Bitcoin community must not allow let Ordinals debate cause division

The following is a guest post by Kadan Stadelmann, CTO at Komodo Blockchain.

A great debate on Bitcoin Ordinals, essentially NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain, has broken out. One side of the debate believes there is no place for Ordinals on the Bitcoin blockchain. The other side believes ordinals are the perfect innovation for the first blockchain. 

Either way, the debate is now reaching fever pitch. Bitcoin core developers are looking to introduce an update that would make the minting of future Ordinals impossible. Bitcoin Ordinal proponents are protesting the change but don’t call the shots. 

BRC-20, the fungible token standard that makes ordinals possible, supports creating and transferring fungible tokens in the ordinals protocol. Furthermore, Ordinal inscriptions use the Bitcoin unspent transaction output (UTXO) sets. Thus, Ordinals increase output demand and the size of the UTXO set. 

BRC-20 is similar to Counterparty, which provided a way to create NFTs involving links pointing to images, but those links today are all broken after IMGUR made it a policy that their service cannot be used for NFTs. Therefore, Ordinals proponents argue that they want to put the data and images onchain to avoid such issues in the future. 

Ironically, Segregated WItness and Taproot made Ordinal inscriptions possible on the Bitcoin blockchain. The present-day anti-Ordinals crowd made Ordinals on Bitcoin possible with past Bitcoin design decisions.

The Ordinals crowd did not change the consensus rules of Bitcoin. SegWit and Taproot made Ordinals possible. Therefore, Ordinals proponents argue that the network already allows such functionality. Pay the fee, post the data—no matter what the data—onto the Bitcoin blockchain. 

Segregated Witness (SegWit) altered the transaction format of Bitcoin to defend against transaction malleability while decreasing transaction times by increasing block capacity and speeding up validations by storing more transactions in a single block. 

Taproot offers a new way to perform Bitcoin transactions by enhancing privacy and flexibility for users. It also activates Merklized Alternative Script Trees (MAST), which condense complex Bitcoin transactions into a single hash, reducing transaction fees, minimizing memory usage and improving Bitcoin’s scalability.

Detractors view Ordinals as an attack on Bitcoin, undermining Bitcoin’s strength as digital gold and adding unnecessary risk and scams to the blockchain. Ordinal detractors think that…