the legend Super Testnet has produced the first valiant attack on ordinal inscriptions by inscribing a 0-value transaction, causing joy from hater maxis, and panic from JPG grifters like me
but the situation is not as bad as it sounds, here's my understanding:
he created an inscription on a 0-value input, 0-value output transaction 🤣
https://blockstream.info/tx/2814d0a3c9e6dd5b88911a6280fc3899391f5c47072eb11593af2838160fad2f
which he claims has broken ordinal theory. however i believe this is incorrect and the key is the difference between "ordinal theory" and "inscription numbers"
"ordinal theory" is the made-up system of tracking individual satoshis throughout their history, but nothing was actually broken here
satoshis are still numbered from their creation and correctly tracked to their current locations
what *was* broken is "inscription numbers" - this is just an arbitrary way of tracking what order inscriptions occurred
note the difference between ordinals and inscriptions
ordinals is a tracking system
inscriptions are the actual jpg files: monkey penises, astral_babes (npub1avw…j3gh), etc
"inscription numbers" are just a vanity metric putting an order to which inscriptions came first.
some collectors like having the 100,000th inscription, for example or whatever
these are all messed up now, because super_testnet's transaction exposed some logic in the software
personally, i think this is totally fine. in fact, i think inscription numbers were broken already early on anyway
so in summary:
- if hoping to inscribe the 4-millionth inscription, you're gonna have a hard time getting that right because the tracking is broken
- the ownership of your existing and new ordinals are all totally fine, monkey pensis are safu
- "rare" sat tracking unaffected
if you want to cause more chaos, you can use super_testnet's exploiter tool and wreak more havoc
https://github.com/supertestnet/breaker-of-jpegs
turns out the 0-value inscription for the attack was actually awarded to the miner of that block
and the inscription says "you will use soma and you will like it"
https://ordinals.com/inscription/c1e0db6368a43f5589352ed44aa1ff9af33410e4a9fd9be0f6ac42d9e4117151i0
soma is a proposed concept for a "spacechain" which can be a future maxi-approved way to do collectibles without bloating the blockchain as much
https://github.com/nbd-wtf/soma
that's all for now, will post updates and please correct me if anything is wrong.
and make sure to follow me if you want to get scammed with my next grift!