Bitcoin Forum

Could we make a hard fork to disable new inscription to reduce the network pressure. Then both inscriptoin supporter and objector can work on each chain. That may seeperate bitcoin value to two chain, and probably, one chain can gain more value,we can call the coin on this chain BTC, the other chain must called another name. Even though, the inscriptions inscribed before fork seem valid after fork.

It would divide the community and in the case of Bitcoin reduce it's security.
Hardfork arises as a result of an alteration of a pre existing rule that causes a rejection from the existing egg Rule.
It is a scenario where the blockchain split in two and this two blockchain starts working independently.
Hardfork is still an altcoin and wouldn't stop those dealing with Runes to stop congesting the system of Bitcoin
Because whatever the hard fork creates would never be bitcoin and this ordinals are leveraging on Bitcoin security.

Hardfork would help nothing except creating another altcoin.
Nobofu

Anyone is free to create a fork of Bitcoin to disable/enable anything they want in the software. But do you think miners/mining pools will support such a chain? (Or at least most of them?) What would be the incentive for them to do so?

If miners do not have incentives anymore, then the security of the blockchain might be in danger or at least in a more vulnerable position.

That’s exactly the thing that would divide our community and could lead to unwanted increase of volatility. Not having come to a consensus, investors might not know which one to participate in thus reducing both chains’ market value.

They joined Bitcoin blockchain with their Inscriptions which are useless because they smelt chance to make hypes and get benefit with Bitcoin blockchain.

They know that if they hard fork Bitcoin blockchain to have a new chain that supports Inscriptions, their Inscriptions will die very quickly. The hard fork to block Inscriptions on Bitcoin blockchain will be good for Bitcoin users who dislike Inscriptions.

I feel uncertain that will this create argument as such hard fork to block something is a type of censorship that was not Satoshi Nakamoto's vision.

Miners can not support the fork because they are looking for what can replace block reward. These Ordinals, BRC20, Runes and others that are yet to come will replace the block reward with higher rate of transactions. I think it would be better for bitcoin developers to look for ways this will not subsequently be leading to mempool congestion.

Eventough a hardfork is always a strain on the community, i have to say that a hardfork solving this mempool flood would be interesting. I'd defenately think solving the mempool congestion with those inscription thingies would be a better cause than the last "big" hardfork (BCH).

If such a fork would exist, i'd think it would have a reasonable chance of getting adopted by the majority (depending on how many of the core dev's were willing to switch to said fork).
If enough users adopt the fork, miners would eventually switch since big adoption usually means an OK FIAT value, and eventough the block reward is getting lower, money could still be made mining the "new" fork. Personally, i think it would be great being able to make a transaction that doesn't need 200 sats/vbyte to have a decent chance of getting confirmed in the next couple of blocks... I'd also think it would be a good idear if the nodes didn't have to fill their disks with nonsense data when they store the blocks.

And censorship? What censorship? Those inscription thingies could still exist in the "old" chain. If they want to keep filling blocks with their data, they can do so, just not on the "new" chain... If somebody wants a chain to store even more ridiculous stuff, they can make their own fork, and if they gain some adoption, they have a network and they can store whatever they want... I don't see creating a hardfork to see if it gains adoption as censoring.

I'm not saying it's a good idear per sé, i'm not saying i would blindly follow such a fork, i'm just saying that such a fork would probably have more merit than BCH, and eventough BCH did not gain the biggest part of the community, it does still exist.

Personally I don't think it would be worth all that drama because I'd expect Ordinals to fall out of favour within a halving reward era anyway. At least extrapolating from the current state of the NFT market and colored coins before that I would not expect them to be more than a temporary fad (famous last words of the non-visionary, I know).

Besides, lest we dumb down Bitcoin completely I'm pretty sure something else would simply take their place. In a way we're already seeing this with Runes, though I know too little about this project to know how much (or how little) it adds to Blockchain bloat compared to Ordinals.

You will find a more detailed discussion about disable inscription ----->  (Ordinals) BRC-20 needs to be removed (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5452159.0)
The bottom line is that we may have negative or positive opinions about Ordinals, but in the end, the decentralization of the network means accepting opinions that differ from yours as long as they are compatible with the protocol.
The main problem is the high transaction fees, for which we see that there are lengthy discussions without ideal solutions.

It's very drastic action, when we could just make Ordinals TX (or rather OP_FALSE OP_IF usage) become non-standard which force spammer to either give up or ask miner to add their TX manually at high cost. And IMO hard fork should be used for far more important upgrade/change, rather than only to make Ordinals TX invalid.

