The debate surrounding the “cursed” ordinal inscriptions

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Only four months after the protocol was launched, Ord’s first controversial debate took place on what are known as “cursed” inscriptions.

The simplest definition of a cursive inscription is any inscription that is not currently sequenced and not recognized by the Ord. The term came to be a catchall when some people misplaced or misused inscriptions to create inscriptions that were not capable of being indexed by ord and therefore would not be recognized and given an inscription number. .

This issue was first mentioned on 25 April in ord github And the interim fix proposed by then-lead developer Casey Rodarmore was to “modify old blocks to recognize currently invalid inscriptions, including retroactively, but treat these new inscriptions as ‘cursed’ and give them negative inscription numbers.”

Interestingly, the example inscription code on the Ordinals docs website would have been a cursed inscription.

Link to embedded tweet.

There are many ways to make cursive inscriptions. Any inscription with multiple input/output would be considered cursed. As shown above, some misuse of opcodes like OP_1 can lead to cursed inscriptions. Alternatively, the introduction of OP_66 by using the value of “cursed” intentionally created this type of subscript with an even number of opcodes not indexed by ord. Numbered opcodes are not recognized unless already defined in the spec as they are reserved for future protocol development. Complete list of ways to make cursed inscriptions issue #2045 Is in this type:

• Multiple writes per transaction for efficient batching.
• Inscriptions on the inputs after the first, which is useful for collection.
• Multiple inscriptions on the same set, so that there is no need to examine the entire history of a set to determine whether a new inscription is valid.
• Inscriptions with unfamiliar even headers, so that upgraded clients don’t disagree about inscription numbers because of new even headers.

There are some specific debates surrounding cursive inscriptions. One of the disputes comes from how these inscriptions are currently numbered. Cursive inscriptions are negatively numbered in the order of their creation. Because of this numbering system and naming convention, some people intentionally chose to create inscriptions and collections that appeared “cursed”, whether by flipping the image of the inscription with a positive number or by using a more sinister image theme when engraving. The question is, should these be added to the index of positively numbered inscriptions or should they keep their negative inscription numbers when the code is updated?

Additionally, another contentious conversation is what to do about certain types of cursed inscriptions that use the OP_66 opcode in their construction. Because this opcode is not recognized by Ord and even numbered opcodes are intentionally omitted for future development use, it is debatable whether opcodes using this opcode should be included in the cursed set. should or if they should be rejected.

in present time, problem around even number opcodes Listed in github order. There are many comments in support of including these inscriptions in the index, but the principal maintainers of the protocol seem to be against it. So far, the current stance of the developers is that these inscriptions will be unbound, meaning they will not be assigned to a specific Satoshi.

Remember, Ordinal Theory is based on a First In First Out tracking system for Satoshis. Each write is assigned to the first satoshi in the genesis transaction when the write is made. This type of lens allows images, files, text, etc. to be tracked and moved for viewing bitcoins. If a cursed coin is unbound, it will not be tied to a specific satoshi and therefore unable to be transferred to another address. Many people who are inscribing are hoping to be able to sell or transfer their inscription to another person. While inscriptions using this opcode will live forever on the bitcoin blockchain, if these inscriptions are classified as unbound and not assigned to a specific satoshi, using this opcode can create cursed inscriptions. users will be unable to sell or transfer them.

Here’s one of the bigger concerns for those who are spending money on transaction fees to make cursive inscriptions. If they were unable to sell them in the future, significant money would have been wasted on fees. Several users have responded to a Github issue expressing support for the inclusion of these inscriptions, but the code’s maintainers are not in favor of recognizing cursed inscriptions using the OP_66 even-numbered opcode.

On 30 May, Ord’s new lead maintainer, Rafjaf, wrote“As the protocol currently stands inscriptions are not valid if they use an unrecognized sum tag, so this change makes a concession by already recognizing them. For now they are unbound but we may reconsider.” Can and bind them in future if there is strong reason.

This response is not what many inscribers were expecting to hear. Similar to bitcoin, Ord is open-source software, so users can fork the code to recognize these specific types of cursive inscriptions. This contentious debate is ongoing and the way forward for the order remains to be seen. Users spending significant sums on transaction fees may be willing to switch to a newer version of ord that will recognize their cursive inscriptions, but this is only a theoretical route at this time.

Regardless, ordinals are a new technology being built on bitcoin. Whether the inscriptions are a flash in the pan or if they have permanent power may depend on how this issue is resolved.