Can Inscriptions Be Made to Disappear? How Much Power Do Bitcoin Core Developers Really Have?
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Can Inscriptions Be Made to Disappear? How Much Power Do Bitcoin Core Developers Really Have?
"Defend" or "Sacrifice" Inscriptions? The Bitcoin story is far from over.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthors: Jaleel, Kaori, BlockBeats
Editor: Zhang Wen, BlockBeats
On December 6, Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr posted on social media stating that "inscriptions" are exploiting a vulnerability in the Bitcoin Core client to send spam data onto the blockchain. Since 2013, Bitcoin Core has allowed users to set size limits for additional data when relaying or mining transactions. By obfuscating their data as program code, inscriptions have bypassed this restriction.
In simple terms, this veteran Bitcoin client developer believes that the current inscription sector—epitomized by ORDI, now ranked within the top 50 by market cap—is a bug that can and should be fixed.
Luke Dashjr stated, “This vulnerability was recently patched in Bitcoin Knots v25.1. Due to severe disruptions to my workflow last year (v24 was completely skipped), the fix took longer than usual. The vulnerability still exists in the upcoming v26 release of Bitcoin Core. I can only hope it will finally be resolved before next year’s v27.”
In follow-up replies to his post, Luke Dashjr explicitly stated that if this bug is fixed, Ordinals inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens would cease to exist.
As a Bitcoin OG, Luke Dashjr has long been an outspoken critic of the Ordinals protocol. In February this year, Dashjr tweeted that the “Ordinals protocol is an attack on Bitcoin.” In May, during the first wave of inscription mania, Dashjr and other Bitcoin Core developers’ opposition were briefly seen as potential roadblocks to inscription development.
However, previous disputes did not spark widespread discussion, as Ordinals were still considered niche and biased by the market. But now, with ORDI surging 20,000%, becoming a universal meme, one comment from Luke Dashjr wiped $300 million off ORDI’s market cap within minutes.
The reason for market fear is clear: Does the Bitcoin Core team really have the power to arbitrarily change the code?
Luke Dashjr: Early Developer Since 2011
Does Luke Dashjr have the authority to comment on Bitcoin? Absolutely. Luke Dashjr encountered Bitcoin in 2011 and soon joined the project as a developer. His programming expertise quickly elevated him to a key Bitcoin developer, helping build Bitcoin in its early days. His early contributions to Bitcoin software focused on troubleshooting security, performance, and advanced features in Bitcoin Core.
Ranked by number of commits, Luke Dashjr currently ranks 14th among Bitcoin Core code contributors.
As an early developer, Luke Dashjr has been involved in nearly all major early events in Bitcoin's history.
Due to a software bug in Bitcoin Core, Dashjr was one of the first to detect Bitcoin’s hard fork in 2013. In 2014, Dashjr began playing a larger role in the Bitcoin ecosystem, as his modified version of the BFG Miner allowed miners to operate at higher performance than others at the time.
In 2016, Dashjr introduced BIP-2, a significant improvement to the BIP format proposed by another Bitcoin developer and renowned cryptographer, Amir Taaki. During 2016 and 2017, Dashjr was also a key participant in activating SegWit in Bitcoin. Other contributions by Dashjr include BIP-22 and BIP-23, aimed at optimizing block generation structure and improving mining pool efficiency respectively.
Luke Dashjr; Image source: Crypto Times
Returning to earlier context, the “Bitcoin Knots” mentioned by Luke Dashjr—where he said “this vulnerability was recently fixed in Bitcoin Knots v25.1, and hopefully will be fully resolved before v27 next year”—is a full Bitcoin client whose original concept came from Luke Dashjr himself.
Luke Dashjr is also a cybersecurity extremist. He believes that Bitcoin currently has security vulnerabilities because its network is not yet fully decentralized. For this reason, he encourages everyone using Bitcoin to run their own full node.
Why Does He Dislike Ordinals?
Luke Dashjr’s disdain for Ordinals stems from his firm belief in preserving Bitcoin’s purist ideology.
At the end of 2022, software engineer Casey Rodarmor created the “Ordinals” protocol, which numbers the smallest unit of Bitcoin—the satoshi—and stores file metadata via Taproot to create unique NFTs. On March 8, an anonymous developer named @domo released the BRC-20 protocol based on this, enabling a fungible token standard atop the Ordinals protocol. This triggered this year’s inscription boom and sparked a surge in Bitcoin’s ecosystem.
On February 1, Bitcoin mining company Luxor mined the largest Bitcoin block in history, measuring 3.96MB, slightly under Bitcoin’s 4MB limit. The block contained a Taproot Wizards NFT based on the original “magic internet money” meme.
