Bitcoin Forum

I may be hated for saying this, but what's currently happening in the mempool is a feature, not a bug. The fact that we have a fixed-sized block limit means that the current clogged up state would inevitably happen sometime.

Another important reminder: Censorship won't prevent monkey jpegs. Let's leave asides if censoring monkeys would undermine one of the important properties: It just technically doesn't work. People who spend dozens of millions of dollars in monkeys everyday can bypass every censorship measure and save them straight to the UTXO set, which would be a lot worse for the rest of us.

Here's another: As long as the law of supply and demand defines the price of block bytes, we can never on-board billions or even millions of people on a layer-1 solution, unless we undermine another important property; being practical to verify the ledger.

Final reminder: The free market decides the ideal tradeoff. "Is it better to have a dynamical block size?", "Would it be worse if we traded 'being practical to verify' with 'being for the poor'?", "Would a tail emission save the situation?". These questions are not easy to answer. However, we have a lot of cryptocurrency options, each tailored to meet different needs. It's up to us to determine which option suits us best and to refrain from complaining about the shortcomings of a single solution.

I'm going to disagree with you. The fact that Bitcoin is currently useless for small transactions, and very expensive for large transactions is a serious problem. I'm now teaching my kids to use Monero, simply because Bitcoin fees take up an entire year of their allowance. Bitcoin has lost out on so many potential users and transactions over the years, just because it can't handle more. I don't like it.
LN isn't going to solve this if opening and closing a channel costs a week worth of food.

Reinstating the "coin days destroyed" priority mechanism can help. Spammers can't destroy unlimited coin days, but this isn't in the interest of miners. And that's a fundamental problem: the ones who earn from high fees benefit from the flaws in the fee system.

Yep. It sucks. What's left: all Bitcoin users keeping their coins on large centralized exchanges and ETFs? That destroys the concept of "electronic cash".

Hey, I get to complain about transaction fees! At least let me have this :P
I just hate seeing Bitcoin lose market share to shitcoins, because Bitcoin can't handle the transaction volume that comes with it's popularity.

I divide crypto into two.
One part is Bitcoin which is store of value and another part is Altcoin
which I use for trading.

Bitcoin continues to do exactly what its supposed to do, without fail. Although the debate goes back all the way to 2011 or so, and we're just rehashing a 13-year-old argument, any transaction that is valid and picked up by a miner is a legitimate bitcoin transaction. So stalwarts who stay mad have two choices:

1) Continue to cry about how jpeggers and/or devs have "broken bitcoin," or
2) Embrace the evolution of what bitcoin can be used for.

PS: staying mad isn't going to change anything.

How? You mean like joining the madness of paying $400 for a dust transaction, and then selling that same transaction to a greater fool for $4000? That doesn't sound like something I'm willing to embrace.

I never said it isn't a serious problem. What I said is "it's a feature". Here's another feature: 21 million cap. "But this might not sustain the miners' income". I know. It might not. But, it's a feature nonetheless. Same applies to a fixed-sized block limit. It's inevitable that rich people will outweigh the poor sometimes, in terms of confirmation priority.

You're a father figure! I wish I had a father who taught me about Bitcoin and Monero. Congratulations.  :)

Agreed.

Doesn't prevent the problem, perhaps discourages it by a little bit. What if they mint these tokens through centralized platforms with enormous amounts of UTXOs? I also don't like coins days destroyed, because it's anti-fungibility. A coin with value 100 days is more valuable than one that was just created.

The sooner we accept that Bitcoin cannot handle the entire populace on-chain, the better. Free markets are trial-and-error based. If Bitcoin has erred as electronic cash, then it's down to us to see which change in a crypto-protocol would make it look more like cash. Maybe there is none. Maybe it's dynamical block size. Maybe it's tail emission. Or even a compression method we haven't even thought of. In practice, we can see which is more recognized as cash.

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A lot of Monero proponents on Twitter are bragging about Monero, and how it's better cash. Do they have any idea how bad the system works if the network was clogged up with gigabytes of monkeys every once in a while? I know, it'd still be cheap, but to finish syncing you'd have to verify like a million of monkey-ring signatures, which would slow down it by orders of magnitude.

Iirc last time we had this there were two directions for action:
1. get the community point their finger towards the services (wallets & exchanges) that were spamming the network
2. get bitcoin one step forward with SegWit

Imho telling that current situation is OK is not the best course of action.


True that. Still, not counting (nor restricting) at all those P2TR related bytes is imho a bug, not a feature.


Afaik Monero went - many, many years ago - for virtually no block limit. I may be wrong, because I didn't keep up with their news.
Of course, this can come with other kind of problems, but (sadly) they don't have this magnitude of being used by people (so we don't know).

