Bitcoin Forum

Fees on the Bitcoin blockchain have been on the rise ever since Ordinals became a big hit. There's a lot of NFT inscriptions that's making BTC slower and expensive to use. We've already seen some criticism by Bitcoin users all across social networks (Twitter). Last time I've checked, TX fees were as high as $30. It's insane!

I'm beginning to wonder if nodes will eventually reject Ordinals transactions, leading Bitcoin towards a hard fork (UAHF)? If that happens, we'll be heading back towards the era of the scaling debate which lead to the creation of Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Do you think the new hard fork will be a success? Will it destroy/ruin Bitcoin? If not, why? Your input will be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much. :)

I think the possiblity of nodes rejecting Ordinals transactions, it is unlikely to happen as these transaction are still valid according to the Bitcoin protocol. However, it is possible that nodes might prioritize other types of transaction with higher fees to maximize their profits, which could result in slower confirmation times for ordinals transaction. In terms of the potential for a hard fork (UAHF), it is difficult to say whether or not it will be successful or if it will ruin Bitcoin. Hard forks can be contentious and can lead to a split in the community, as we saw with the creation of Bitcoin Cash.

In terms of success of a hard work will depend on several factors, such as the level of community support, the technical capabilities of the new protocol, and the ability of users to adapt to the changes. It is worth noting that hard forks can be risky, and users should always exercise coution and do your own research before joining in any new network.

It’s been hard trying to send bitcoin after one might have reason the amount of fees they would make on the transactions, but if it’s necessary you need to do.

Looking on the bright side this has helped limit my bitcoin transactions there by it’s been helping me save up some bitcoin, there is always a good side in everything and also looking at the source of the problem in as much as Ordinals being a thing won’t end immediately it would only take a crash and FUD for it to crash.

Yeah we also have toook on the bright side of life and situations as we also wait on them to get everything fixed and I've always been on the opinion that every disappointment  is an obvious bemisoness and not a hidden one as proposed in the past.
And this very attack on the blockchain has really cut down my transactions on the blockchain and I really wish it should end but stay a little longer so I can amsace up more for my treatment.

But I don't see bitcoin  fading off because I'm sure that we've seen bitcoin  attacked in the past and also faced with same challenges with increased transaction fees but bitcoon came out fine and stronger  and those who are core believers will actually buy more of bitcoin  because they should be expecting a skyrocketing  anytime soon.

There will be no hard fork because it's the trend of the moment but it will soon cease to exist, as happened for Ethereum with NFTs the bubble has burst and now there is less interest in cryptoart, history always repeats itself.

I don't think this causes a scaling debate. Everyone already knows you don't scale on-chain. I'm not saying Bitcoin necessarily never increase block size. If there is a fork for some other reason for a needed upgrade to Bitcoin I wouldn't mind a 2x or maybe even 4x block size increase cuz its not like the 1MB (or 1MB + segwit I guess) size that Satoshi happened to implement way back in the day is the perfect size ya know, it's just what he decided to put it at at the time. There are reasons to want a bit more txs in the blocks in the future like when newly minted coins go close to zero in a couple decades, but scaling bitcoin is not one of those reasons because you don't scale on-chain, you scale on higher layers. But I don't think block size alone is a reason to fork, and if it is done as part of some other fork it should only be done once because there is no point in actually trying to scale with block size increases.

Anyway, block size increase wouldn't do anything to stop useless crap like NFTs and tokens from spreading, it'd just give them more space to fill up. So that's not even a solution. A solution would be a code change to prevent this sort of non-vital data from being crammed into txs. Some people would say thats censorship but of course it isn't. Nothing about bitcoin was about cramming any old data you want into the blockchain, bitcoin was made for sending money (satoshis) around. Other uses are fine as long as they don't inhibit the sending of money, but this whole ordinals/inscriptions/nfts/tokens nonstop does inhibit it so it is an exploit that should indeed be fixed. I don't know how or what that fix would look like, I see some people say you can do it and some people say it can't be done. I assume there would be some way to do it.