Developers like Luke Dashjr believe this causes rapid bloating of the Bitcoin blockchain, significantly raising hardware requirements for running full nodes, reducing the total number of full nodes across the network, and weakening censorship resistance. Additionally, abnormally large transactions and blocks may overwhelm wallets, mining pools, explorers, and other ecosystem components, causing malfunctions such as failure to parse certain transactions properly. Moreover, mining pools or miners might skip downloading or validating massive transactions and blocks to reduce synchronization and verification time, creating security risks.
They even harshly criticized Taproot Wizards, stating: “This is an attack on Bitcoin. Bitcoin blocks have a 1MB limit. Taproot Wizard’s 4MB data is placed on-chain in the witness field, bypassing the 1MB limit for both blocks and transactions. If 4MB is acceptable, then 400MB is too! In this sense, this isn’t innovation—it’s exploitation of a vulnerability!”
On February 28 this year, Luke Dashjr posted on social media that an auction website had used his name and code without consent to create and sell “misleading” NFTs. Screenshots showed an NFT featuring an image of code he wrote, listed for sale at 0.41 BTC.
“I did not participate in the creation or sale of this or any other NFT, nor do I consent to my code or name being used for this purpose,” Luke Dashjr clarified and criticized on Twitter. “Due to the false representations involved and confusion among actual buyers, I strongly demand that 100% of auction proceeds be refunded to buyers.”
It’s evident that Luke Dashjr is a developer with near-obsessive standards for Bitcoin’s healthy ecosystem. Dashjr argues that Ordinals are not just spam clogging the network—they’re also an attack on Bitcoin’s fungibility. Accepting them could undermine the Lightning Network and CoinJoin.
This outcome is precisely what Bitcoin maximalists find most unacceptable. In May, Luke Dashjr wrote on his GitHub account expressing frustration over the hype around BRC-20 and meme coins: “To address Ordinals, immediate corrective action is needed, and such measures should have been provided long ago.”
Luke Dashjr’s GitHub interface; Image source: community
In emails sent to other Bitcoin developers and miners, Dashjr proposed integrating a “spam filter” mechanism into Taproot transactions to prevent the spread of Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens on the Bitcoin network. He said, “Action should have been taken months ago. Spam filtering has always been a standard part of Bitcoin Core. That existing filters haven’t been extended to Taproot transactions is a mistake—it’s a bug fix that doesn’t actually require waiting for a major release.”
In Dashjr’s view, people can have NFTs and collectibles on Bitcoin without sending spam or attacking the network—“Taproot actually makes this easier.” On the Bitcointalk forum, many discussed implementing a soft fork to “enforce strict Taproot validation script size limits,” how protocols could filter content deemed “spam,” or even pursuing a hard fork to roll back Taproot. But how easy is a Bitcoin hard fork, really?
Who Decides Bitcoin’s Development—Developers?
Before discussing “who must approve a piece of code before it gets merged into Bitcoin’s codebase?” and “who controls Bitcoin’s core code repository?”, we must first clarify what it means to control a GitHub repository for an open-source project.
For open-source GitHub repositories, developers with two types of permissions hold the greatest influence: merge rights and commit rights.
Having merge rights means a developer’s cryptographic key is added to the “trusted keys list” on GitHub, granting specific privileges. For the Bitcoin Core project, once a developer’s key is added to this list, they gain the ability to merge reviewed and approved code changes into the Bitcoin Core codebase.
Thus, having merge capability means they can directly influence the final version of the Bitcoin Core software. This recognition reflects trust and responsibility toward developers, as merging code allows them to directly affect the final Bitcoin software. Developers with this privilege are typically experienced and reputable contributors who must follow strict quality control and review processes when merging code.
The difference between commit rights and merge rights lies in the fact that merge rights allow developers to decide which code ultimately gets included in the project’s main branch. While commit rights represent an important milestone, merge rights play a more critical role in project decision-making and final product formation. Both are important, but in terms of influence and responsibility, merge rights are generally considered the highest level of permission.
Who Controls Bitcoin’s Core Code?
Who can merge code into Bitcoin Core’s GitHub repository?
Among Bitcoin Core developers, those with direct merge access to the codebase are usually project maintainers or long-term contributors. For example, Wladimir J. van der Laan, one of the primary maintainers of the project, holds merge rights.
Previously, five developers held the highest-level permissions for the Bitcoin codebase. However, Pieter Wuille and Marco Falke stepped down on July 8, 2022, and February 23, 2023, respectively, relinquishing their maintainer privileges and requesting removal of their keys from the trusted keyset via GitHub.