I think that in times like these, where we have multiple sides siding against different opinions, it is important to remember the very first words that stood the foundation of what Bitcoin is today:

By simply existing the feature to implement such protocols doesn't actually mean that they should be created/implemented in the first place. Sure, adaptability and flexibility are great in the technological era but I believe that there has to be a core idea that would have to be followed in making sure that each ramification of the technology stood the ground against their foundations. Otherwise, what would it stand for?
I'm not against progress and improvements to the concept of Bitcoin, don't take me wrong, but I can't seem to find a reason to believe that adding NFT imprints in the blockchain is something that would allow the technology to remain faithfully to something it stood to reach (someday).

That is an astonishing feat, congratulations to you in introducing them to both concepts. I wonder if they realize the main differences between those and fiat and what were their first opinions about them?

This is an acceptable discussion and one that has been going on for some time and I easily see more this as acceptable regarding what can be made than Ordinals/Rune implementation and is totally understandable that Bitcoin simply cannot answer with efficiency when nothing could prepare us for these new NFT concepts when Bitcoin was first created. I wonder what more can/will be created that we  haven't imagined regarding Bitcoin - ~ 14 years to create "fungible NFT" on the blockchain, I wonder what it may come next. As an additional perspective, not one of my friends in real life, those who just want to hold bitcoin, is aware of what is going on regarding high fees, fungible tokens, Ordinals, Runes.

But then again, like BHC said, the free market is the concept that dictates this behaviour - if people didn't care about NFT, these implementations wouldn't have any kind of relevance. Problem is, I don't see NFT going away any time soon and with the amount of bridges being made for the Rune implementation, I fear that this may just be the beginning of a troubled period in Bitcoin existence. At least for a while.

I didn't know about developments of Bitcoin behind the scene but when I read documents, I feel that these attacks from Inscriptions, Ordinals, Runes can be kind of tools to create problems, and months later problems will be resolved. Bitcoin will escape from big technical problems to better technology even it will be only able to resolve problems temporarily.

You can consider it as my conspiracy theory, problems created, then problems resolved, and Bitcoin will make its a highest all time high for this bull run.

I am sorry but as I followed, there is no solution is developed to handle this problem except proposal from Luke to censor transactions from Ordinals. It was raised to the community months go. Did I miss anything technically?

But don't forget there are ways to discourage those spammer. Even if it's limited to make Ordinals TX become non-standard, it would force them to use Runes instead where they only can store 80 bytes of arbitrary data on OP_RETURN on each TX.


That mechanism was never part of Bitcoin protocol. It's just default behavior on Bitcoin Core (previously called "Bitcoin-Qt" and "Bitcoin") which used by miner until they prioritize profit.

I understand that you hold the view that the current clogged state of the mempool in blockchain networks is a feature rather than a bug. The fixed block size limit certainly contributes to the occurrence of congestion.  On the other hand, there are concerns that larger blocks could lead to centralization and decrease the number of people who can participate in the network as full nodes.

You raise a valid concern regarding the scalability limitations of layer-1 solutions, especially when considering the onboarding of billions or millions of users. As the number of participants and transactions increases, the demand for block space also grows, potentially leading to congestion and higher fees.

I totally agree with this, people forget when they preach about how the decreasing supply will raise the price, how scarcity drives prices, how the space in the chain also acts the same, and you have too little, you need to pay more. Bitcoin was never a charity, was never a quick money scheme, it was made to obey only the law of economics and free trade, and here you have it!


It can make them more expensive, not completely get rid of them but diminishing the quantity.
But, with "good" censorship you're opening Pandora's box.


But without enough space on the L1 you can't make a good transition to L2.
You can have the best innercity transport system working at 10% capacity and still have 2 million waiting on the outer ring for hours since they can't get in an use that transport.
The exchange between L1 and L2 must be cheap and easy, otherwise...well you can see the results.


I heard that in '89, unfortunately, we didn't shoot our guy like the Romanians did.


https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1bak3to/monero_spam_recap/
"dynamic block size"  ;D

What are the disadvantages of dynamic block size and tail emission?

I also wonder what are developers reaction to the recent fees that spikes due to Runes, I didn't find any discussion about that in Bitcoin stack exchange, Github, or Linux foundation.

But, as the fees is keep declining, they might think it's not needed yet.

LN isn't going to solve because it would end up like on-chain. :P

What's currently happening might be a feature, but it's a feature of spam that's abusing the network for its selfish reasons.

