Over 1,600 community members have shared their opinions about possible fixing solutions.
The Bitcoin Ordinals community is actively discussing potential fixes for a code bug discovered within the protocol, which has left over 1,200 inscriptions unvalidated.
Bitcoin Ordinals are digital artifacts on the Bitcoin network, analogous to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and can consist of images, PDFs, video, or audio formats.
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The issue was revealed on April 5th by the GitHub user, dubbed "veryordinally." Based on several reports, the bug originated from the indexer function.
Less than a week later, on April 10th, prominent community member "Leonidas.og," discussed the possible solutions on Twitter.
Although most of the Ordinals community members agree that these unvalidated inscription requests should be addressed, the question remains whether they should be added retroactively.
The first solution entails selecting a block height to retroactively index the so-called "orphan" inscriptions from inscription number 420,285 onwards—the approximate starting point of the first orphan inscription.
Leonidas.og stated that while this "purist" solution would align the protocol with the logical on-chain ordering, it could introduce further complications.
An alternative approach suggested by Leonidas.og involves keeping the existing inscription numbers unchanged and choosing a block height to incorporate the orphan inscriptions at a future point.
This would not change any existing inscription numbers so the ~1,200 orphans would not be assigned inscription numbers officially in the protocol. It would be up to the market to value them as ‘misprints’ or not.
Another GitHub community member, "Yilak," supported the idea of maintaining the current order, noting that only a tiny portion of inscription owners have been affected.
At the time of writing, over 1,600 community members submitted their votes in the "Leonidas.og" pool. Over 67% of users voted to not change the inscription numbers.
It is worth noting that, on April 8th, Bitcoin Ordinals' inscriptions exceeded 1 million, according to data from the crypto analytics platform Dune. This milestone occurred shortly after a record daily high of over 76,300 new inscriptions on April 4th.
