Developer Inserts ‘Bug’ Into Bitcoin Ordinals – How Bad Is It?

There is a new controversy in the Bitcoin Ordinals community after a developer under the name “Supertestnet” started a transaction that had no input or output, but is still seen as valid.

This resulted in the Ordinals’ inscription numbering system crashing, raising concerns that the entire protocol may now be broken.

Ordinary inscriptions, also known as “proof of ownership” inscriptions, are essentially a way to associate metadata with a specific Bitcoin transaction.

This metadata may contain information about the digital asset being transferred, such as title, description and ownership details. So far, it has also been used for a wide variety of media inscriptions on the chain, including artwork, profile pictures, playable games and video-based web apps.

Unlike Ethereum-based NFTswhich requires the use of a separate token and smart contract to record the ownership and transfer of digital assets, Ordinal inscriptions are recorded directly on the Bitcoin blockchain without the need for a sidechain or separate token.

The transaction in question, which did not include any satoshis (smallest unit of BTC), was found in block 788200.

“[The Ordinals protocol] validated the inscription (3492721) attached to the input, which sounds like a bug,” Ludo Galabru, staff engineer at Hiro Systems commented on the issue on GitHub. “Philosophically, the inscribed satoshi was transferred to the miner as a transaction fee, but was still inscribed by the previous owner.”

Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor agreed that “it shouldn’t be possible to enter bets that you don’t own,” suggesting that the transaction is indeed a bug.

“But fix the mistake by making [the Ordinals protocol] ignore this inscription would change inscription number after the curious transaction. I’m honestly not sure what to do!” Rodarmor added shortly after the problem was found.

But is there a real danger to the Ordinals protocol?

Bitcoin Ordinals Under Scrutiny

According to Danny Diekroeger, founder of the Bitcoin Lightning platform Deezy, the flaw does not pose any risk to the Ordinals protocol itself.

“Personally, I think this is perfectly fine. In fact, I think the inscription numbers were broken already early anyway,” Diekroeger tweeted on Friday.

Supertestnet agreed that there is no immediate danger to the protocol itself, although he is “not sure what the long-term consequences will be.”

“The short-term consequence was that the guys running the indexing software had to fix the bug,” Supertestnet said Decrypt.

What actually happened and what prompted the Austin-based developer to run such an experiment, like Diekroeger described as “the first valiant attack on order inscriptions?”

According to Supertestnet, it all started during a recent conference in Austin, where a hackathon was held and people would come up with projects, and the idea was born to try to create “some weird things in Bitcoin and create a transaction that sends some zero Satoshis .”

“No one at the conference wanted to do that project, so I did something else. But afterwards I tried it and created one of these weird transactions and broadcast it to a miner who mined it for me, Supertestnet said Decrypt.

Calling itself “the breaker of jpegs”, Supertestnet not only introduced this bug into Ordinal explorers, but also created a tool that allows other users to increase the attack.

Still, he also admitted that “it’s not entirely clear to me exactly what’s going on right now.”

“Usually, when you create an inscription, you create a Bitcoin address that has some substance to it. And then you create an image that the software assigns to one of the searches in your Bitcoin address. But my Bitcoin address had zero satoshis in it. So it looks like it assigned it a negative number, which is weird in itself,” Supertestnet explained.

Despite that, when the software encountered this negative number, it appears to have tried to give this inscription a number.

“It took that and either made it the first satoshi of the block, which then belongs to the miner, or it put it into the transaction fee of the previous transaction, which then went to the miner. Either way, it definitely went to the miner as it’s description, ” said Supertestnet. “But that’s not supposed to happen. You shouldn’t be able to enter someone else’s satoshis without their consent. So it’s like a bug.”

Things are “a bit more complicated” for Ordinals discoverers, according to the developer, because all the numbers after his inscription are off by one.

“If they decide to fix it, they’ll have to undo all the numbers that have been issued since then, like reducing them all by one by however many. They’re looking for one now, but they might not fix that, or they can fix it for the future, but all the previous ones are going to remain as they are.”

“I don’t know what they’ll do, maybe they’ll decide it’s not important anymore and it’s not the bug but a feature,” Supertestnet added.