin network. So in practice, the possibility of Bitcoin inscriptions being deleted is really small.

Moreover, after a year of development, almost all miners have benefited from the rise of inscriptions, so they have more motivation to maintain and support the development of the inscription ecosystem.

So in my opinion, this incident is just an episode, it will not evolve into a storm.

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