In an attempt to censor transactions related to Bitcoin ordinals, the US government is analyzing whether non-fungible token (NFT) operations on the Bitcoin network pose a cybersecurity threat.
This according to the petition This was done in the National Vulnerabilities Database (NVD), which is managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a facility of the US Department of Commerce.
According to the information on the website, the government institute is analyzing whether the arbitrary information that traders and creators record in Bitcoin via the Ordinals protocol can be considered dangerousas the Ocean team warned, according to CriptoNoticias.
Luke Dashjr, Bitcoin developer and CTO of Ocean, said so himself “'Registries' Exploit a Vulnerability in Bitcoin Core.” to spam the blockchain.”
Therefore, Dashjr has developed a tool called Ordirespector, which is able to filter transactions that contain registrations, as the method of adding arbitrary information in Bitcoin is called. This tool has been integrated into Bitcoin Knots, the software used by Ocean.
Now the developer strives for ordinals to be recognized as a vulnerability and that could be corrected in future versions of Bitcoin Core, the most commonly used software for running Bitcoin.
In this sense, the US government's analysis seeks to determine whether this circumvention of the limit through the ordinals is feasible, based on the fact that it was a mechanism that was exploited in 2023.when large transactions were stored in blockssays the NVD.
The community criticizes the petition
Although the US government is still assessing whether Ordinals could pose a cybersecurity threat, members of the Bitcoin community have voiced criticism of the situation.
The investor and ordinals enthusiast Leonidas was one of the first criticize Bitcoin NFT critics say US investigation “have turned to the federal government for help in an attempt to censor Ordinal transactions.”
Without elaborating, Leonidas mentioned Bitcoiners who support the use of BTC as a means of payment and criticize other use cases of the network, such as the creation of non-fungible tokens (NFT), which has been criticized because they create traffic jams.
Especially in times of increasing registrations of BRC-20 tokens in the Bitcoin network, there was also noticeable overload. In low priority cases, transaction fees above $5 are often charged and up to more than $30 with high priority.
A similar opinion to Leonidas was expressed by the user @KingofOrdinal, who he asked the fact that those Bitcoiners who oppose governments and the traditional system in general are turning to the same system for help to fight against those who promote ordinalseven though they belong to the same ecosystem.
“It's obvious that they don't give a shit if Bitcoin grows, attracts new people and becomes popular. Or if they damage the network. “They only care about their ideology,” he criticized.
While under investigation by the US government, Ordinals is the protocol that allows the registration of NFTs and tokens on the Bitcoin network has achieved serious fame.
This week it was announced that the long-established auction house Sotheby's has offered for sale a collection of NFT ordinals with pieces valued at over $20,000 for the first time.
It was also learned that an enthusiast and collector had purchased Bitcoin Ordinals Entry #8, for which he paid about 10.3 BTC or just over $460,000.
This article was written with the assistance of Marianella Vanci