Super Testnet Releases A Tool That Breaks Ordinals

• A non-standard transaction by Super Testnet has messed up inscription numbers yesterday, as noted on GitHub.
• Soon after, the transaction's author, Super Testnet followed up with the following announcement:
• "I released a tool for increasing the off-by-one error in ordinal theory: https://github.com/supertestnet/breaker-of-jpegs…"
• "Please follow the installation and usage instructions and let me know if it works for you. Note that if it doesn't work you'll lose 10k sats and that's on you. Let's break stuff."
• However, as pointed out by Daniel Diekroeger, Founder of Deezy. "breaking ordinals" was not entirely accurate to put it.

• "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."
• 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."
• Self-proclaimed "NFT historian" LeonidasNFT also wrote an explainer, in which he also reminded that "there has been debate about inscription numbers being off by a lot more than one for almost three months now."
• He also added that "we can fix this bug for future instances of this event so that it can't happen again, and we can move on with our lives."

"For these meta protocols ontop of Bitcoin I'm definitely leaning more in favor of the indexers being the source of truth. It's just not practical to retroactively go back and change every inscription number months after we discover a bug. Because inscription numbers aren't core to the protocol there is no real problem except we will have to get over the fact there was a bug that let certain inscriptions that shouldn't have been included included," he added.

• The 0-value inscription that was used for messing with the numbers also included text saying "you will use soma and you will like it."
• Soma is a proof-of-concept for spacechain which has potential to become a way to do collectibles on bitcoin without bloating the blockchain.
• The whole situation also prompted a new discussion about allowing non-standard transactions on Bitcoin mainnet.

GitHub Repo
Danny's Thread / Archive
Leonidas Explainer / Archive