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Ordinals Inscriptions is the cause of increase in mempool congestion. After Ordinals NFT, there is now ways to create fungible tokens called BRC-20 which led to the more in the rise of mempool congestion. BRC-20 marketcap has surpass $1 billion.

Some people call it another scam. But during the days when Ethereum blockchain started ERC20 and ERC721 (NFTs), some people were saying that it is the beginning of scam. Yes many people were scammed and many people lost money, but there are many of these altcoins tokens that are surving now.

The mempool is far from getting less congested. Bitcoin transaction fee is too much and becoming unbearable.

What do you think can solve what is happening? How can the mempool become not congested again. More miners needed or what?

Simply increasing the number of miners on the network can not help to reduce mempool congestion, as this does not necessarily increase the network's bandwidth. The block size is limited, meaning there is a maximum number of transactions that can fit in a block. Therefore, miners cannot directly change the block size limit to accommodate more transactions.

From my understanding, the only way miners can help is by not prioritizing transactions solely based on the transaction fees, but I doubt that will ever happen.

This can not solve anything, it will only make the mempool to become something else. Considering higher fee is better and it will make mining to be more profitable. If the fee is set to just 1 sat/vbyte for all transactions, the mempool will still be congested as it is now and no transaction will have higher chance to be confirmed, so why not accepting higher fee instead so that higher fee ones would first be confirmed which is how it is and it is better.

Miners (mining pools) can choose which transactions they want to include in the block. This is why I said that they can help solve the congestion if they for example put a higher priority on actual bitcoin transactions versus ordinal inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens.

On the other hand, your idea to increase the number of miners would not solve anything because it has no concrete impact on the current state of the network. As I said before, miners cannot increase the block size or speed up the validation process on their own. The block size limit is determined by the consensus rules of the network and can only be changed through a hard fork.

With high transaction fee that you sending 50$ will also cost 30$ for the fee makes BTC less attractive to use. It making BTC unsecure as well because definitely this will be exploited who knows the government may be behind all this. If they are an attact from random groups, obviously they will not stop until something has to be done by the BTC dev.

What could happen is the less and less people will used BTC for remittance, there are altcoins cheaper and faster.

BTC transaction fee is not calculated in $, but in sats/vByte, and there cannot be a "recommended" or fixed fee because transaction size varies, so even if you and i make a transaction paying 30 sats/vByte as our TX fee rate, if my transaction has more data, i still pay more fees than you do. People make BTC transactions for different reasons, some want it confirmed fast and others do not mind to wait, it is not possible for everyone to use the fee rate for low priority, miners will not confirm those transactions, and will choose those who pay better fees.
High transaction fees do not make BTC network unsecure, it makes it more secure because miners are gaining from the high fees, so more incentive to mine, and the higher the hashrate, the more secure the BTC network is. The government isn't behind this, we must not create a sensational theory for every issue BTC faces, some people found a way to spam the blockchain with inscriptions to try and make money, and that is how we got here.

Ban ordinals and BRC20 and any other NFT/non-financial data on blockchain. Some of my customers already contacted me saying they can't pay me because of the ridiculous fees. They have to pay in fees more than the invoice sum on some occasions. Everything depends solely on core devs now. Just let me remind you that inaction (not only action) also can be an offense. If you see some crime or attack going on and refuse to prevent it you can be called a criminal as well.

I believe consensus rules are being exploited now.

At some point the network will be forked with new consensus rules which will not allow those ordinals to do that , which are only spamming the bitocin network.

Everything will be back to normal. There is not need to panic, imo.

This is as silly a thing to say as people imploring the government to "ban bitcoin" because they don't like it.

Bitcoin is is designed to be ban-proof. You can harass the onramps and off-ramps but you can't stop bitcoin
itself in its tracks.

Similarly, ordinals are pretty ban-proof. By the time you get a significant fraction of nodes to try filter them out from the mempool, they have already adopted a different encoding scheme bypassing the filter. The more you filter, the more ordinals encoding will become indistinguishable from financial transactions, and the more collateral damage you cause. In the worst case, they will just use fake output addresses for embedding data.
That may be a little less efficient but at these fee levels they're willing to pay it obviously doesn't matter much.

Not only is there no plausible approach to banning them from the mempool, but doing so wouldn't even suffice. Miners are very keen on processing these transactions which raise overall fee levels. So they'll make it easy to have these transactions routed directly to them.

So please stop with the knee-jerk proposals without thinking things through...

Hi, bitmover. Since you suggested that I should debate this over here...

Could you explain how the consensus rules are being exploited and which changes to the consensus rules will or should not allow the ordinals to work?

