Monero Ordinals Face Community Backlash Over Anonymity Concerns

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Jeff Horseman
Jeff Horseman
Jeff Horseman got into journalism because he liked to write and stunk at math. He grew up in Vermont and he honed his interviewing skills as a supermarket cashier by asking Bernie Sanders “Paper or plastic?” After graduating from Syracuse University in 1999, Jeff began his journalistic odyssey at The Watertown Daily Times in upstate New York, where he impressed then-U.S. Senate candidate Hillary Clinton so much she called him “John” at the end of an interview. From there, he went to Annapolis, Maryland, where he covered city, county and state government at The Capital newspaper. Today, Jeff writes about anything and everything. Along the way, Jeff has covered wildfires, a tropical storm, 9/11 and the Dec. 2 terror attack in San Bernardino. If you have a question or story idea about politics or the inner workings of government, please let Jeff know. He’ll do his best to answer, even if it involves a little math.
  • The Monero community has raised a number of concerns, including a loss of anonymity.
  • Mordinals are an altered version of Ordinals that may be used on the Monero blockchain.

The most notorious privacy-focused blockchain now supports non-fungible tokens (NFTs), although this has not been welcomed by everybody. As with Bitcoin Ordinals, anybody may use Mordinals (or Monero Ordinals) to inscribe data alongside transactions on the Monero blockchain.

The Monero community has raised a number of concerns. Including a loss of anonymity on the network and the potential for unlawful material to be stored in an unerasable database. Also, to enable the addition of arbitrary data to Bitcoin transactions, Casey Rodarmor released the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol in January. In this way, information may be associated with a single satoshi.

Legitimate Worry by Community

Moreover, Mordinals are a slightly altered version of Ordinals that may be used on the Monero blockchain. Unlike Ordinals, which depend on the “witness” section of a Bitcoin transaction. Mordinals may keep information in the “tx_extra” field of every Monero transaction.

This has been theoretically feasible on Monero since 2014, but support for it has just recently surfaced. The arguments against Mordinals are quite similar to those made against Bitcoin. With the added concern that it may compromise the anonymity provided by Monero.

Moreover, considering how highly the Monero community regards anonymity, it was never going to be straightforward to implement NFTs on a network that works hard to keep its tokens inconspicuous. Monero transactions are authenticated using “ring signatures,” which encrypt user information by combining a transaction with a group of bogus signatures.

Furthermore, it would be easy to distinguish real transactions from fake NFTs if a wealthy attacker inundated Monero blocks with Mordinals. For Monero, this is a legitimate worry.

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