We have seen it already, a hard fork could divide many people involved in Bitcoin like the developers and the miners and other player. So it's not the solution to have a fork and obviously it will not be the original Bitcoin that Satoshi developed. And for all we know, I think Bitcoiners by now learn to accept this inscriptions and those who try to sabotage the network and it seems that we are not affected by it. Currently, fees around 20 sat/vB could be the new norm for us, and for sure Bitcoin developers have seen the issues already and well aware of.

Let's pretend that inscription doesn't exists right now.

It would have been a more painful experience for Bitcoin miners right now, the existence of runes and ordinals are benefiting the miners, more transactions equals more money for them.

But for random Bitcoin users out there, the existence of runes and ordinals are not looking too well, high transaction fee is showing up more times now compare to when these craps don't exist.

I don't believe that any hardfork will come that will erase off these inscriptions, mind you, there will come a time where Bitcoin miners will only make money from transactions only, the existence of these crap will make it fairly better, although I don't expect this to last very long, because inscription is giving me the meme coin vibes.

The only problem I have with ordinals is the higher transctoin fee on Bitcoin network, so if there is a chance that they can make this happen why not use this for something better? Ordinals shouldn't be getting all this attention right now, make Bitcoin better instead.

In few years time ordinals and all inscriptions can face an amount and like most altcoins always do, maybe no one will talk about them or have interest in them anymore? This is my believe, it is only a fool that will leave Bitcoin and choose to invest in inscriptions, I don't have one even when I know that the present investors can make a lot of money from it.

Looks more like the fools game to me, let's see how long this will last, it could exist in the next few years but the interest will be lot lower than it is right now.

Technically speaking, is what you wrote technically demanding or is it easy to implement and are there any negative implications for security or anything else when it comes to Bitcoin? If it's "so easy" to remove ordinal nonsense, I wonder if the developers are afraid to take such a step because the miners signal it to them, or if they just don't care that the fees skyrocket every now and then?

How long will it take until the Bitcoin community accepts Ordinals as an inevitable outcome of a decentralized, censorship-resistant network? Regardless of what we do, there is always a way to bypass it. Treating addresses as chunks of arbitrary data is just one way.

It is easy to implement a rule that will make these particular transactions non-standard. The thing is: it doesn't invalidate them. The Ordinal users can still broadcast them to mining pools, and miners can still mine them normally. The only difference is that some upgraded nodes won't accept them in their mempool.

There is also another main problem from the fact that this makes bitcoin Non-Fungible since some sats worth more than others, like this post about someone paying 1 sats for 33.3 BTC simply because it is Rare https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5494171.msg63992220#msg63992220 though its an hard truth to say everyone choose what they use their bitcoin for but what about now when it also affect the fungibility of Bitcoin.

I`m curious, what kind of more important upgrade that needs to be done rather the Ordinals

You can do anything you like.  The question you should be asking is if the rest of us would be prepared to follow you, or whether you're doing it on your own.

For me, personally, I wouldn't be following the tyrannical fork which is attempting to control what people can or can't do.  I can fully appreciate why people would like to prevent inscriptions, but for me, it's a slippery slope towards other varieties of censorship.  I want no part of that, but wish you the best of luck in your endeavours.

I've got a bad feeling that this way of thinking is going to come back and haunt us in the future when the price has crashed hard since people will have had abandoned bitcoin due to prolonged high fees... By that time the reward+fee would not be worth the same amount of money as 3.125BTC is worth today at $60k.

Sadly this to me is the reality we are facing right now, before the security of bitcoin network network was the aim of the community or developers right now it’s all about the how to make the miners more happy about getting more incentives. Although the reward for mining a block is reducing, but wouldn’t that at least take more years to complete be worthless with the potential that bitcoin price will grow in demand and subsequently more price of there is more adoption (high fees will certainly decrease that).

My only security concern about removing this inscriptions is that wouldn’t that at least affect our decentralization where nodes can every day make changes to the network even those that wouldn’t suit the community. But if there is no security risk then nothing much to worry about.

If there's a proposal, and if it could get community consensus, then absolutely yes.


But ser, isn't prolonged high fees an indicator that there's high demand for block space in the Bitcoin blockchain, and therefore it's also an indicator that there's high demand for Bitcoin?