I heard a good comparison between Ordinals/Runes and telemarketing spam. Telemarketers are also using telecommunication networks the way they were intended. They pay their bills and purchase the needed hardware to make calls. But what happens then? They spam. You get a call to talk about Jesus, saving the planet, investing in this or that, or they inform you of a lottery you won or can participate in. Most people don't like them. You hang up the phone, you block their numbers.. you censor them. If this trend doesn't end, that's what needs to happen. You find a way to put them in the garbage bin. That's where garbage goes.

Why? Because Bitcoin's purpose is to be a
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

If blocks are only filled by 10%, 20% or 30% with P2P online payments of digital cash, then something has seriously gone wrong. I have no problem with a free and competing fees market. That's how it's supposed to be. If you are willing to pay more than me to make an online P2P payment of electronic cash, then all the power to you my brother. I will have to wait my turn or reach deeper inside my own pockets to offer a competitive fee rate. What I don't believe anyone should have to do is to compete with spammers who are not making P2P online payments with electronic cash, and are taking away many of the features that normal people love. With those, I mean a cheap, fast, and borderless way of sending payments in any amounts you want.   

You are right staying mad is not going to change anything, that's why many will move away from BTC and find other benefit options, for different financial activities, we don't have other option but to accept the evolution of BTC which is what? in your POV. But yeah we should not cry about inscriptions, but we should cry if we are not taking benefit from this feature.

My words are same as before that, those who are making $$ via Ordinals are prasing it, and embracing the new evolution and who are not and paying high fee they are not embracing and crying. But don't you think if the people from crying category enters the embracing category the hype will increase more and thus the tx fee will also.

I've participated in such threads many times before last year but at the end of the day where the solution, haha it's quite funny that we cant solve it, many people offer the L2s as a solution but people don't want to move on, many of them support this solution and many oppose on the same time.

Now the closing wordic on the high tx fee on the Bitcoin network is really a concern for the day-to-day Bitcoin network users, if you can't afford it just stop using the Bitcoin network and move on to other solutions which are much cheaper obviously you won't be able to enjoy that reliability. Now you won't be able to use the Bitcoin network if you cant afford its a bitter reality.

The Ordinals is something that I didn't expect to be on the Bitcoin Network till but now Rune as been added, while others may claim everyone has freedom on how they choose to spend their Bitcoin/Sat and when you try to remind them that this was not what is written on the Bitcoin whitepaper they respond with Bitcoin is now bigger than Satoshi but I wonder how they justify this when others suffer from this fate, bitcoiners are depending on Altcoins for making payments.

Anyway if the dev still decides to let the spam continues, it doesn't matter after all we have been on this issue since last year and nothing have really be done. Though I don't really know much but one thing I can say is that these should be scrap out of the Bitcoin Network.

Bitcoin being only use as a means of payment and been great for years while if anyone think Bitcoin needs to expand then, why don't they, make Bitcoin usable for everything Ethereum and other altcoins are being used for since they fail to see how it is feasible on the Bitcoin Network.

ignoring all of blackhatcoiners BS


bitcoin is code, code can make rules for whats expected. and yes we can denounce the core roadmap and fight against/prevent new exploits and clean up the code and create rules via code which dont just allow junk..

we can close off majority of opcodes that have no conditions(no validation requirements thus anyjunk is allowed)
we can close off the miscounting and the 'assume valid' and 'is-valid' exceptions that just let junk through

code can clean up the network.  idiots and bullsh!tters just dont know it or dont want to admit its possible

we actually can get back to a system where every byte is accounted for, has purpose and conditions which nodes have set rules for.. we can harden consensus again and add new validity checks for any active opcode.

the issue is not a physics problem... its a social/political problem of dev control..

instead of being sheep to one master reference client(core) we can have multiple brands of different teams making reference clients where they all are allowed to propose new features whereby the best feature gets adopted by all brands and then the feature activates..
this hardened consensus then ensures proposers actually think more about their feature, develop its idea better, display the benefit better and actually unite the community around good beneficial features to then get activated via true network consensus of network readiness.
.. instead of the last few years of softened consensus of centralised trojans rolling in bad crap unchecked because the gate keeper wants a blind/softened system of lax gatekeeping

and dont pretend its "censorship"
there are many buzz words used by core themselves
'depreciate','evict','orphan','reject','ban','prune','strip' (list goes on)
where by bitcoin always HAD and HAS decided on which transactions are relevant
but the softening of the rules has now allowed more irrelevant unchecked junk.. and that junk can be cleaned up..

One genuine user abandoning Bitcoin is greater damage than 100 shitcoiners going away because they can no longer upload their bananas to Bitcoin's blockchain. 

So your suggestion is joining the shitwagon? There are no benefits. Even the profits you might earn aren't worth destroying the best chance of an uncontrollable way of sending money that we have. 