And since the Bitcoin network is free and open, one could argue that there is no spamming. If people are willing to pay to have a shitcoin inserted into the global network of nodes that we call Bitcoin, shouldn't they? If you think otherwise, please let me know why.

I'll wait, read and answer your inquiries/points, thanks!

edit: nevermind, read his last post on the Portuguese board and it's full of ad hominem. He doesn't want a debate.

I don't much about the team behind the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol but I wonder what they are trying to prove and why they choose to create a protocol that enables the minting of NFT on the Bitcoin blockchain because no one has done it before without doing the right analysis if it will lead to the congestion of the BTC network.
I would like the idea if it doesn't lead to negative effects on the BTC blockchain since the idea was not to create something innovative but something that will impact the price and transaction of BTC.

I supported your opinion because no dev that wants the progress of BTC will choose to create a project that makes BTC users seek alternatives for transactions due to fees.

Remember that congestion is the end-goal for Bitcoin in a future with insignificant block subsidy, which is only a few decades away.

An uncongested blockchain will never raise enough fees to provide decent security and be subject to cheap 51% attacks. So a fee market must develop where people fight for the right to have their transaction processed swiftly.

So before long, congestion must be celebrated rather than criticized. It's crucial for Bitcoin's long term future.

Or any PoW coin with a capped supply. Which is why I think Bitcoin Cash is doomed long term. It would take an insane amount of low fee (a fraction of a cent) transactions to pay for their security when their subsify effectively runs out. Their current tx volume of ~10k/day provides under $100 in fees.

Have you seen ERC20 and it’s historical progress. It was highly congested, and there was literally no limit to the number of coins that were getting added every time on the blockchain. The gas fees was so high it used to take days for the single confirmation even if you had paid the desired gas fees. This was the major reason behind ETH got upgraded and they literally switched from PoW to PoS.

I am not sure if same is possible with the bitcoin or not but bitcoin should not be changed. The scam projects like Ordinals and NFT should be taken down. But again since we are in the decentralised world we can not touch it as long as every investor ignore the ordinals.

Sad to see blockchain getting burdened with such projects.

Today I spent some hours to truly understand what is ordinal NFT and how it spams bitcoin blockchain. If anyone wants to understand it, here it is: https://docs.ordinals.com/introduction.html
If I want to inscribe an ordinal NFT, I can visit gamma.io. I tried that, uploaded an 50kb image and it costs me around $143 with 60 sat/vB and $250 if I sent it with 107 sat/vByte that is a high priority fee according to mempool.space

So, people were paying almost ten times more these days in these NFTs but there is a thing that I don't understand. Why does someone pay money to create an NFT and why does someone really buy an NFT? If you want an image, just take a screen and that's all. I don't really understand why someone pays millions of dollars to get a status of official holder of ape that's draw in pixels? I just don't get it, is there something magic behind NFT? What's the purpose to buy them, to just pay hundreds of dollars to create meaningless thing? And then someone buys this meaningless thing. I don't really get it, I couldn't really imagine that bitcoin blockchain would get flooded by a group of people who pay tons of money to create the dumbest thing and they have people around them who pay tons of money to buy the dumbest thing.

To be clear you can NOT create any kind of tokens on Bitcoin blockchain. The protocol simply doesn't support that. Any other alternative centralized network can decides to interpret any of the bitcoin transactions in any way they like.

It is a scam but that's not even the thing people are arguing about.
All the problems that the Ordinals Attack is creating is because they are abusing Bitcoin and are exploiting the protocol.
As I've said many times in the past, even if people were using Ordinals to store cure for cancer on bitcoin blockchain, Ordinals still would be considered a malicious attack.

I disagree with this part for a couple of reasons:
1- Altcoins are only cheaper because nobody uses them and their price is very low. As a matter of fact if usage of majority of them increased by a small percentage (a tenth of bitcoin usage increase) their fees would rise a lot more than bitcoin's.
2. They are not faster. Most of them produce more blocks per 10 minutes on average but that doesn't make them "fast" simply because they don't provide the same level of security. In simple terms 1 bitcoin confirmation is usually equal to tens of confirmation on an altcoin chain and in some cases tens of thousands and in a couple of case no matter how many confirmations you get on that altcoin chain it will never be secure (due to being centralized or having mutable blockchains).

In another topic, it was proposed to introduce a quota for old payments so that they are included in the block, regardless of the size of the commission. But what if we introduce a quota not for old payments, but for Ordinals? Aren't they typical transactions? We can, perhaps, allocate a quota for them, let's say, in the same 25%, over which they can only be the last in line.