Plus it's not his way of thinking, it's merely a fact. Miners actually have no choice but to be incentivized in order to continue to provide security for the network.

here is the idiot not thinking another brand offering a proposal for the bitcoin network but instead an idiot thinking another brand is a tyrant opposition of an altcoin he wont follow

this idiot is known to gold core as centralised tyrant gods who should not be opposed or de-throwned, he doesnt think people have a vote of future direction he doesnt believe in consensus/democracy of node readiness to activate features. he would be the first to REKT any proposal thats not in cores plan. and he would not want people even having a choice. he adores how core now as sole reference client can just change protocol layer stuff and transaction formats without needing network readiness of validating new data.

as for he over exaggerated but under-educated stance on "censorship"
bitcoin is code and that code did make hard rules and thats the point of code, creating rules nodes follow. but in last several years those rules have softened whereby nodes no longer validate every byte and ensure each byte has relevance to the utility of bitcoin. and now he things this unvalidated irrelevant data is "censored" if its put into a hard system that validates every byte again for relevance

stupid part of his rhetoric is core do love censorship. and s does he he loves moderation, bans and removal of certain things.
core ban, drop, eject,evict, prune, not relay, strip data before it gets to the mining pools and during and after
.. just not the stuff core want to keep even if what is kept is junk

as for his child mentee grasshopper


fees do not indicate demand
excessive fee's indicate over payment of a fee.. the fee bumps are not increments of smallest amount. and the junk spammers are not even using smallest amount nor bump increments, they just apply extreme fee's instantly which then cause everyone else to pay extra ontop

its not about demand. its about price fixing inflated prices. its not a true demand fee free market, its a premiumised racket not a fee free market

.. as for miners
miners have many choices and can continue to provide security
firstly
bitcoin main reward is incentivised by the spot market. which even today is more profitable than the rates of 2023, they were not poor in 2023 and not poor now. the spot market can afford the miners a good income
secondly
miners dont choose the transactions so they are not incentivised to accept the highest fee first because they are not the ones controling which transactions get into a block.. a miner(asic) does not make the block templates.. learn the difference between a mining pool(that does no mining) but does manage the block template creation and transaction selection, vs the miners that just re-hash a hash the mining pools send to them
thirdly
when junk spammers are placing high fee's inconsiderately and nonsensically, its because these junk spammers have scammed alot of coin from victims so dont mind wasting coin.. thus not a sign of 'demand for bitcoin' its a sign the junk spammers dont care about bitcoin and would careless about bitcoin, which is why they throw high fee's into their transactions

A BTC developer under the name of Luke Dashjr already proposed a "fix" for the Ordinals inscription. But it hasn't gained traction yet. You can still run Bitcoin Knots (which is a node software under development by Luke Dashjr) if you want to filter Ordinals inscriptions. Many in the community would consider this as "censorship", so I wouldn't count on a hard fork soon. We should expect strong rejection from miners. Especially when large fees are mostly beneficial to them.

BTC users will be forced to wait or switch to the flawed Lightning Network for "fast and cheap" transfers. Who knows what will happen with BTC in the future?  :-\

This is why Bitcoin is decentralized, everyone can fork Bitcoin. But Bitcoin will always be the King and original. Look what happened to other forked coins from Bitcoin, they just slowly vanished.
While your proposal addresses a real issue, implementing it would require careful consideration and thorough planning to minimize potential risks and maximize benefits for the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Not necessarily.
When the increased traffic is artificial, it only indicates that someone found a way to sustain an attack on bitcoin. Just like 2017 when they spent a large amount of money to spam the network for months.

This is more palpable when you look at the market and the price. If the demand were actually rising the way the network gets congested these days, price should have been a lot higher than it is right now.

Keep in mind that people aren't buying bitcoin or actually sending bitcoin. They are just spamming bitcoin with small/dust amounts so that they can gamble in a scam market on fake tokens that don't exist, in the hopes of making some money.

So far we have had no problem incentivizing miners and we won't in the near future either.
Just zoom out and look at the average price during each 4 year cycle.

* Today miners are getting 3.125BTC reward at a price that is above $60k.
* The biggest chunk of the past 4 years miners have been getting 6.25BTC reward at a price that was below $30k.
* The 4 years before that they were getting 12.5BTC at a prices far below that ($500 to $3000 averages).
* ...
* The first 4 years they were receiving 50BTC at an average of $1 or something like that!

In other words you are basically saying that the miner that used to earn ~$150k (6.25*25000) per block this time last year needs an additional incentive today because he is earning $190k (3.125*61000) per block!!!

Making non-standard only require change on full node software, so it shouldn't be that hard. I recall someone fork and edit Bitcoin Core source code which doesn't relay Ordinal TX. And looking at few PR and discussion on bitcoin-dev, developer have split opinion about whether to make Ordinals TX become non-standard.


Few random example,

• Fixing any critical vulnerability.
• Adding quantum resistant cryptography.
• Adding new opcodes (such as OP_CAT).

Although those example i mentioned could be added through soft fork instead.