After Pieter Wuille and Marco Falke left, only three Bitcoin Core developers—Wladimir J. van der Laan, Michael Ford, and Hennadii Stepanov—currently retain modification rights to the Bitcoin Core code.
However, although these developers have merge rights, they typically follow rigorous code review and community consensus procedures. Their role is more about coordination and reviewing contributions rather than making unilateral changes. The Bitcoin community places high value on consensus and transparency—any significant code changes undergo extensive discussion and scrutiny.
Who Must Approve Before Code Is Merged Into Bitcoin’s Codebase?
Merging code into Bitcoin’s codebase involves a strict and detailed process designed to ensure proposal quality and community consensus. Here are the main steps:
1. Writing Proposals and Code: First, developers must write a detailed proposal document clearly describing the motivation, technical details, impact assessment, and any potential issues or challenges.
2. Community Discussion: After submitting the code proposal to the Bitcoin community, members—including developers, miners, investors, and users—discuss and review it. This stage is crucial for ensuring feasibility and gathering feedback.
3. Revisions and Improvements: Based on community feedback, the author may need to revise and improve the proposal.
4. Voting and Consensus: For major improvements—especially those affecting the Bitcoin protocol itself—community consensus is required. This often involves miner support, demonstrated by including specific signals in the blocks they mine.
5. Code Implementation: Once consensus is reached, the Bitcoin Core developer team reviews the code to ensure quality and security.
6. Merging into Codebase: After passing review, the code is merged into Bitcoin’s official repository.
7. Deployment and Activation: Finally, miners and node operators must deploy the new code on their systems. For protocol-level changes, there’s typically an activation threshold—improvements only take effect when enough network participants upgrade to the new version.
From past experiences like the block size debate, no single individual or entity can unilaterally confirm whether a BIP has achieved consensus or can be merged. Instead, it’s a collaborative process involving the entire Bitcoin community, including multiple key groups beyond just developers and reviewers:
Miners, especially, play a decisive role for BIP proposals involving protocol changes. Miners express support by including specific signals in the blocks they mine. If a sufficient threshold of miners does not signal support, the proposal is generally not considered to have reached consensus.
Full node operators also play a vital role in forming consensus by upgrading to software versions supporting the new BIP. An increasing number of nodes indicates broad community acceptance. Additionally, while Bitcoin users and community members don’t directly decide code merges, their opinions and discussions are crucial to shaping consensus—they can voice views through forums, mailing lists, and social media platforms.
Is Bitcoin Returning to Its 2017 Fork Moment?
Of course, as previously noted, miners wield the most influence.
Although miners don’t manage Bitcoin Core code permissions, they own mining hardware and decide which version of Bitcoin software their machines run. As the mining community grows, they’ve gained bargaining power against developers. In 2015, some Bitcoin Core developers proposed increasing the block size limit from 1MB to 2MB, but Chinese miners rejected it, citing insufficient bandwidth to support 2MB blocks. Miners serve as infrastructure providers—they process every Bitcoin transfer, keeping the system running, thus holding a critically important position.
Then came the historic night—the most famous hard fork in Bitcoin’s history. On August 1, 2017, at 8 PM, miners led by BCH initiated the fork, starting from block height 478558. Six hours later, ViaBTC’s microBT pool mined the first BCH block, officially birthing Bitcoin Cash.
Even if a hard fork occurs, people will use their real money to vote for the version of Bitcoin they prefer. Thus, although Bitcoin Core developers hold code management rights, due to Bitcoin’s open-source nature and decentralization, no single team or person can fully control Bitcoin.
Miners’ Wallets Are Off-Limits
Simply put, miners won’t let inscriptions disappear.
As co-founder of F2Pool—one of the top three mining pools—Shen Yu’s voice is widely seen as representing miners’ positions. After Luke Dashjr claimed inscriptions exploit a Bitcoin Core vulnerability to flood the blockchain with spam, Shen Yu commented multiple times in the community: “Bitcoin isn’t Ethereum—developers don’t call the shots.”
Reportedly, among Bitcoin mining pools, Foundry USA—the largest—supports Luke Dashjr, while AntPool (second) and ViaBTC (fourth) oppose him, making F2Pool’s stance pivotal.
During previous bull markets, miners’ income was never a concern. But in bear markets, miner earnings become bleak.
In June 2022, Bitcoin miners’ average daily revenue was only $27.19 million, down 56% from the $62 million daily average in November 2021. With poor miner income, overall Bitcoin network hash rate was affected—BTC hash rate dropped over 10%, and hourly block production fell to 5.85 BTC.
