Taproot Wizards Contributor Launches Script To Remove Bitcoin Ordinals Inscriptions

A contributor to Taproot Wizards has launched a script to reject Ordinals inscriptions.

In an X post published on Tuesday, Rijndael, Taproot Wizards’ chief technology officer, announced that he had published a script to “rid your node of inscriptions.”

“Merry Christmas, ord disrespectoors! I have a gift just for you! This [script] will rid your node of inscriptions,” Rijndael wrote.

The script was crafted with the purpose of inducing nodes to reject blocks containing inscriptions, he elaborated.

“If the economic majority of nodes does that, the miners will choose to build on a chain tip that doesn’t have inscriptions, or they sell into a smaller market,” he noted.

The launch of the script faced criticism from some industry observers, one of whom said that the script was a “solution for your [Rijndal’s] betrayed conscience.”

“Go run the script or admit that you’re just virtue signaling on twitter and are uninterested in stopping inscriptions,” Rijndal said in response to X user GhostOfPashka. “I handed you the solution. If you choose not to use it, you have nobody to blame but yourself.”

James Check, the lead analyst at Glassnode, told Cointelegraph that the software is unlikely to gain traction, despite Ordinals having faced criticism in the past.

“It is purely to demonstrate that most folks who are complaining about Ordinals, are in the minority,” Check told Cointelegraph. “The software is now available to invalidate them on their node, but one would automatically realize it essentially just bricks your node as they are valid transactions.”

“It is a demonstration of the mexican stand-off that Bitcoin governance is all about,” Check noted.

Rijndael also admitted that creating the software only took roughly 15 minutes, and he conceded that the script’s effectiveness could be readily undermined by modifying an Ordinal fingerprint under various circumstances.

The Ordinals censorship debate regained prominence recently when OCEAN, a Bitcoin mining company headed by Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr, began rejecting Ordinals transactions.

Their company expressed concerns regarding the susceptibility to denial-of-service attacks and an increase in congestion within the mempool, a queue of pending transactions awaiting validation from a node before being incorporated into a block on the blockchain.