I'm not sure "congestion/congested" is the most appropriate wording. Congestion, in a very simplistic way means that something is not working as it should. Something working now, but not working in the moment after. And then working again and later not working again.
In traffic, congestion is not good. Flow without congestion is good. I think the same can be applied here. Mempool full but not congested. A little bit before congestion!

Of course that empty mempool is not good either, but it's the mid term we need to seek and this Ordinals and BRC-20 and ORC-20 are congesting the mempool which in my opinion is not good.


Seems that this opinion is not shared among all devs, right? Like, who considers this an attack and/or an exploit and who doesn't.
Also, who sees a fix as a censorship move and who doesn't. In my view, this is an exploit and as with any other software, exploits needs to be fixed.

I don't know, but the bet that block congestion will continues is a losing bet. The only thing that developed the NFT technology is the cheapness of the fees. No one will pay $140 to upload a photo, and he does not guarantee that he will sell it ---> projects will not continue like this for a long time.

The bad side of the story is that we will not go back to those low fees soon, as we will not see, for example, fees less than 10 sat/vb, and therefore the use of bitcoin for daily payments will be the problem.
There are solutions to this problem, such as the Lightning Network, but solutions such as Hardfork, due to the increase in fees, is similar to increasing block size, which has proven to be a failed solution.

In short, let the economy talk and you'll see fees stabilizing soon.

The number of those spam transactions gradually decreasing in just a week hopefully it won't be a big issue to concern that is Bitcoin ordinals, the one who hyped the brc20 is on the losing side now. As you said LN is the only option for now to transaction Bitcoin cheaper or else have to wait until it correct after this chaos ends.

Increasing the block size limit can be solution too cause in future if there are actually more incoming btc transactions because of more people started to use Bitcoin and by that time if we have same mempool congestion then it act as a barrier for further growth of Bitcoin.

You have a point about the congested network providing some sort of decent security in terms of 51% attack but excess of everything will lead to something unhealthy.
Having said that, I was talking about the situation where it's affecting the price of the Bitcoin market cause people are switching to alternative means of making payments. I also hate the fact that I make payments for my internet network which is 0.001BTC and I have to pay 0.0013BTC for a fast transaction fee and you're telling me to celebrate that? Of course, I am celebrating.

While I agree that a quota system could be a potential solution, there are a few things to consider. First, implementing a quota system for Ordinals could create a backlog of other types of transactions that are also important for the network. There could be potential issues with determining what qualifies as an Ordinal transaction and how to allocate the quota fairly.

Another challenge would be to achieve a consensus among all miners regarding this matter. Given that transaction fees are a significant source of income for them, it is unlikely that they would be open to any efforts to limit or regulate them. Perhaps incentivizing miners in other ways, such as rewarding them for including a certain number of low-fee transactions in each block, could be a potential solution. However, I do not know where to get the funds for such a reward.

People will find a way around it using other coins.
As always Litecoin wins, even with faster coins like USTD. Due to the higher fees and being a subchained coin.

If people want to use other coins, it is a free market. If transaction fees can make one choose shitcoins over BTC, then they are weak hands, and the fewer weak hands in the network, the better for the long term. I would rather hold and use BTC even if i have to pay a few more Satoshis as transaction fees, than hold a centralized stable coin that can even be frozen in my own wallet.

It seems to me that miners are also interested in the stable operation of the network, and ever-increasing fees will only lead to an increase in the requirements for the amount of computing equipment that they need. Therefore, I think they are also interested in the balance, so that there is an interest in commissions, and most of the usual payments also take place in a reasonable time.

I believe everyone considers this an exploit considering that it was created because of an oversight in the Taproot implementation. There is nothing to dispute there. But some don't consider this an attack which in my opinion is weird considering that when someone exploits a protocol and abuses it, that's the literal definition of an attack :P

it's up to people what to say, but I 1000% support the btc dev must be banned all kinds of tokens / NFTs that ride on the bitcoin network (such as vitalik which offers a smart contract feature on bitcoin) if congestion continues to occur the impact will be bad for bitcoin in the future ahead, just imagine in el salvador, people start using bitcoin as a transaction but is it fair if they are required to pay a fee of $ 10 for the coffee or food they buy.

As for what's happening now, if I compare it to last week, it's pretty good in terms of fees. Unlike last week, the fees are a headache because of the spam transactions made by ordinals and brc20.

       At least somehow, we can breathe a little easier. Unlike for the past few days ago, there was really exploitation due to the hype of the ordinals and that brc20, now their hype is over, so the fees are gradually decreasing for each of our bitcoin transactions.

We can't reliably identify what exactly is an Ordinals transaction and what is not because with all the different ways of storing junk data inside a Taproot output, the format of what an Ordinal might look like can mutate like a virus strain.