And BCH was a different kind of fork than what you're talking about here. Here you're talking about a fork to fix a caustic unintended consequence on an upgrade, a fork to actually upgrade and replace the current spam-attacked chain. BCH was just a toxic group of people who wanted to turn bitcoin into a centralized altcoin that they control - and they got their centralized failed altcoin and bitcoin kept on going.

Yea, you are only speaking for yourself; don't forget that there are a lot of people buying Bitcoin every day; some are buying from CEX and withdrawing to their individual wallets, and this huge fee is going to be a problem for the rate at which they accumulate. I know every day thousands of Bitcoin transactions are going on, as many are buying and many are also selling, and for those people buying and selling, it may be a necessity for them to either buy or sell or spend their Bitcoin, and this high fee just made it a bit messy for some to carry out Bitcoin transactions, although it has reduced so much as of today compared to what It saw yesterday. I just believe this will not continue like this for a long time, and if it does, there will be a lot of FUD, but a lot of people will also adopt and only spend their Bitcoin when they necessarily have to, which will be more of an issue for some who want to invest in Bitcoin newly. For example, some newbie who wants to buy $100 worth of BTC for the first time, would spend like $20 in fees (it's crazy, right?).

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I believe we will cross the bridge soon.

Memecoins brings nothing but pain, and this has been confirmed with this recent btc high transaction fees and congestions. Before the btc ordinals thing, btc network was fine and so was transaction fees.
That ease and cheap fees has been snatched away by the emergence of brc20 memecoins, who would ever thought there will be a brc20 projects on the bitcoin network  ???
Crypto has really advanced and evolving.  :D

random users rejecting zero confirm tx at relay wont stop it.

what needs to happen is the economic nodes (businesses/services which users want to stay connected and viewable by) along with pools need to stop accepting blocks that include them..

its like 2017 but in reverse. where at a certain date a mandated threat that pools will get their blocks rejected if they accept non standard tx (use certain opcodes that dont have any rulesets set). thus after that date it goes back to a system where if bew features are wanted then proposals are needed to say what the rules will be for a new opcode. then devs will release it and a activation system would occur once majority is reached. like it used to be

if it was just a uahf then users will just be splitting themselves off he network by rejecting alot of blocks if mining pools continue building with blocks containing spam junk.

its become a system where the main exchanges and devs can threaten pools. but users have become the followers or leavers

I see the chances of yet another forkcoin as close-to-nil.  If fees were that big of an issue for me (but for me, censorship resistance is the far more crucial factor.  I'd have nothing to do with this proposed exodus, so this is all hypothetical), I'd choose one of the existing forkcoins over further diluting the hash rate and making yet another fork where the network effects would have to be built from nothing.  

The far better option in my mind is to allow the market to do its thing.  This will eventually price the spammers out and incentivise them to move to a crappy forkcoin.  The existing forkcoins already have a bunch of junk transactions in them just to prove they can do it, so they won't mind a bunch of memes padding their numbers.

Stand your ground.

how stupid do you have to be to buy into this NFT and memecoin nonsense?

99% of the retards buying these things will lose all their money.

you can say the miners are making money which is good for the network.
but it would be better for the network and miners if people would simply invest in bitcoin itself and not fall
for these get rich quick memecoin pump and dumps that is much more likely to get you very poor quick.

This won't happen because miners and most of the community won't care. However, now is a ripe time to start creating forked shitcoins that disable the possibility of NFTs and other crap, and dumping them on exchanges like it happened with all the previous forked shitcoins (BCH, BSV and so on). And then someone will create forked shitcoins with even more NFT integration to dump them too. So maybe we'll see a repeat of the previous Bitcoin fork craze that created a lot of airdrops for Bitcoin hodlers.

Miners are cashing out big time, so the odds of having another Bitcoin-based hard fork are pretty slim. I'm hoping the spammers targeting Bitcoin with useless NFTs move to other chains with plenty of transaction capacity to handle anything they're thrown at them. Fees on BTC will rise to a point where it'll become economically unfeasible for spammers to continue flooding the Blockchain with Ordinals inscriptions. We just need to be patient to see great results in the long run.

