Bitcoin Miner Backed By Jack Dorsey Confirms It Will Censor Ordinal Inscriptions

Bitcoin Ordinals are in the spotlight again after Ocean Mining, a new decentralized mining pool which raised $6.2M in a funding round led by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, confirmed late last night that it would censor Ordinal inscriptions.

Ocean’s co-founder and longtime Bitcoin core maintainer, Luke DashJr, had hinted at an anti-inscription stance, confirming his position yesterday. “Inscriptions” are exploiting a vulnerability inBitcoin Core to spam the blockchain,” he wrote, adding that the bug was fixed in the script his company is now running – Knots v25.1.

BRC-20 tokens, which stem from the Ordinals protocol, have had mixed reactions to the situation. According to Coingecko, the top 10 by market cap showcases four drops in value, three of which are in the double digits.

ORDI, the largest BRC-20 in the ecosystem, dropped 10% on the news but has since bounced back to an all-time high. The token was the first to surpass the $1 billion market cap on the weekend.

Most BRC-20s in the top ten remain in bullish territory, several of which enjoy double and even triple-digit gains on the day.

Controversy ensued late last night when the company’s official X account announced it was deploying Knots v.25.1, claiming “this upgrade fixes this long-standing vulnerability exploited by modern spammers.”

“As a result,” the company added, “our blocks will now include many more real transactions and help to bring an end to the DoS attack being performed on the Bitcoin network.”

The appearance of Ordinals, which allow for arbitrary data to be stored on the Bitcoin blockchain, has spawned a heated debate in the Bitcoin community since the protocol launched early this year.

Widespread quarrels have sparked once again, especially as the Bitcoin blockchain suffers another bout of congestion. According to mempool.space, roughly 263,000 transactions remain unconfirmed, with median transaction fees skyrocketing to $9.45 at the time of writing.

Bitcoin’s community, known for its trigger-ready stance, was quick to take a stab at DashJr and his company’s decision.

“Ah yes censorship is what makes Bitcoin great! Have fun fighting miner game theory,” said Bitcoin educator Dan Held.

Held refers to the fact that since Bitcoin mining pools outsource hashrate from around the pool, individuals can “point” their computational power at other pools if it’s financially or ideologically beneficial for them to do so.

Words written by Held reverberated with those of General Partner for the Bitcoin Frontier Fund, Trevor Owens, who said on ‘X,’ “Inscriptions will never stop. People will pay for them and miners will mine them,” signing off as an “Ordinals enjoyoor.”

As for the broader crypto space, prominent crypto investor Nic Carter also referred to the situation on X: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a business launched in a competitive space that explicitly aims to earn less revenue than its peers. Good luck ?”