The conclusion is that it is easy to do something that can force the ordinals to find an alternative solution, but that those who should implement such measures (miners) will certainly not give up something that (occasionally) brings them extra income. I am fundamentally against such things happening on the blockchain, but I also understand those who hesitate to take any step that can be interpreted as censorship.

However, we still have the problem of how to explain it to someone who is an average Bitcoin user without too much technical knowledge, and who also uses Bitcoin perhaps on a daily basis for microtransactions. If today he can send his transaction for $1, and tomorrow he has to pay 20 or 50 times more, it looks quite confusing.

That's true. But it could be opportunity for miner or mining pool to charge extra to include non-standard TX. For example, https://mempool.space/ (https://mempool.space/) currently recommend 13 sat/vB for high priority TX fee while https://slipstream.mara.com/ (https://slipstream.mara.com/) currently only accept TX with minimum fee rate 39 sat vB. And we should mention those service to those who angry over "censorship".


Yeah, it's definitely a problem. And saying vague explanation such as "due to high demand" or "too many unconfirmed pending" doesn't help much either.

Some day people will get tired of inscriptions, it will make no sense once the fees are reasonably high

And likely never will.  Most people don't consider a perpetual game of whack-a-mole a "fix".  Not only is their proposal dangerous, it's also entirely ineffectual.

If I'm not mistaken, MARA pool is one of those who first decided to censor transactions - but I don't understand why they only accept transactions that pay even 3-4 times more than those currently required for confirmation in the next block? As far as I can see, in the last 7 days they found "only" 36 blocks, while for example Via found as many as 124 blocks. Their business logic makes no sense to me, but I'm obviously missing something.

OK, then it was merely temporary demand. Right now, "normal" fees are at an average of 18 sat/vB to include a transaction in the next block. It illustrates that, currently, demand is low. But obviously that could change later.


Are you then saying that the current demand today for block space as represented by sat/vB is the normal demand?


But with block rewards that halve every four years, the miners can't continue depending on the spot market, no?


What do mining pools do? Because if they don't take highest fees first, then why are the transactions that paid the highest fees get included in the next block first?


No, absolutely not all transactions by those users during a point of high demand "have scammed".

On my previous post, i mention about idea which makes Ordinals TX become non-standard. Mara's Marathon Slipstream is service which let people submit their non-standard TX to Mara.


So their business model is letting people submit their non-standard TX at higher fee rate. And here are few example usage i could think,

• Include transaction with size more than 100 vKB.
• Include transaction which use SegWit address created with uncompressed public key.

That's an interesting question, and I'm personally not 100% anti-censorship, so I'd actually support the decision to make it impossible to build NFT-like things on Bitcoin blockchain. But I'm not a part of decision-makers in this case, and it's also clear from this thread and other discussions that it's a divisive matter. Miners probably enjoy high fees, as it's more income for them. Everyone else probably isn't thrilled with high fees, but for long-term hodlers it's an insignificant matter (as they don't move their coins much anyway). Then we have those who are directly affected by high fees, but even among those there are people who see it as a necessary downside of freedom, decentralization, and censorship-resistance.
So even if it's technically possible to do such a fork, I think it's too divisive.

Of course it is divisive. If such a hard fork occurs, BTC would be in "utter disaster". People who want the purity of BTC as a Blockchain for financial-only applications should try either the BCH or BSV hard forks. These last two didn't adopt SegWit + Taproot, making it impossible to inscribe NFTs on-chain.

I sure hope the main BTC blockchain gets some sort of upgrade that would boost transaction capacity to keep fees low for a little while. The Lightning Network is flawed, despite years of research and development. Totally not the best way to scale BTC. In the meantime, we should wait until fees decline to make our move. Fees can't stay high forever. As long as Bitcoin stays decentralized, there should be nothing to worry about. ;)

Possible, but a hard fork when the whole market's and community's like this? It's gonna be utter chaos. People will be divided and we might see even harsher problems than network pressure if we do fall through with this hard fork you're talking about.

Plus in my opinion, the real enemy here isn't inscription or Ordinals, the thing is that sooner or later someone would try to innovate on the bitcoin network and it wouldn't work because it's just not that scalable, the fault lies in the fact that Satoshi was shortsighted when it comes to how he thought bitcoin was going to be, he made just enough to make it scarce but not enough to support the millions of potential people who would transact in the bitcoin network on a daily basis. but I'm not fully blaming him really, after all, if I was a bloke back in 2008 with computer knowledge and a basic grasp of economics I too would've done something similar to bitcoin, and I would've made a worse version of it.

For now, hard fork's an option but it's out of the table, besides, the high transaction fees are still ahead of us at this point, so why don't we just deal with the issue when it does come around?