When a dev tells you that something is weird and hard and they have to change behavior that users rely on, the correct response is somewhere between "Cool story, bro." and "Wah, wah, wah, are the bits being mean to you?". Developers serve users, not the other way around.

For this and other reasons, the ord developers recommit to the stability and predictability of inscription numbers, and will not pursue renumbering.

As someone who people in the ordinals community mysteriously pay a lot of attention to, I see myself as having two distinct roles with regards to proposals such as the great renumbering.

One is to have and propose things that I think are good ideas. This will continue, and I don't see any particular reason to self-censor. In other words, the unfettered blog posts will continue. The community needs to understand that these are proposals only, and that I have had and will continue to have wacky ideas.

The other role is as one of the people who helps make decisions about what to implement in ord, the ordinals reference implementation. Raph, as lead maintainer, has the final say, but he hasn't stopped listening to my wacky ideas, so I still have some influence. Those decisions must be made with respect to the userbase of ord and the greater ordinals community.

When I first decided to propose renumbering, I knew that it had to meet a very high bar. Changes to ord and to ordinals must be Pareto improvements, changes to the status quo that leave everyone better off, or extremely close to it. Changes cannot create winners and losers, even if the benefit to the winners might be greater than the harm to the losers.

After reading discussion on GitHub and Twitter, lurking in many a Twitter space, and discussing it with many people, it's clear that the great renumbering does not meet that very high bar, and is better off consigned to the dustbin of history.

A couple of the arguments that I personally found most persuasive:

• Any public discussion will consist only of the most engaged users. Many less engaged users simply won't be aware that a discussion is taking place, or might not participate, regardless of their views. These voices simply won't be heard. This includes people who aren't terminally online, many people who don't speak English as their native language, and people who just don't particularly like arguing online. This means that the bias must be strong towards the status quo,

• A programmer's job, fundamentally, is to drag his (or her!) balls through miles of broken glass if it benefits the user. Unless the status quo is so complex and unmentionable that it is untenable, disruptive changes must be avoided. As a spirited GitHub commenter put it, "Code and protocols get messy as they age. That's reality. Purity is for virgins."

What does this mean, practically?

• ord will commit to the stability of positive inscription numbers. Negative, or cursed, inscription numbers are subject to change at any time, if new cursed inscriptions are recognized.

• At some as-of-yet unannounced block height in the future, new inscriptions which would previously have been cursed will be blessed, and will receive positive inscription numbers as part of the main sequence of inscription numbers. Hopefully, this kind of community wide coordination is not a common occurrence, but it may happen again from time to time, if it is advantageous to recognize new kinds of inscriptions which previously would have been invalid.-

• The commitment to the stability of inscription numbers does not preclude the fixing of bona fide bugs. If there is a legitimate bug, and the only reasonable way to fix it proves disruptive to inscription numbers, we will fix it.

Inscriptions are both a technical artifact, and an artistic technology. Technical considerations must contend on equal footing with aesthetic considerations.

Inscription numbers are here to stay.