Veda Protocol indefinitely postponed Ordinals vulnerability controversy sparks Bitcoin community debate

Veda Protocol delays the Ordinals vulnerability indefinitely, sparking a controversial debate within the Bitcoin community

On December 10th, Ordinals expansion protocol Veda made an announcement on X, stating that the launch of the protocol has been indefinitely postponed due to force majeure. Veda-core and Veda-bvm will be open-sourced. The purpose of the Veda protocol is to solve the lack of L1 layer smart contracts in Bitcoin without changing its core consensus. Surprisingly, just 2 hours before the announcement of the postponement, Veda had announced that it was about to launch and had already formulated its token economics and token standards, and had been indexing for its Ordinals service. After that, the detailed personal information of the project founder was made public within the community.

Previous articles mentioned the controversy caused by the surge in Ordinals transactions leading to network congestion in BTC. After experiencing months of frenzy, Ordinals seems to be entering a new wave of controversy, and the open-sourcing of Veda is a part of this wave. Dashjr referring to Ordinals as a “bug” is at the center of this controversy. This series of events has brought uncertainty to the development of Ordinals and further raised concerns. In this article, TrendX Research Institute will delve into these events and their subsequent impact on Ordinals.

Is Ordinals a “bug”?

On December 6th, Luke Dashjr, a Bitcoin developer and co-founder of Ocean mining pool, launched a lengthy criticism against Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens, claiming that they are exploiting a bug in BTC called SLianGuaiM attack. According to Dashjr, since 2013, the Bitcoin core code has allowed users to set limits on the size of additional data in transactions. However, the inscriptions bypass this limitation by disguising their data as program code, making them a “bug.”

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Dashjr stated that the Bitcoin core code is still vulnerable to “SLianGuaiM attacks” in the upcoming v26 version, and developers hope to address this issue before v27 next year. Dashjr also mentioned that if the bug is resolved, although existing inscriptions will continue to exist, Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens will be stopped. On the same day, Dashjr, who serves as the Chief Technology Officer of the decentralized mining protocol Ocean, announced on X that Bitcoin Knots upgrade “fixed the bug that modern SLianGuaiM attackers have been exploiting for a long time.” Dashjr later revealed that this vulnerability had been entered as CVE-2023-50428 in the US National Vulnerability Database.

The inscription entry is recorded in the US National Vulnerability Database.

The Debate about Ordinals

The debate about Ordinals has always been there, and Dashjr’s speech has pushed these debates to a climax: on the Bitcointalk forum, there are many discussions about resisting “attacks on Bitcoin,” and these people claim it is the malicious work of BSV developers. They are also discussing the adoption of a soft fork to enforce strict Taproot verification script size, and how the protocol filters content they consider to be “SLianGuaiM attacks,” or even taking a hard fork to revert Taproot.

Bob Bodily, co-founder and CEO of Ordinals market Bioniq, disagrees with this view. He believes, “Due to Ordinals, the demand for Bitcoin block space has increased this year, and these transactions have paid over $100 million in network fees. Miners want more income, and Ordinals brings a renaissance to Bitcoin with huge demand for block space.” Bodily also said that this move will undercut many of the benefits brought by Taproot and Segwit upgrades and eliminate valid use cases for Bitcoin. Even in the case of implementation restrictions, Bodily believes that the demand for protocol transactions like Bitcoin Ordinals still exists.

Like Bodily, Casa CTO Jameson Lopp expects economic rationality to prevail. He explained on X that miners are mostly large companies now and have a responsibility to maximize profits for shareholders. Therefore, they will mine any valid transaction that pays the highest fee. He also said that few people agree to classify inscriptions as vulnerabilities, and Dashjr’s categorization of them as SLianGuaiM attacks is subjective.

Hass McCook, former member of the Bitcoin Mining Council and staunch believer in Bitcoin, does not like Ordinals either, but he also believes that “getting rid of” Ordinals is not a good thing. He said, “Freedom is the most important thing outside of Bitcoin. My overall view is that I personally don’t like it (Ordinals) and don’t see its value. But I don’t want to censor it. I think it could lead to a very dark path.”

The Future of Ordinals

Luke Dashjr’s proposal does not imply final execution. He himself does not have the authority over Bitcoin’s code, and the upgrade also requires miner voting.

Bitcoin is different from Ethereum; developers do not have the final say, and code upgrades must go through miner voting. Opposition will prevent the upgrade from proceeding, even if developers insist on it, miners still have the right to choose to fork. However, the possibility of a fork is relatively low at a crucial moment in the approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF.

At the same time, removing high-value transactions from the memory pool will reduce miner income, and Bitcoin miners are unlikely to engage in a “moral struggle” over this issue. Even if Bitcoin community members intend to maintain the value of Bitcoin and rectify the negative results brought by Ordinals, such as rising gas fees and BTC network congestion, it cannot be denied that the Ordinals heat has also brought positive development to the BTC ecosystem.

Famous podcaster Peter McCormack stated that these assets (Ordinals) do not benefit those who use Bitcoin for payments because they only result in a high fee environment. It is easy to see that the emergence of Ordinals has caused losses for some Bitcoin holders, which is the central point of contention between supporters and opponents of Ordinals.

Conclusion

The debate about Ordinals is still ongoing. The appearance of Ordinals in the Bitcoin ecosystem has had a profound impact, sparking discussions about gas fees, block space requirements, and more. As for the contradictions between supporters and opponents, as well as the impact caused by the Bitcoin network, there may be more suitable protocols or methods to address these issues in the future. The Bitcoin community is facing the challenge of how to deal with Ordinals, but overall, the potential direction of community voting seems to lean towards supporting Ordinals, with relatively low possibilities of a fork. After all, for miners and supporters of Ordinals, as long as at least one Bitcoin mining pool includes scripted transactions, they are unlikely to disappear.

References: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-50428

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