Developer Inserts ‘Bug’ in Bitcoin Ordinals How bad is it?

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There is new controversy in the Bitcoin Ordinals community after a developer by the name of Supertestnet initiated a transaction that had no input or output, but is still considered valid.

This caused the Ordinals registration numbering system to crash, raising concerns that the entire protocol could now be broken.

Ordinal registrations, also known as “proof of ownership” registrations, are essentially a way to attach metadata to a specific Bitcoin transaction.

This metadata may include information about the transferred digital asset, such as its title, description, and ownership details. So far, it has also been used for a wide range of channel media listings, including artwork, profile pictures, playable games, and video-based web apps.

Unlike Ethereum-based NFTs, which require the use of a separate token and smart contract to record ownership and transfer of digital assets, ordinal registrations are recorded directly on the Bitcoin blockchain without the need for a side chain or a separate token.

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

[The Ordinals protocol] validated the registration (3492721) attached to the entry, which sounds like a bug, Ludo Galabru, Staff Engineer at Hiro Systems commented the issue on GitHub. Philosophically, the inscribed satoshi was transferred to the miner as a transaction fee, but was nonetheless inscribed by its former owner.

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

However, fixing the bug by doing [the Ordinals protocol] ignoring this registration would change the registration numbers after the curious transaction. I really do not know what to do ! added Rodarmor shortly after the problem was discovered.

But is there a real danger for the Ordinals protocol?

Bitcoin Ordinals Under Review

According to Danny Diekroeger, founder of Bitcoin Lightning platform Deezy, the bug poses no risk to the Ordinals protocol itself.

Personally, I think that’s quite correct. In fact, I think the registration numbers were already busted early on anyway, Diekroeger tweeted on Friday.

Supertestnet agreed there was no immediate danger to the protocol itself, although it was unsure of the long-term consequences.

The short-term consequence was that the guys using the indexing software had to fix the bug, Supertestnet told Decrypt.

What really happened and what prompted the Austin-based developer to conduct such an experiment, which Diekroeger described as the first valiant attack on ordinal inscriptions?

According to Supertestnet, it all started at a recent conference in Austin where a hackathon was held where people were supposed to come up with projects and the idea was born to try and do something weird in bitcoin and create a transaction that sends someone zero Satoshis.

No one at the conference wanted to do this 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 told Decrypt.

Calling itself the jpeg breaker, Supertestnet not only inserted this bug into ordinal explorers, but also created a tool that allows other users to augment the attack.

Yet he also admitted that it’s not entirely clear to me exactly what’s going on right now.

Normally, when you create a registration, you must create a bitcoin address containing satoshis. And then you create an image that the software assigns to one of the satoshis of your bitcoin address. But my bitcoin address did not contain any satoshis. So it looks like he gave it a negative number, which is weird in itself, Supertestnet explained.

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

He took that and then either made it the first satoshi in the block, which then belongs to the miner, or he put it in the transaction fee from previous transactions, which then went to the miner. Either way, it definitely went to minor as if it was registration,” Supertestnet said. “But that’s not supposed to happen. You are not supposed to be able to enter someone else’s satoshis without their consent. So it’s like a bug.”

Things are a bit trickier for Ordinals explorers, according to the developer, because all numbers after it’s inscribed are shifted by one.

If they decide to fix this, they will need to cancel all numbers that have been issued since then, such as decrementing them all by one or the number they have now. But they might not fix it, or they might fix it for the future, but all the precedents will remain as they are.

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

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