In the meantime, I'd suggest you use an alternative cryptocurrency with lower fees to avoid "breaking the bank". That is if you're planning on spending BTC every once in a while. Else, keep on "hodling" until the tide is over. Who knows if there will be brigher days ahead for Bitcoin? Just my opinion :)

It won't result in a hard fork soon.

More transactions in mempools than days ago but no more very high fee rates like days ago.
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),30d,weight

So the problem comes from how people understand the issue and use fee rate. If they keep escalating fee rates, they will escalate it to infinity. Do they want infinity fee rate?

I believe at some expensive fee rate, they will stop like how people rejected to make transactions on Ethereum blockchain with too expensive Gwei or they just don't have enough money for too expensive fee. They can not make transaction with $100 in fee and only have $20 to buy some BRC20 token.

This is when you pay for worthless NFTs that will soon fade away, these arts has made some blockchains miserable, take a look at Solana and how some of them snitch and left for Matic when there is no longer sweet liquidity and money, the same thing I expect to happen to Bitcoin network very soon and whoever allow this to be done in the name of open network shouldn't be angry or take an offense when they attack bitcoin for accommodating things they dislike in the beginning.


I don't think there is a global node where transactions are been broadcasted and if you decide to be selective and reject ordinal transactions as a node, Mining nodes will be there to receive them with one hand, they will never let go of revenue because your idea doesn't go well theirs and if there is a division among the community, a fork wouldn't do anything serious, look at Bitcoin BSV and other forks that has happened in the last couple of years, they are only enriching the early holders, no development or passion for adoptions from investors because of the negative speculations.

It will not destroy the bitcoin but it will surely slow down the investment coming it’s way. Last time when BCH fork happened there was distinction of 1:1 and thus everyone surged to buy the bitcoin but that was literally temporary. Just to receive the BCH and see if they book crazy profits along the way.

Anyways, that was different story but what I want predict from that is it won’t be working if we have more forks. They are just temporary additions to the problems and later situation resets to where it was earlier.

Ordinals NFT should be removed or their way of workflow must be changed differently. That’s the only situation to remove the congestion right now.

There are several reasons why the rise in popularity of ordinals could lead to higher transaction fees on the Bitcoin network. But in order to understand why this will not lead to a new hard fork, several factors should be considered.
First, ordinals are not the main reason for the increase in transaction fees on the Bitcoin network. Instead, it is due to the 1MB block size limit and the increase in the number of users willing to transact on the Bitcoin network.
Secondly, the creation of a new hard fork (UAHF) requires a significant amount of time, effort and resources to be spent on developing a new network and mobilizing the community. While the Bitcoin community, as a whole, strives for a single standard and does not want to be divided into several networks.

i hope the bitcoin blockchain will get back to normal soon, ordinals is clogging up the TXs. as far as the hardfork is concerned, by nature it tends to divide the community, as has already happened in the past with bitcoin cash, but I don't think it can be a bad thing because each of us bitcoiners has preferences and it is right to respect them

That's the bright side I have seen in it so far(limiting bitcoin transactions). At least many are learning to leave their bitcoin in their wallet without the thought of transacting it because of the high transaction fees.

Despite the bright side, how I wish the ordinals is to be blocked on bitcoin network. Bitcoin wasn't created as a contracted network for any project in the first place.

We do not need a hard fork to fix the exploit they are using to attack bitcoin because the change would be adding more restrictions on the consensus rules instead of removing anything. This is backward compatible and can be achieved using a soft fork like all the previous soft forks.

It is nothing like the scaling debate because there aren't two sides proposing different approaches (increasing hard cap using hard fork vs increasing the capacity though soft fork + second layer).
The two sides in this case would be those arguing against abuse of the protocol and fixing the exploit versus those arguing that bitcoin should turn into a cloud storage.

