New bug found in the Bitcoin Ordinals system
A crypto developer recently came out with claims of a bug that broke the Ordinals program. However, another expert noted that the bug only broke a non-essential component of the program.
Ordinals program broken
The ordinals program is still in its infancy, but reports already indicate a bug has been discovered. The reports indicate that this bug relates mainly to the numbering of the inscriptions.
A Twitter user called Super Testnet went to Twitter to claim he found a way to “increase the off-by-one error in ordinal theory.” The user highlighted a GitHub page where users could follow instructions to break the Ordinal’s program.
The user refers to the new tool on the GitHub page as ‘Breakers of Jpegs.’ He highlights some key steps he followed to ‘Break Inscription Numbers.’ The user claims to have ‘introduced an off-by-one bug into ordinal explorers’ on May 4.
Essentially, the inscription 3492721 had zero input and output; hence its numbering broke Ordinals. Based on the reports, a person convinced a miner to include an ordinal transaction that contains zero input and output.
The report notes, “This was an edge case that the ordinal indexer had not accounted for.” Hence, “It ended up inscribing onto a sat from the transaction fee being paid to the miner, so now the miner holds this inscription.” Based on Ordinals theory, inscribing on a Sat you don’t own should be impossible. However, in this case, the Indexer is inscribed on a sat held by a miner.
The creation of the off-by-one Ordinal inscription led to many calls within the NFT community that the Ordinals program was broken owing to the event. Many claimed that the numbering was already off by one after the event.
Experts say the program is not broken
Referring to the case, an expert in the NFT business, Leonidas NFT, noted that the Ordinals program is not broken; only the indexing is. The Indexer gives inscriptions an inscription number, but in this case, it was corrupted to give a one-off inscription number.
However, while the inscription number is broken, it’s not core to the functioning of Ordinals based on reports; what matters most is the ID. It’s through the ID that the Indexer can track inscriptions. Reports indicate that the ID system is rock solid even as the numbering suffers.
The expert noted that the numbering is said to be off-one. However, he mentions that the inscription system has been claimed to be off by a larger number for over three months, as some have released multiple inscriptions in a single transaction.
The analyst, therefore, claims that the numbering system is not key to the functioning of Ordinals; hence the bug is not a major crisis.