The only way to avoid something like that is to impose a quota on ALL transactions involving Taproot outputs, which is not ideal at all.

If there is no way to detect and quota only transactions with "tokens" in order to divide the flows between the main transactions in the network and the secondary ones in the form of "tokens", then, of course, the limitation of the new consensus bitcoin code looks fundamentally wrong. Thus, it will simply be incentivized that miners do not upgrade not only to Taproot, but also to subsequent upgrades, due to the risks of such quota. Too bad if the idea of quoting only "tokens" is not possible.

It wouldn't be a new limit, but the limit that already exists. That is to say just copy the limits on witness version 0 to witness version 1 and we'd prevent the Ordinals Attack very easily! It also is very ideal because nobody has any use case that would need bigger witness size other than this attack.

You're probably right about fees coming down eventually, but let's not pretend that the problem doesn't exists. It doesn't take much to get the network congested and prohibitively high fees make it unusable for the average user. That's unless we assume Bitcoin is only for holding and doesn't have to be transacted.

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Anybody knows what's the lead developers' view on ordinals and congestion? Do they recognise this as a problem or a feature? I'm a bit out of the loop on recent devs affairs.

Ordinals should be banned not because somebody doesn't like it but because it's ddosing the sh*t out of the blockchain.

That's a fact. But there's a huge difference between Bitcoin and ordinals.

That's BS. It's easy to fix the ordinals bug. Just like the double-spend and unlimited Bitcoin bugs were fixed. I guess it will only take a few lines of code that's it. Removing or filtering/limiting OP_RETURN is not complicated at all. Just simply limiting the size will instantly send 70-80% of that crap into oblivion.

Again wrong. they're not paying lots of money for their spam transactions. Regular users who need to process their tx faster do that trying to outbid each other.

Cut off the metadata tag and miners won't have anything to process.  ;D

I agree regarding "doesn't take much to get congestion issues". Layer1 is just extremely limited in regards of data-capacity and a good scaling solution here is not on the horizon at all. Lightning will help (layer2), especially for mid/low-value-payments, but it's just one part of a difficult puzzle.
However, right now, fees are at an almost reasonable level already and with 10 - 20 sat/byte most stuff goes through quite rapidly already.

Regarding your other point: Yes, would be interested to hear it, too. What I heard so far: The system will sort itself out - which seems to have turned out as true already.
I mean it does make sense: It costs a ton of money to put data on the Bitcoin-blockchain - not sustainable with the BS that 99% or ordinalcrap is anyway.

That's right, in fact, here in our country, a merchant here who exchanges bitcoin with our fiat has stopped temporarily, I won't mention the name first, because of the effect of the transaction fees.

       Here, if the congestion really continues, it is likely that other merchants in different corners of the world who accept bitcoin may switch to other cryptos with cheaper transaction fees, such as Bep20, Xrp, Matic, Trx and others, this is just my example. Instead of spreading the beauty of Bitcoin, what will eventually happen is that it may not be talked about anymore because of the high fees and its holders will be reduced little by little.

so you're willing to pay double to your internet service provider just so you can use bitcoin? why not cash out the 0.001BTC and send it to them some cheaper way. i am sure they take other payment methods like paying from a bank account or debit card. those are probably free.


i've been curious about that too. seems like they've been remaining silent on the entire thing. but i could be wrong. but i haven't hear anything. i think the developers kind of hang out on that archaic linux mailing list for some reason, away from this forum's prying eyes. so they're insulated from these type of discussions.  :o

On May 16th, Ryan Gentry from Lightning Labs announced that they are launching Taproot Assets v0.2 (https://lightning.engineering/posts/2023-05-16-taproot-assets-v0.2/). As far as I understand, this update should allow us to operate with tokens mainly in the second layer and not take up as much space in blocks as happened recently. Will the new solution from the Lightning Network help solve the problem and reconcile the community with tokens without a mempool congestion?

They're seem to be slowly coming down but an average fee of >$4 per transaction is still pretty high. I made a transaction with a 12sat/vbyte fee and it's stuck for almost a week now (can't bump the fee as was sending entire wallet's balance).
The problem is some wallets are not doing the best job in terms of estimating fees/transaction times. When I made it, it was showing as "Economic" with 2-3 hours expected confirmation time (Mycelium wallet). Needless to say, that was far from accurate.


Thanks for sharing. Sounds like a step in a right direction.

Well, not the solution I was waiting for, but still better than nothing. Moving all spam transactions to L2 will free up the mempool and get rid of the congestion. Most NFT transactions use low fees so they should be suitable for Lightning Network.