Plus if the community truly finds and goes into consensus for a Hard Fork, we better take that as a Golden Opportunity for the Core Developers to make great improvements in the code. The opportunity would be wasted if it's merely just to remove a "feature/bug", depending on opinion, that doesn't really break the consensus rules.

Plus we could be quite confident that long term development for inscribing tokens through Ordinals is a dead end, nothing more can be done with it. Their "network" with a third party/trusted indexer is off-chain. It's better for their developers to use more efficient solutions, like Blockstream's Liquid Network or probably Counterparty?

I don't think there's a high risk of a hard fork, and anyone's always welcome to try creating another version of 'Bitcoin' that won't succeed (so that doesn't really matter). The fees are going down, and I just hope that this will be one of the issues that get naturally resolved on its own by the market, namely with a lower interest towards Ordinals, as high transaction fees are affecting everyone using the network. The hype seems to be dying out, there are plenty of other coins to use for NFTs and stuff, and Bitcoin will eventually be left alone, I believe. The high fees are probably an issue not just to regular Bitcoin users but to those using blockchain for other purposes as well, which should be discouraging to them.

I hope that turns out to be the case in the long run. Bitcoin cannot afford losing market value with another hard fork. You can see how both BCH and BSV hard forks took a large portion of BTC's market share when they came into inception sometime ago. Fortunately, fees on the BTC blockchain are declining. People will ultimately decide the fees to pay, leaving miners no choice but to go along with the "fee market". It's the way this works.

Let's see how long will the "Ordinals craze" last as people move on to the next big thing in crypto. Maybe all of those worthless NFTs will move to a sidechain in the future? Just my opinion :)

I do not think this one needs a hard fork, I believe this will only need a soft fork where the idea of filtering the network or censorship will be implemented against unnecessary transactions created by the that exploit Ordinals and the Taproot feature.  A hardfork may happen if the miners decided to stick with the current rulings and create a split chain just like what happen when segwit was implemented.  Rejecting Ordinals does not necessary needs a hardfork IMO, a softfork is enough to upgarde the existing network and block unnecessary transactions.

The action to solve the current problem will not destroy or ruin Bitcoin, instead, I believe it will make Bitcoin more resistant of the attack and possibly enable the scalability of Bitcoin to improve.

I don’t think a hard fork will happen as a result of Ordinals. I think it would show bias towards projects that would be hard to defend going forward without also disabling the Lightning network. It’s a major problem in my opinion if the developers are able to censor transactions for any project they don’t deem as important as their own.

I don't like censorship and Bitcoin network with its main mission to provide non-censored transactions, peer-to-peer, decentralized should keep up this mission. If it breaks its vision, it will lose belief in communities and users.

Why do I have to use Bitcoin network for transactions if my transaction can be censored, rejected because of any node, mining pool which don't like mine?

If it goes to this direction, Bitcoin network will no longer be better than altcoin networks or central banks. I and others will have less reasons to use it for either transactions or investments.

Nah, although the fees is still high as compare before wherein we can pay 1 sat/vByte, now the fees is between 16 - 35 sat/vByte, and I think that is manageable, still less than 2$.

Depends on the nodes if they will eventually reject Ordinals, the point of contention is that it's business and they are making big money because we try to outbid each other to get our transaction to get into the next block, so that debate is going on right now.

For all we know, those entities spamming bitcoin's network right now are the same individuals back in 2017 wherein we have a debate whether to increase block or not.

I hope the hardfork will run successfully even though I'm not really sure about that. And yes I agree that the garbage of NFTs has made blockchain networks quite slow and I don't like what they call non-fungible. I hope this hardfork will actually solve the current problem.

Full node operators can filter Ordinals from their mempool using Ordisrespector, but it won't make a difference because not the whole network would be doing it. Those transactions would still propagate.


Possible, plausible, probable.

 8)

Do we all want censorship from Bitcoin full node operators and miners on our transactions?

I believe that if they filter and censor transactions from Ordinals, they will be able to do the same for coins related to CoinJoin transactions or any reason they think is bad, serious and should be censored.