How does that help anyone? We should all upload bananas and enjoy the high transaction fees? That's what you are saying.

Not you but I'll probably really be hated for saying this: Bitcoin become a victim of rich people.
What it was years ago | What it is today:

- P2P Electronic Cash system | P2P JPEG ownership transfer service
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Low transaction fees |  Abused network with high transaction fees
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- No regulations, no ETF, no restrictions |  Regulations, ETF, restrictions
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- Mining was decentralized |  Now mining is centralized
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Do you wanna know what's going to happen? Did you guys ever hear If you can't defeat them, be one of them? So, governments and rich people took important resources and taking it every day. Bitcoin ETF approval was one of the most important step. Exchanges are getting regulated too and there is KYC everywhere. They technically become one of them. Soon they'll force miners to filter transactions and don't include the ones that governments don't want to be included. This is where it's heading!

It's here because money is made. Miners are earning tremendously big amount of money thanks to ordinals and ordinals are also making tremendously big money thanks to dumb people. Does anyone think that it will be removed anytime soon? Money!

Great, so here's a fact: we don't do that in here. We cannot afford censorship. If you start censoring this and that, you open the Pandora's box, and be sure you might be next in line to be censored.

Great. So, what do we do to centralized exchanges and their users? They don't use it as a peer-to-peer cash system; it's clearly against the concept. Or, what do we do to dust attacks? I can claim they are spam and everyone would agree. What about second layers that do not go according to the whitepaper? Let's ban them too, why not? What about OP_RETURN? Clearly not an addition related to financial transactions.

What makes you think that your opinion on spam is the holy grail of truth we should all follow, whereas my opinion on spam is just subjective and must be ignored?

Dumb people don't have infinite money. A fool and his money are soon parted.

You are probably right, dumb people don't have infinite money but you completely ignore that there is an infinity of dumb people and they are constantly expanding like the universe does. So, technically we have an infinite money.

Not gonna lie. That made me laugh!

Another behaviour that left a mark on me was the amount of fees that people were willing to pay, especially around block #840.000, to have their transaction around that block. For example, it makes me wonder who is behind these fees[1][2][3] (33k, 28k and 34k respectively) - could it be early adopters that saw that there is a big opportunity in earning more with Runes/Ordinals? I don't believe that the early adopters would embrace this idea to the point of burning so much in fees, so I rule out that option.

Could it be just crazy rich people that just want to attempt to be even more rich? I also find it hard to believe recent adopters, or average Joe's, just decided that Runes were the way to go regarding wealth and went crazy with spending money into them.

Could it be the miners that also take part into some of this behaviour in order to inflate the fees and make their whole operation even more profitable?

As a behaviour I reckon that I would like to find a reasoning behind such acts, but perhaps the error falls on me as these actions may not be supported in rational and structured decisions...

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[1]https://mempool.space/tx/d906205fdb2fdad9d8f1999f890a05a49d6125ec712c83d0a9901be6b4dafe2e (https://mempool.space/tx/d906205fdb2fdad9d8f1999f890a05a49d6125ec712c83d0a9901be6b4dafe2e)
[2]https://mempool.space/tx/e89ecbbe0a70a2305edc9c18c61f019f34b72c9af1b8221fa1231b0aa9351226 (https://mempool.space/tx/e89ecbbe0a70a2305edc9c18c61f019f34b72c9af1b8221fa1231b0aa9351226)
[3]https://mempool.space/tx/a58b4fe7bd215935ab07c54d014ffcd9fe7172734b5993634e259613d8b433b0 (https://mempool.space/tx/a58b4fe7bd215935ab07c54d014ffcd9fe7172734b5993634e259613d8b433b0)

That's the thing: there is no JPEG ownership, it's meaningless! It only "means" something on a made-up system, which only means something to the few people who are in on it. To the rest of the world, it doesn't mean anything. And on top of that, anyone can claim "ownership" of any image, with or without having the rights to do so. It's a scam.

If I'd tell you each of my satoshis is worth $1000, and if I'd create a wallet that actually shows that, and if I were to hype it enough, I could probably get some gullible victims into paying me that much. Just like the ICO scams did when Ethereum was facilitating all those scams. I really don't like the idea of Bitcoin faciliting this.

I was thinking of:

A fool and his money are soon parted.

Bitcoin doesn't censor because there was no grave need for that. No transactions should ever get censored. I don't consider the Ordinal/Runes spam to be transactions (going back to the P2P transfer of digital cash), so the same rules shouldn't apply. My personal opinion, of course.

Now you are exaggerating. Don't forget that you need a huge majority support to make important changes in Bitcoin. Even a solution for inscription spam might not pass that threshold, let alone something that shouldn't be prevented.

