Controversy of 'joke digital currency' from the Bitcoin blockchain

The turmoil caused by thousands of coin memes makes the Bitcoin blockchain developers want to remove the "joke cryptocurrency" from the system.

In May, the meme coin craze returned, led by cryptocurrency Pepe , causing record transaction volumes and fees on the Bitcoin blockchain. There was a period when the transaction volume increased 11 times compared to normal, causing network congestion. The world's largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance even had to stop withdrawing Bitcoin and some other cryptocurrencies due to Pepe in a short time.

Although the turmoil has subsided, some of the programmers who maintain Bitcoin's blockchain are arguing about getting rid of the thousands of coin memes that flood the network.

“I think the system is being abused,” Bitcoin developer Ali Sherief wrote on his blog last week. “Bitcoin was never born to serve as a platform for worthless coin memes.”

In an email to the cryptocurrency development community, Sherief commented that "worthless tokens are threatening the normal and smooth operation of the Bitcoin network". He called for the digital currency to be removed from the blockchain to avoid similar incidents in the future.

Pepe is the token that created the latest meme coin craze recently. Illustration: CoinTelegraph

Compared to older memes that run on Ethereum's ERC-20 standard, tokens like Pepe are built on Bitcoin's BRC-20 over a new protocol called Ordinals. Created by software engineer Casey Rodarmor, Ordinals helps users put text, photos, and videos inside each satoshi - the smallest unit of Bitcoin (there are 100 million satoshis in one Bitcoin).

The coin meme is considered a joke of the cryptocurrency world . They are sought after by many people but do not bring any core value to the community, other than the goal of "investing luck." This trend went down last year, but Ordinals has made new meme coins like Pepe According to website brc-20.io , there are now 25,000 meme coins on the Bitcoin blockchain with a market value of $475 million.At its peak in May, the tokens were worth nearly $2 billion. Average per transaction also increased from $2.8 in April to $30 in May, but then back to $4, according to Coinmetrics data .

According to Jameson Lopp, co-founder of crypto storage solutions company Casa, the exploding coin meme is not good for the Bitcoin network. "It's like a DDoS attack on the system," this person said.

Veteran Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr also considers meme coin transactions like spam. He even created a program called Ordisrespector to assist with eliminating such transactions.

"This action should have been taken months ago," Dashjr said. “Garbage filtering has been a standard part of Bitcoin Core since day one.”

In the opposite direction, many people think that Ordinals bring many benefits. They agree that the meme coin bloom is harmful, but the potential of BRC-20 could be applied in many other areas. According to Dune Analytics, an increase in transaction fees is one of the immediate benefits , especially for miners. In the context that Bitcoin is about to be fully mined, this will be the source of money to maintain the system through the validation task.

Because the Bitcoin network is not controlled by any individual or organization, experts say it will be difficult to completely eliminate Ordinals, meaning that the meme coin still has the potential to continue to explode in the near future.

One solution being offered by developers is a hard fork, which means creating a version of the Bitcoin blockchain that doesn't support Ordinals. However, Andrew Poelstra, Blockstream Research Director, said that not many people will be excited about the prospect of developing a Bitcoin network that is not BRC-20 compatible.

Some argue that instead of splitting, developers should find a solution to scale the Ordinals, avoiding the case of the Bitcoin blockchain being blocked like recently. “The real value of Ordinals is the ability to store arbitrary data on the Bitcoin network,” said Messari analyst Sami Kassab. “As this space is utilized, the demand and proceeds from transaction fees will increase.”

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