Bitcoin NFTs Creator Fixes The Bug Causing Inscriptions Numbering Error

Updated: 23 October 2023

Disclosure

Don’t invest unless prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment, you shouldn’t expect to be protected if something goes wrong.

Casey Rodarmor, the creator of the Bitcoin-based non-fungible token collection popularly known in the crypto market as Bitcoin Ordinals, has found the resolution to the bug causing the Bitcoin inscription number generation error. The Bitcoin ordinal inscriptions numbering problem was detected and identified in the past weekend.

New curse just dropped, booooooois 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭https://t.co/HJ43NG7DV9

— Casey (@rodarmor) October 21, 2023

The Bitcoin Ordinals Explained

Since its inception in 2009, the flagship crypto, Bitcoin, has been functioning as a single digital asset until earlier this year when Bitcoin Developer Casey Rodarmor introduced the Bitcoin Ordinals as a second practical use case for Bitcoin in the crypto market.

Bitcoin ordinals’ journey to the crypto market started in December last year after Rodarmor discovered a loophole in the latest Bitcoin version, “Taproot,” enabling him to upload a black and white skull PNG image. The skull was known as inscription 0.

Earlier this year, Casey Rodarmor fully leveraged the new Satoshi ordinal theory to inscribe more digital assets. Once collectibles are inscribed on the Bitcoin network, they can never be edited or deleted as long as the Bitcoin network exists. It’s this permanence that makes ordinals unique.

During the process of uploading data “Inscribing,” the generated ordinals denote the unique number assigned to each new ordinal. Today, there are 35 million ordinal inscriptions in the Bitcoin NFT ecosystem. According to Dune Analytics, creators have spent over $63 million on the Bitcoin network to create Ordinals.

The easiest way to create a Bitcoin ordinal is to use an inscription service like Gamma, Unisats, Magic Eden, or OrdinalsBot. Once you’ve made your first Bitcoin ordinal, you can choose to hold, sell, or list it for sale. Gamma, Ordswap, and MagicEden are three popular marketplaces where you can buy and sell bitcoin ordinals.

The Bitcoin Inscription Number Debacle

Unfortunately, the Bitcoin Ordinal inscription suffered a slight problem over the weekend after Inscriptions 35321413 and 35329860 were indexed by ord 0.9.0 but not by ord 0.7.0 or 0.8.0. As a result, 0.9.0 started assigning numbers that were off by two from those assigned by older versions.

Source: github.com

After carefully researching how to fix the bug, Bitcoin Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor has found a resolution for the inscription numbering problem, suggesting upgrading to ord 0.9.0 and using it as the source of truth from now on. In a short explainer, Rodarmor wrote:

“Ord 0.9.0 introduced a new, more robust inscription parser. Before release, we compared 0.9.0 with previous releases of ord, to make sure that it produced the same inscription numbers. However, after release, inscriptions, including 35321413 and 35329860 were created which exercised an edge case in the parser which previous versions of ord did not handle.”

INSCRIPTION NUMBER DEBACLE RESOLUTION

TL;DR We suggest upgrading to ord 0.9.0 and use it as the source of truth going forward.

Ord 0.9.0 introduced a new, more robust inscription parser. Before release, we compared 0.9.0 with previous releases of ord, to make sure that it…

— Casey (@rodarmor) October 23, 2023

The Bitcoin Ordinals Market Health

Since their inception, Bitcoin ordinals have received a warm reception among crypto and non-fungible token collectors. In the first six months of 2023, bitcoin ordinals surpassed Solana NFTs to become the second most popular non-fungible token collection.

Popular creative projects such as DeGods, OnChain Monkeys, Yuga Labs, Beeple, and MegaPunks led the bullish movement. The Bitcoin Ordinals protocol has inspired Bitcoin derivative tokens through the BRC-20 protocol and .sats, an attempt at online decentralized identity using Bitcoin Ordinals. It has also inspired the introduction of Ethscriptions NFTs.

In recent days, Bitcoin Ordinals collections have spiked up after taking a little slumber in the past several months. In the past seven days, Bitcoin ordinal has recorded a trading sales volume of $13 million. Bitcoin Ordinals are up 13.28% this week from the previous week.