We don't do anything. They aren't a threat. Ordinals don't use OP_RETURN (I think). Runes do. A solution should be found to filter out only inscription spam, nothing genuine. For the record, I don't consider what Luke Dashjr is doing as a good solution because it affects coinjoin transactions.     

There is already a solution to that which prevents us to make transactions below the dust limit. 

That's the beauty of discussing different topics. You share your opinions and people either agree with them or not. If the majority agrees, it can be implemented. I don't see why a random person would look at the current situation and go: This is fine, let's not do anything and just pay $20 or $50 per transaction, depending on how much the spammers are spamming at the time.

---

Btw, there have been multiple posts about these spammers soon losing their money and stopping their attacks. Possible. But the enemies of Bitcoin with access to money printers could also improve their approaches and clog the network in the same way. The current spammers have showed them the way.

You're right, with Ordinals there is no proof of ownership on-chain -- it is only enforced at the Ordinals protocol level. With Runes, which I haven't really looked into, supposedly the proof of ownership is on-chain, although I don't know how it works.

There was a saying by Joe Looney (https://twitter.com/wasthatawolf), an early Counterparty user, wallet dev & former Rare Pepe Scientist, "the token is the art." A lot of famous Counterparty "NFTs" (quotes are needed because most are actually fungible) don't have the artwork attached to the token at any level, or the original image-containing URL it pointed to on-chain is broken. Doesn't affect the price or collectability of the token in any way.

https://talkimg.com/images/2024/04/23/jW0lT.png

https://xchain.io/asset/RAREPEPE

With Counterparty, the token itself is the art; the art is merely a representation of the token.

With Ordinals, people are basically just collecting dust, which is why I never got into it.

Runes is basically a more crude, expensive & better-marketed Counterparty AFAICT.

What is the discussion around this particular case? Ordinals have been going on ~ mid 2022[1] and their behaviour hasn't slowed down to the point of being non-relevant in the network and Runes are following the same trend (albeit in a bigger scale at the moment, but the data is still few).
This point brings me back to my previous comment[2], especially when combined now with this suspicious from LoyceV[3] - If this is the work of one individual, how deep do you have to trust these implementations to sink hundreds and hundreds of dollars in (fees) transactions that, supposedly, have a unique characteristic that will make somebody in the future find value in that? Like I said, surelly this isn't the average Joe that heard about bitcoin in the news, nor this is the early adopter whose pockets are the first ones that I believe could sustain such "investment".

Or is this a case of a very, very bored individual that sees Ordinals and Runes as the next boom (similar to what happened so far with Bitcoin) and want to take the early benefits of it?

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[1]https://rodarmor.com/blog/ordinal-theory/ (https://rodarmor.com/blog/ordinal-theory/)
[2]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5493652.msg63979843#msg63979843 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5493652.msg63979843#msg63979843)
[3]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.msg63981471#msg63981471 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.msg63981471#msg63981471)

Absolutely disagree. Bitcoin doesn't censor for the simple reason that it is the right thing to do. If you don't like censorship-resistant always-no-matter-what cash, there's a host variety of cryptocurrencies I can direct you to.

- "I don't consider OP_RETURN spam to be transactions (going back to the P2P transfer of digital cash), so the same rules shouldn't apply".
- "I don't consider LN channels to be transactions (going back to the P2P transfer of digital cash), so the same rules shouldn't apply".
- "I don't consider centralized exchanges' transactions to be peer-to-peer (going back to the P2P transfer of digital cash), so the same rules shouldn't apply".

Do you get it now?

According to you. According to someone else, they might pose a threat to the P2P cash model. According to me, no transaction that complies with the consensus rules is a threat.

That's only non-standard. It's perfectly valid to create dust. Be certain that if enough people were willing to trade millions of dollars for dust, the miners would bypass any standard rules. Especially if dust was standard beforehand, as already happens with Ordinals.

If you want the system to scale, work on scaling. Not on censorship. That's the appropriate response.

To add to the discussion, and since I have recently been reading more about Ordinals and Runes, in the first article written by Casey regarding Ordinals[1] he says that the concept of Ordinals had already been discussed, in some ways, back in 2012, right here in the forum[2][3]:

The idea never reached adoption and generate some discussion about it and eventually Casey would make a post about his idea on the forum on December 2022[4]. What I can't seem to understand so far is the contradiction that Casey makes regarding Ordinals when he says that he has views from those whom he considers being labeled as "ideological Bitcoin maximalists", without being himself a ideological Bitcoin maximalist:
This is all fine and well - I suppose he supports a hybrid model regarding supporting some basic fundamentals but embracing other perspectives - but this is the part that triggers me:
I would very much would like to ignore Inscriptions but sadly I can't - Every now and then I am faced with 100 sat/vB fees if I want to make a payment of a couple of dollars to any kind of service. How can I choose to ignore them when they have a huge impact on the core functionality of Bitcoin?