It is not what Satoshi Nakamoto designed for Bitcoin and it is not what the Bitcoin community have tried to maintain since 2009.

Should we break it because of Ordinals?

My answer is very strong, No, I don't want it and I don't think we should have it.

It's not what I personally want, but their full node, their mempool.


Satoshi technically designed a permissionless, decentralized, censorship-resistant network, if we start calling for censorship for their use case of the blockchain, they might start calling for censorship for our use case of the blockchain.

strange thing is satoshi invented a permissioned network:
a. the handshape protocol between peers
b. agreeing to share data
c. when sending a transaction it has to be done by the permissioned owner of value
d. it had to have a fixed format.
e. length of proof was required
f. he started with a 0.01 fee which all tx with less was rejected
g. later the called it "dust" where they rejected amounts below
h. it does not allow double spends
i. his code did not allow more then 50btc per block reward subsidy, rejecting blocks that tried
j.he did not allow 4mb of monkey pics in a block, they got rejected

decentralised:
a. many devs in satoshis day were not using one repo. they copied code into their own and compiled their own client.
b. there was no centralised github, reference client or roadmap
c. he didnt even hire/rank/sponsor or contract people to be his team maintaining the rules

censorship resistance
a. bitcoin had strict rules where every byte was accounted for where each byte had a purpose. if a tx contained anything not set for the purpose of proving value transfer of sats. it was rejected
b.transactions trying to move more then they are owed rejected
c. blocks not fitting the rules rejected,
d. transactions paying to little rejected
e. blocks with hash solves not fitting difficulty requirement rejected

i can go on but i just said a few examples of each

bitcoin is not permissionless.. its consensus..
bitcoin is not censorship resistant.. its has(had) rules..
bitcoin is not as decentralised.. due to CORE central point of failure (they named if that for a reason)

Upgrades and development of the Bitcoin blockchain can be implemented even without Hardfork.  Softfork is enough since Segwit and Taproot had been implemented through soft-fork.  So I do not think that there is a need for Hardfork in order to solve the current problem.


I think removing Bitcoin Ordinals in the blockchain does not need hardfork, the developer just needs to disable the feature that allows it and it can be done without hardforking the network.

its simple. all opcodes/sigop codes should come with requirements, format and expectations. that way things can actually be verified to be validated rather than tagged as "is valid" without verification checks
having it where after block 7XXXXX any opcode/sigops that has no format/requirements will have that tx rejected by core 2X.x+ where economic nodes and pools do another NYA.. devs loved that plan last time. so they cant now pretend its impossible or unable or not capable of doing. they already set that precedent

if devs want to propose a new opcode in the future. then they should do it the proper way. propose it, code it. get people to adopt it. and when safe to run due to adoption level THEN it activates, where by its given time for the network to be ready to actually verify and validate blockdata.

all this weakening consensus to not need a consensus activation is what gets these exploits to occur. it makes devs lives easier but when they are the ones in control of a near trillion dollar economy they need to have a tough life where they are responsible for what happens within it

..
and again for those shouting UAHF
it should be emphasised as a EN MPA (Economic Node(merchants/services)) (Mining Pool Assisted) becasue regular normal users dont have the same power as the services/miners.

if users reject blocks, not much happens it just affects the user who is no longer part of the network.. stuck at a certain old height.. however if merchants rejects blocks it affects their customers which includes miners and users being their customers. thus it pressures mining pools to toe the line and users to toe the line.

so now you know where the power lies. core devs then merchants followed by pols, followed by users. in that order

Developers have power as long as they don't abuse it. Merchants seems to benefit from this strange meme economy, plus the expectation of a hard fork can be a good driver for the rise in the price of bitcoin. Miners benefit from the current situation, and in the event of a hard fork, they will switch to a more profitable network. Hardfork is also beneficial for users, in principle, they will receive coins in both networks. In an environment where it is technically easy to make a hard fork and so many benefit from it, it is hardly in the interests of developers to try to tempt fate with a public demonstration of power.

