BRC-20 was first conceptualized in March 2023. It is an "experimental token" that supports the deployment, minting and transfer of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Bitcoin blockchain. The "Ordinal Theory" was proposed by @domodata on Twitter, adding new gameplay to Bitcoin's original L1.
Understand the ordinal and inscription. The ordinal exists in every node of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Satoshis (sats) is the smallest unit of the Bitcoin network. 1 BTC = 100,000,000 sats. Everyone can use the technology of "ordinal theory" to "engrave" tokens with data such as text, images, videos, etc. on Satoshis and turn them into inscriptions. Due to the relationship of "fairness and naming", it indirectly gives the status of $ORDI and $STAS.
The hot BRC-20 market has exacerbated the congestion of the Bitcoin network. It should be noted that the four-year halving cycle of Bitcoin is about to come, and the block rewards will only get lower and lower. The "inscription" has also caused a sharp increase in the transaction fees obtained by miners.
On November 7, 2023 (UTC+8), Binance Exchange announced the listing of $ORDI , and the price of the coin on the day of announcement was about 6U. As of December 6, it rose to a maximum price of about 65U along with $BTC. However, at 0900 on the same day, Bitcoin ecosystem developer @LukeDashjr tweeted that "the serial number/inscription is a vulnerability in Bitcoin L1, a spam attack, which will be fixed in subsequent versions." As soon as this move was made, the coin price fell to 40U at 1900 in the evening. About 13 hours later (2300), Luke replied that "it is not necessary to eliminate the inscription to benefit Bitcoin", and the price then broke the historical high of about 70U.
On December 9, 2023 (UTC-5), the U.S. National Vulnerability Database (NVD) marked Bitcoin's inscription technology as a cybersecurity risk, officially becoming a nationally certified vulnerability.
The question is, after the vulnerability is fixed in the future, the inscriptions cannot be tampered with based on the blockchain and will "not" be deleted. The existing inscriptions will still exist on the Bitcoin network, but after the fix, will everyone be able to continue to engrave or trade them?
After asking Luke, "Inscriptions should not be traded. They destroy the original ecology of Bitcoin and are used by some people to defraud money."
But when I asked whether some of the existing inscriptions have been listed on exchanges, such as $ORDI , would be untradable in the future, he only replied, "Who knows?"
The answer is very interesting. Even if the tokens can no longer be engraved or traded after repair, can the exchange issue new tokens at a 1:1 exchange rate based on the existing popularity of the inscriptions, allowing the original holders to exchange them and still trade them later, thus retaining the historical creation of "inscriptions"?
The repair work needs to be verified by the miner nodes, but can the community really approve of this indirect exploitation of miners’ rewards? If there is indeed a demand for BRC-20 inscriptions in the market in the future, it may be necessary to create a side chain through a "hard fork", just like the birth of $BCH in 2017, but NVD has recorded it as a vulnerability. Can this problem not be fixed?
As of the time of writing, according to statistics from#OKXWeb3 wallet information, 14,527 inscriptions have been minted on BRC-20, and 4,120 are in the process of being minted. Before the vulnerability was fixed, everyone could "fairly" inscribe their own tokens and include them in the node, but this may not be possible on BRC-20 in the future, and inscriptions can only be created through other chains.
The above is only my personal opinion. Everyone is welcome to discuss and share. It does not constitute any investment advice.