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[1]https://rodarmor.com/blog/ordinal-theory/ (https://rodarmor.com/blog/ordinal-theory/)
[2]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102355.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102355.0)
[3]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117224.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117224.0)
[4]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117224.msg1273726#msg1273726 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117224.msg1273726#msg1273726)
[5]https://rodarmor.com/blog/inscriptions-a-guide-for-the-ideological-maxi/ (https://rodarmor.com/blog/inscriptions-a-guide-for-the-ideological-maxi/)
*He mispelled bitcointalk  >:( (Bitocin??)

It's not cash. Again, my opinion. Anyone is free to agree or disagree.

Then, that someone is free to suggest what should be done to change/stop the threat and the community will decide the course of action.

I don't disagree. But how good has that done us? We don't have a solution for scaling on L1 that wouldn't affect the decentralized nature of Bitcoin and which wouldn't require much more storage at the same time.

It's already been ignored, thus Ordinals led to Runes. Tomorrow Runes will lead to something new, and then we can all enjoy our censorship-resistant Bitcoin at 500-700 sat/vByte.

No-coiners will also tell you that BTC is meaningless, it's a made-up system...

Only 1% of the global population owns BTC, to the rest (99%) of the world it doesn't mean anything. Ordinal users are a subset of an already small subset (BTC users).

In the end it's all ones and zeroes. However we decide to interpret it is a matter of perspective (for art lovers art makes sense, for others not so much).

Even copyrighted material (such as Nintendo video games (https://www.cryptopolitan.com/bitcoin-developers-nintendo-games-ordinals/)) is ones and zeroes.

Nintendo will tell you it's not just ones and zeroes, it's their intellectual property (because that's how they interpret it from their own perspective) and they may even try to take down BTC nodes with a DMCA notice (https://uk.pcmag.com/games/151539/gitlab-removes-nintendo-switch-emulator-suyu-following-dmca-notice).

Piracy lovers/preservationists will tell you it's just ones and zeroes, not much different from other data stored in the BTC blockchain.

You're missing the point. Sure, theoretically we can softfork and "fix the exploit" if there's enough demand. But, the Ordinal users can find another loophole to store their data, and it'll probably be worse for the rest of us. Imagine if Ordinal users bloated the UTXO set instead of using tapscript. That'd be a verification nightmare, and I'm sure they can handle it financially!

There. Is. No. Room. For. Censorship. The more you try to censor what you deem as "spam", the more you're pushing that spam to become indistinguishable from monetary transactions.

Question: what should we do if instead of Ordinal users there were "legitimate users" who used Bitcoin as cash? Censor a percentage of those, or work on scaling?

Once more, what we are presently experiencing is the inevitable outcome of Bitcoin's nature.

I am kind of seeing a similar thing while at the same time starting to feel some kind of a tinge of an attack on the bitcoin network and transactability of regular folks, but I still am tentatively considering that they are not going to be able to keep it up, becuase there would have to be buyers on the other end, so sure maybe for a while the hype can keep going, and maybe even several months, but is it sustainable in any kind of way that it is really going to break transactability?  or maybe this is just the beginning of variations of similar kinds of ways to remove lower paying transactions for these ones who are apparently willing to spend a lot of money on variations of their crap.. and then maybe it gives other actors (such as governments and financial institutions - even miners) more information about ways that they can drive bitcoin fees up and to discourage normies from getting involved in bitcoin, including that normies could become frustrated by not being able to engage in on chain transactions and normies are then tending to use third party providers and also realizing that they are not really directly using bitcoin, but they may well be able to get bitcoin price exposure.. ..

but then price dynamics that are partly motivated by a bunch of scams on top of bitcoin and contributing to confusion in terms of whether bitcoin is any different than any other shitcoin, which we should still realize that bitcoin is still different from various other shitcoins, just that the fees cost a lot to transact (rght now) and maybe we have to make sure that we are transacting in the thousands of dollars in order to justify the fees that we are paying.. although even if we might have to send $1k to $2k to some kind of a lightning network wallet, then maybe we would thereafter be able to have cheaper transactions on that wallet that we had initiated with $1k to $2k worth of bitcoin.


Is it worth it to try to stop it rather than just letting it run its course.  I am having trouble considering that it breaks bitcoin, even though it is quite inconvenient, and it stacks a lot of cards in favor of rich people and against poor people and even normies wanting to get into bitcoin. .but there frequently is misinformation (information asymmetry) that normies newbies to bitcoin have to sort through in order to still recognize/appreciate bitcoin as a powerful investment that they should get rather than not getting, even though transaction fees happen to currently be high, and "we" seem to be going through a period of excitement in regards to how to propagate various scams on the bitcoin main chain.


