The growing increase in the use of Ordinals to register NFTs and other content in Bitcoin raised alarm bells among developers and node operators. Among them, a person identified as Unhosted Marcellus #371, who claims that this protocol is being used to perpetrate a DDoS attack on Bitcoin.

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According to Unhosted Marcellus, the network transmission of a batch of 5,500 Ordinals NFTs would be “another piece of evidence supporting the hypothesis that the inscriptions are not being used by ordinary people, but specifically for a DDoS attack on Bitcoin.“

Unhosted Marcellus claims that “signups degrade Bitcoin performance for all of its users.” Since they impose higher fees and longer confirmation times. Additionally, node operators face higher operating costs.

In this sense, it is worth noting the fact that, one day after Unhosted Marcellus pointed out the alleged activity against Bitcoin, a record of 72,328 registrations was registered in a single day.

Bitcoin transactions have accumulated to levels not seen in a long time. In fact, on March 24, network congestion reached levels never seen before, with an accumulation of more than 70,000 transactions and a total weight of 1 GB. This negatively affected users, who saw an increase in the payment of commissions to confirm transactions in the next block or in a few minutes.

Ordisrespector, an alternative for node operators
 

The response from many node operators has been to use an Ordisrespector patch. However, opinions are divided. This method of filtering transactions that include Ordinals inscriptions is believed by some to be a form of censorship; and others defend the idea that it is a way to avoid what could be considered spam in Bitcoin.

By the way, Luke Dashjr, who devised the patch and contributes to the development of Bitcoin, explained that “the only thing these spam filters are doing, at most, is preventing you from forcing people who do not consent to download jpegs against their will.“

the difference between censorship and the leaking of inscriptions, Dashjr says the following: “Censorship would prevent publishing the jpegs. Nobody is doing that.” And he adds: “Even in its most liberal definition, censorship would at least require denying you access to a specific publication medium. That is also not applicable as Bitcoin is not a publishing medium.”