Jack Dorsey-Backed Bitcoin Mining Pool Refuses To Process Ordinals Transactions – What’s Going On?

cryptonews.com:

OCEAN – a newly launched Bitcoin (BTC) mining pool backed by Jack Dorsey – has updated its mining software to exclude Bitcoin ordinals transactions from the blocks that it generates.

Ordinals is a protocol for issuing NFTs and alternative tokens on the Bitcoin network – a feat most thought impossible for most of the asset’s lifespan.

After popularizing earlier this year, the online Bitcoin community was torn on whether ordinals were a net benefit for the network thanks to the new applications it provides, or a burden due to enabling transactions that the network was never intended for.

OCEAN CTO and Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr has taken the latter position.

““Inscriptions” are exploiting a vulnerability in #Bitcoin Core to spam the blockchain,” he wrote in a post to X on Tuesday, noting that the “bug” had been “fixed” in OCEAN’s latest upgrade.

“Bitcoin Core is still vulnerable in the upcoming v26 release,” he added. “I can only hope it will finally get fixed before v27 next year.”

We are happy to announce testing of Bitcoin Knots v25.1 has completed successfully, and is now deployed to production. Among other improvements, this upgrade fixes this long-standing vulnerability exploited by modern spammers. As a result, our blocks will now include many more… https://t.co/II3y0B6Pu4

— OCEAN (@ocean_mining) December 6, 2023

Less than a year after launch, Ordinals have left their mark on the blockchain in more ways than one. During times of peak activity, the sheer data size of related transactions has caused Bitcoin’s transaction fees to soar while radically slowing network settlement times.

Ordinals activity began surging again last month, taking Bitcoin’s transaction fees as high as $19 apiece. It’s even caused the network’s