Sure.. I am kind of thinking that too.. and so you are implying that rich people, governments, financial institutions, anti-bitcoin folks will just keep throwing their money at bitcoin to clog it up.. and suggesting that they have enough money to actually accomplish their mission..

I understand the idea, and I have similar fears, but I think that we cannot necessarily presume such a thing without possibly letting it play out for some additional time, so in that sense, I cannot see what kind of a "rush" change would be good enough to NOT damage more than it solves, and I am kind of thinking that these high fees might be inspiring various kinds of developments that might be able to inspire some kinds of solutions that had not previously been considered.. How long these solutions take?  Who knows, but there are variations of them that already exist, even though they seem to have more centralization characteristics. 

Many of us who hold bitcoin privately are likely made aware of these matters, and there may well be some folks who hold bitcoin privately who have not yet become aware of these current high fee issues, and surely some of them could become inspired to sell their coins because of such matters or maybe fail/refuse to buy more bitcoin because of such matters, and yeah, they will become low coiners or no coiners, and maybe they will regret their decision later.. so yeah, we each make decisions about our own bitcoin holdings if we believe some of our use cases are being interfered with. and/or that we might have transaction sizes (UTXOs) that have become uneconomical to spend.. or marginally economical to spend, and some folks might panic based on these kinds of issues and misread them as more sustainable than they actually are.. and I am not going to proclaim that I know the solution, but I am not much of a fan of emergency measures based on even what seems to be currently going on.

You're missing the point. If I own Bitcoin, it's mine! Nobody else can use it, nobody else can take it. It doesn't matter if someone else is interested or not: it's mine. The fact that many people don't use Bitcoin doesn't matter: 99.8% of the world, including me, doesn't own Swedish Krona. But nobody would say it doesn't mean anything.
I have many JPEG images. I own many of them: they're pictures I took myself. I never gave anyone a copy, which means I'm certain I am the only owner. If I'd upload it to a server, anyone can download it. If I upload it to a blockchain, it doesn't mean anything for ownership.

I'm not so optimistic. Once one scam fails, they'll move to the next one. We've already gone from NFT to Inscription to Ordinal to Rune, just like many altcoins were created in the past, followed by many ICOs, many Bitcoin Forks, DeFi BS and more.

They just developed the technique of runes  metamining  over bitcoin blockchain. Thus,   patsies who spend hundred of bucks   for their dust transactions have    the incentive to increase the fee rate they allocate,  as the more such transactions are in one bitcoin block the higher the  likelihood  to get metablock relevant to runes. More on that is here. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5493612.msg63985822#msg63985822)

Ordinal users could just switch to Runes, since it use OP_RETURN which usually deemed as less controvesial. And soft-fork isn't needed as we could just make Ordinal TX become non-standard, just like how SegWit address with uncompressed public key categorized as non-standard.


At very least, Bitcoin Layer 2 and sidechain gaining popularity, so let's hope those arbitrary data spam or scam attempt will move to one of them soon.

Of course there should be no censoring of anyone using Bitcoin as digital cash, and I have never thought of saying something like that. I wish the situation post-halving was the result of legitimate use, but sadly it isn't. If it wasn't spam, but a genuine onboarding process of new users, these discussions and ideas wouldn't need to exist. The only ideas that would be valid would be ways of scaling.

That's the thing though: these are new users being onboarded, and they are "genuine" as far as the network is concerned. Until all miners collectively decide to reject their transactions (which will never happen), Ordinals (and now Runes) users can't be stopped.

I guarantee these are still just passing fads though and nobody will care nearly as much about them a year from now. They will have just left a lot of blockchain bloat in their wake, and there's no way to stop it.

Back in the day, people here were not only technically-minded, they could actually program fixes for these kind of things in whatever language it happened to be in.

So there was a lot of intellectual investment by the community into the problems that happens to be going on inside Bitcoin.

If we are to move anything forward then we need to revive that spirit. First (and not necessarily talking to anyone in particular), wise up on your Bitcoin skills if they need refreshing. Then, go to the new bitcoin-dev mailing list on Google Groups and start reading what other people are doing. And talk too, if you want - the new interface is really similar to BTT.

Just a few days ago there was confirmation that new BIP editors will be added, so it's not like Bitcoin's going to be stagnated anymore. But it needs innovators!