Moreover, after the 2024 Bitcoin block reward halving, if BTC price performs poorly, Bitcoin miners face potential profitability issues.
But the emergence of BRC-20 and the boom in inscription transactions brought significant fee increases to miner revenue amid uncertain bear market conditions, making mining hardware easier to sell—they are direct beneficiaries.
On-chain data shows that in May, average Bitcoin transaction fees surged due to BRC-20 activity, rising from an initial $2 to a peak of $31 per transaction. According to The Block Pro, Bitcoin miner revenue increased 30.1% in November to $1.15 billion. Additionally, Blockworks Research reported a record 8.34 million Ordinals-related transactions in November, generating approximately $38.7 million in revenue for Bitcoin miners.
Bitcoin miner fees in 2023; Image source: BitInfoCharts
Bitcoin OG, former eToro executive and founder of Quantum Economics, Mati Greenspan, told media: “Yesterday I spoke with a miner who said his income doubled, which is great—especially before the halving—so this clearly benefits miners.” Clearly, as the biggest beneficiaries of Bitcoin’s ecosystem expansion, miners will fiercely protect their revenue streams and won’t allow inscriptions to vanish from the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Defend Inscriptions—What Voices Exist in the Community?
Luke Dashjr’s words stirred waves of discussion across the community.
The mainstream view in Chinese communities is that the explosion of Bitcoin’s ecosystem has dramatically boosted miner revenue, and since miners dominate the BTC ecosystem—“inscriptions thrive in Asia, American miners profit hugely, European and American developers reject it, leading to clashes between Western developers and Western miners.” Most people are watching the unfolding drama with amusement.
Evilcos, founder of SlowMist, believes there’s no need to patch this bug. He stated, “The unintended consequences of Taproot’s introduction (a good thing) aren’t just spam—there’s also renewed vitality in the Bitcoin ecosystem, which extends far beyond just ordinals/inscriptions. Of course, if patching leads to better compatible solutions for unlocking Bitcoin’s ecosystem, perhaps short-term pain is worth long-term gain.”
Crypto analyst @thecryptoskanda commented on Luke Dashjr’s tweet: “We don’t see Satoshi’s vision here. What we see is an awakened developer trying to impose his pathological personal notions of good or bad onto Satoshi’s original consensus. After this, how can you still claim Bitcoin is the most decentralized currency?”
Influenced by recent inscription frenzy, the Chinese community largely rejects Luke Dashjr’s view. Crypto KOL @11dizhu stated: “No one can speak for Bitcoin. You have your opinion, others have theirs. If disagreements persist, hard fork.”
In English-speaking communities, many complain about severe Bitcoin network congestion and extremely high gas fees, openly saying: “Hope developers can find a way to fix the exploited vulnerability.” Cryptographer @Elder24601 called “inscriptions” a form of dust attack, fixable by raising the default threshold (currently 546 sats).
Some crypto users even commented that because they missed the entire BRC-20 boom, they support Luke Dashjr’s censorship approach.
As mentioned earlier, this isn’t the first time the crypto community has debated the legitimacy of Ordinals NFTs and BRC-20 tokens. Back then, opponents argued that if Ordinals continue to heavily impact the Bitcoin network, a Bitcoin fork could be chosen to modify or remove Taproot.
In May, DeFi Watch founder Chris Blec stated that if enough Bitcoin ecosystem participants—users, node operators, miners—reach consensus that Bitcoin should fork to reduce spam transactions, it wouldn’t be censorship. “You can still mine and use the current fork and mint your silly jpgs there.”
Underlying these debates aren’t just technical disagreements, but deeper philosophical questions about Bitcoin’s purpose and principles. Governing decentralized open-source projects remains challenging.
We all know Bitcoin has no single controller. Its governance structure consists of users paying transaction fees, miners building the blockchain, and node operators validating the ledger. This distributed structure ensures Bitcoin’s security and decentralization to some extent, but also presents governance challenges. Miners’ positions need little explanation—they act primarily based on incentives, choosing their preferred Bitcoin future according to financial rewards.
Despite Luke Dashjr’s clear stance, the Bitcoin community clearly holds diverse views on the future of inscriptions. The power of Bitcoin Core developers alone cannot erase inscriptions.
In the worst-case scenario, the Bitcoin community might again face a 2017-style fork event. But compared to back then, community members now possess valuable experience and insights. This time, everyone will approach potential challenges with deeper understanding and more mature strategies.
“Defend” or “sacrifice” inscriptions? The story of Bitcoin is far from over.
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