In other words, rejecting Ordinals transactions would bring censorship to the Blockchain. Bitcoin is decentralized and open to anyone, so why go ahead and block something you (developers) don't like? This would make BTC no different than banks. If people are not happy with the high fees, they could either make their own fork off the BTC blockchain or simply switch to an alternative chain with lower fees. The market will eventually decide the optimum network fees that will benefit both miners and users alike. Fees can't stay high forever, anyways. Things have settled a bit lately, so there should be nothing to worry about.

I've read something about Bitcoin Stamps which are even better than Ordinals inscriptions. I really hope they don't become extremely popular, or fees will go high again. No one can predict what's going to happen with Bitcoin in the future, so we can only hope for the best. Just my thoughts ;D

I was merely saying, if everyone went into consensus for a hard fork, the communuty shouldn't waste the opportunity to include more important changes in the code? Changes like to make the network running a full node more efficient perhaps? Or anything to improve scaling. REAL SCALING, not the one the big blockers sell.


Get the context of my posts, I never said that it needed a hard fork ser.

you do realise POOL MANAGERS take most the fee's not the asic owners(most pools share payments are the main reward not the fee element)

you do realise POOL MANAGERS can spend their own income in their own block templates(not zero confirm relay) where they give themselves a high fee(returning funds to themselves AT NO COST) but causing the crappy fee estimator of EVERYONE ELSE to be high

as for you saying if everyone else does not like it .. they should avoid asking for it to be fixed and instead use another network.. are you seriously that central point adoring that you want devs to be paid to break bitcoin by corporations that created altnets that you want them to tell devs what do do and not the decentralised userbase..
where you just want  everyone that wants a decentralised monetarian system to instead opt and move over to a crappy network that has middle men payment providers(routers)

seriously. you are reading the wrong hymn sheets and you are not thinking about whats best for bitcoin. but whats best for corporations/businesses.. which means you are the one that loves the "banking" model

Most, not all? Is that what all the pools are doing? Doesn't it depend on the pool, and what kind of allocation schemes they share with the miners? Because it was probably OK when the pools got "most' of the coins collected from the transaction fees BEFORE, when most of miner-profit were from the actual block rewards.

I believe the only trusted source for anything about mining and mining pools is philipma1957. We should ask him what's the current state of profit sharing scheme between miners and pools.

It took me less than a dollar to send some BTC this morning, I think things are back to normal,  if splitting of chain will be the solution to bitcoin ordinals then I'm cool with it because I believe the reason why the gas fee is still lower right now is because all the Ordinal hypes have gone down.

Now, as time goes on, if ordinals become a big thing, may be successful, it is very certain that the price of ordinance will never remain the same, it will Skyrocket and affect bitcoin transactions so badly, then many people would be able to sell their Bitcoin in a bull market, so if splitting or forking the chain will be the solution then it is for the greater good.

Censorship is about a bank rejecting money arbitrarily from some people while still accepting money from others. But in this case, you want the bank to accept cars, buildings and ships, and when they don't because they don't handle those big things directly (just money), you call it censorship.

No it is not censorship, it is Bitcoin for bitcoin. You can have your general censor resistant database elsewhere.

Yes, I'm aware of that. Pools are the ones that get all of the profits for themselves, while individual miners are left behind in the dust. These entities won't approve a hard fork, especially when it's in their best interests to make as much money as possible from the Ordinals craze. I've realized it's best to leave Bitcoin as is if we want to keep it decentralized and open to anyone. Hard forking the chain means you're approving censorship on the Blockchain (which is something banks do with transactions they don't like or deem suspicious). And we all know that censorship harms innovation/growth in the long run. Things have settled a bit lately, so there's nothing to worry about.

In the worst case scenario, you could just switch to an altcoin with lower fees (eg: Litecoin, Tron, etc) for complete peace of mind. But you won't get the same level of decentralization and censorship-resistance Bitcoin has. Ultimately, you decide what to do with your crypto. As long as decentralization wins, nothing else matters. ;)