Yeah, the emergence of rune is like a reminder that if one of their exhortation scheme fails another would sprang up.
Ordinals already losing their hype so they brought runes and once runes popularity start failing another would be brought it.
Such creativity but not directed towards the positive growth in the blockchain but to enrich their pocket
Without considering the long term consequence.
Rune is like a parasite and not a very symbiotic one in the long run .
They argue that they are improving on the uses of Bitcoin but it seems like they trying to create another ETH.
Bitcoin Layer 2 adoption has not reached the level that was anticipated
but technology is increasing and new innovations would definitely arise to combat it.
You can't really find a solution if you don't know the problem.

I'm not sure about the first point that fee spikes are a feature, not a bug. I tend to agree with LoyceV that very expensive transactions are a problem, and I really hope we'll have some remedies for that in the future. I mean, honestly, even a few bucks being spent on a transaction fee can be a significant amount, depending on the total sum (especially considering that such transactions are often free for debit card users). But over $10 is just unacceptable, and we've seen fees well over that this time.

As for censorship not being helpful with NFTs, Ordinals and all that stuff, I'll trust the op on this one, but I think that something should be done to discourage the use of Bitcoin for such things.

I wish you were right, but I don't think you are. Ordinals spam didn't stop. It slowed down, but it's still here. There is now a new form of spamming. When the spammers get tired of Runes, they will invent Corks, Hooks, Queens, or whatever other bullshit they can come up with. In the meantime, legitimate developers are being arrested and their websites taken down by three-letter agencies of the United States of Genocide. Oh, I meant America. Not that it has anything to do with the Runes garbage, I am just thinking it aloud.

Yesterday, I listened to an hour-long Hell's Money podcast  (https://overcast.fm/+53ko5Yvbw)in which Casey Rodarmor and Erin (cohost) talked what they had anticipated in regards to the Runes prior to the actual launching of the runes at the halvening.

Within the podcast, they said that they had recorded the podcast a couple of days before the halvening (start of runes) with an anticipation of releasing the episode a few days after the halvening.

Some folks could read the contents of the podcast in various ways in regards to what Rodarmor was expecting to happen in regards to the launching of the Runes.. and even though I am not exactly excited hearing some aspects of runes-discussion, including their proclaiming that they know that Runes might not be really adding any value (or that runes are designed for degen gamblers) - beyond some benevolent contribution that comes from driving up transaction fees (or providing additional (presumptively unstoppable) use cases for bitcoin).

Yeah probably. There's already something else called Cursed Inscriptions which use a different numeration system than the classic Ordinals system. We can only hope they will get bored with doing this stuff on Bitcoin and do it on a different chain. But given that I understand the M.O. of some of the influencers involved with this garbage, they are only here to cash out on the pump & no one will give a shit about any of this stuff - OK lets up it a year - 2 years from now.

Look we have to continuously look the market and shift the way we can get benefit from BTC. It's not always that BTC will allow us to do profitable trades or transactions but there are many other uses of BTC as well which we can adopt and get benefit from them until BTC again gives valuable transactions and trades.

It's not convenient to mentions the benefits as it will prolong the discussion but the point is that shift from one use case to another until the previous one come back to the game. Crying over one and not using the another is the bulliest thing we can do. Keep an eye on the whole market not to a particular sector.

Spam is difficult to stop reasoning being that they evolve into many form to prevent detection.
And I doubt if they will ever become bored doing this especially with Bitcoin because of the profit they make.
We just hope a time we come when spamming will no longer be a challenge to us all.

I agree with you staying mad will not change anything rather it will keep you in the same position so is better to embrace the new evolution in other to benefit from it.
Complaining and arguing about a particular system won't change anything.
A lot of people prefer complaining and arguing about a particular system than trying to make a difference.

What we can do if people want to be proactive about it is go out there into the battlefield on Twitter (where most action on the subject is taking place these days) and remind people just how dumb Runes is, because its already been done for 10 years, yet a lot of it "claim to fame" comes from "introducing the first fungible shittokens on Bitcoin", which actually goes all the way back to 2013 with Mastercoin (Omni).

For example, this was - somewhat surprisingly - the most popular tweet I've had in a while:

https://talkimg.com/images/2024/04/28/rn3tI.png (https://twitter.com/dogermint/status/1781992083303329927)

The amount of bullshit getting hurled around is just personally insulting to me as I've been making this kind of stuff on Counterparty for nearly 10 years now. Just nobody cared b/c:

1) The time wasn't right, and
2) I don't have a well-oiled marketing machine behind me.

But yeah, just us complaining to each other on Bitcointalk about it affects no one, because Ordinals & Runes people (for the most part) don't really come here.

Well I think going on Twitter now know as X can be helpful and I have seen a lot of people doing that on X but the question is, has there been any change if truly there has been positive impact then I think we all should channel our complain and argument there.