- The site is unstable, it was overwhelmed by a flood of spam
- Critics of inscription sites think they are spamming the Bitcoin network
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack has hit Bitcoin Ordinals’ website, leading it to time out, and its critics are rejoicing, Cointelegraph reported. A DDoS attack disrupts normal traffic on the server or network targeted by overwhelming it or its linked infrastructure with a flood of spam. The Ordinals website was unstable at the time of writing.
Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor posted that a DDoS attack had taken place on December 27. According to him, this has never happened before.
Critics gloat
Critics of inscription sites like Bitcoin Ordinals, who think they are spamming the Bitcoin network, are gloating. Among them are Luke Dashjr, the founder of Bitcoin mining firm OCEAN. He posted on X that no one had any right to call this occurrence a DDoS as all parties involved were probably “paying their internet bills.”
Another user warned Rodarmor against “censoring valid TCP/IP packets” as the latter called out the unidentified attacker for spamming his platform.
What are Bitcoin inscriptions?
Bitcoin inscriptions, also known as Bitcoin script or Bitcoin opcodes, refer to the programming language used in Bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin transactions are essentially scripts written in a specialized scripting language. This language allows users to define conditions under which the funds can be spent.
The reason?
The most recent DDoS attack comes one day after Taproot Wizards’ chief technology officer Rijndael introduced a code script, perhaps as a joke. Reportedly, this script lets anti-Ordinal node operators censor the latter’s Bitcoin blocks.
A passing trend
Not everyone agrees that often profitable services like Ordinals are harming the Bitcoin network. One such person is Andrew Poelstra, Director of Research at Bitcoin infrastructure provider Blockstream. In an interview with Cointelegraph, he said that Ordinals were a minute part of the Bitcoin ecosystem. While conceding that they impacted the fee market “disproportionately,” they were not a risk in terms of “displacing Bitcoin on its own network.”
The expert also conceded lack of technical means to get rid of Ordinals from the Bitcoin network, but assured they were a passing trend.
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