Bitcoin developers are discussing the possibility of modifying Bitcoin’s code to eliminate Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens. These tokens have resulted in the high fees and congestion on the Bitcoin blockchain over the past few months, with about 400,000 unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions waiting to be included in a block.
The proposed action aims to address the clogged-up Bitcoin block space issue caused by the Bitcoin Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens. Segregated Witness (SegWit), a scaling proposal introduced in 2017, and the Taproot upgrade, which brought smart contract capabilities to Bitcoin, enabled the creation of NFTs by allowing the storage of more arbitrary data within the blockchain.
Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr considers Bitcoin NFTs and tokens a spam attack and thinks action should have been taken “months ago.” He maintains that Bitcoin Core has always included spam filtering as a standard feature, and he believes that an error was made in the software by not extending the existing filters to Taproot transactions.
Another Bitcoin core developer, Ali Sherief, suggested introducing a runtime option to delete all non-standard Taproot transactions, including Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens. Dashjr supported the proposal and suggested using a script code like OP_RETURN to flag such transaction outputs as invalid.
The emergence of Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens has caused a stir in the Bitcoin community, resulting in a surge of transactions on the network. According to the latest reports, these tokens contribute to almost 50% of the total transactions, causing concerns among some members of the community.
The surge has caused congestion on the network, leading Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, to temporarily halt Bitcoin withdrawals twice over the weekend.