I was actually mad that I had to pay double due to the Bitcoin network congestion and that's why I am not happy with the recent hike in the tx fee.

Yes, but the payment will be even worse buddy because I have to move the BTC from my personal wallet (non-custodial) and I have to use a competitive fee since I need the internet network asap.

Take this as another test for Bitcoin, man. It’s frustrating but it is what it is. Things don’t move extremely fast in Bitcoin (except price ;) ), you have to be patient until a solution is found. This Ordinal thing is so annoying but the devs will figure it out at some point.

As much as I hate this happening and having to overpay fees, Bitcoin is still young and needs a lot of patience.. by the way, can’t these ordinal guys just move to another freaking layer instead of attacking Bitcoin? By attacking BTC they’re pretty much attacking themselves lol

no one would be happy about that. but maybe bitcoin is not the ideal payment method as it turns out. kind of like how ethereum blew up in peoples' face with its fees. i used to trust it when it had low fees but it's no fun having money stuck in an address where the fee would cost more than the balance.

i guess that's a good reason for keeping a bit of cash on a custodial wallet then. that way you can just cash it out with no exhorbitant fee. and you're not being held hostage by the network with a fee as the ransom...  they always say "not your keys not your crypto" but now its "not your keys, not your fees".

The consensus mechanism has pretty much nothing to do with a blockchain's throughput. And it shows: Ethereum transaction fees are still about $15 a pop, whereas even in the congested state of the Bitcoin blockchain, we pay at most ~$3.50 (100 sat/vB).

It cannot and will not be changed and that's a beautiful thing. Related reading assignment for you: https://bitcoincleanup.com/

Exactly; we can't really take them down, no matter how hard we try, since they properly follow the Bitcoin rules. It doesn't stop us from labeling it as an attack and educating people about it, though.

The idea is that an NFT is supposed to be a digital ownership contract on the (Bitcoin) blockchain. It should allow you to prove to everyone on the world, as long as the blockchain exists, that you own some digital good.

One of my biggest issues with that is that you also need a way to enforce a contract. As long as legal systems don't recognize NFTs as contracts, they are meaningless in the first place.

Furthermore, this is unnecessary bloat on any blockchain with little added value. Especially since you still need to properly, securely back up your private keys. Just the same way you had to properly and securely back up digital scans of regular, old ownership contracts.

You usually don't need to host this information on thousands of nodes around the world. The 'traditional way' of storing and backing up your important digital files (like contracts) has worked ever since digital media came into existence and there's nothing that really changed lately to create a need for ownership contracts on blockchains.

I mean, Lightning Network NFTs is nothing new. The RGB (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5382633.0) team has been working on this for years. That's one more reason that frustrates me with the Ordinals team; instead of joining forces with RGB or Taro to do a sensible thing, they straight up mounted an attack on Bitcoin.

Or keep some BTC in a Lightning wallet / on a Lightning node. Guide for full node setup here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5366854.0

so how do you get money into a lightning wallet so that you can avoid paying fees once you start sending bitcoin to everyone you need to? i guess you have to pay at least one transaction fee to do that. then everything is free after that? if so then why isn't everyone doing that?  :o

not to say that running a node is easy, it does require a phD in computer science as the link you provided proves but i guess a lighting wallet you can just run an app or software so you don't need to have that phD.

Yes, you pay fees once when you open channels. But then you can send and receive for pretty cheaply (almost nothing). Best of all, LN routing fees are independent from network fees / network congestion.
In my case, I currently have a setup of wallets and channels that lets me do almost any payment through Lightning.
However, I actually currently wish to add more channels. Even at ~$3 per channel opening transaction at the moment, I get significantly higher value out of it than just paying that price for a single regular transaction, because these channels might stay open for months and years to come.

Running a node isn't really all that difficult. I'd appreciate if you can tell me how the guide could be improved and if you encounter any issues while following it, feel free to ask.

An alternative would be installing something like RaspiBlitz (https://github.com/rootzoll/raspiblitz) or Umbrel with Core Lightning (https://apps.umbrel.com/app/core-lightning). The latter is actually something I may set up myself this year, since I like the GUI of the whole project and it looks like a good option to recommend to newcomers. But before I do, I've got to try it myself. ;)

I guess the biggest downside / the reason 'why not everybody is doing that' is that you really want a dedicated little PC / Raspberry / server running the software 24/7; then connect to it through your browser or mobile app. If you're interested to learn more about this, check out our Lightning Network FAQ (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5158920.0) here.. :)

cool!

for someone that's not afraid of getting their hands dirty and going to the command line, that looks like a nice writeup. while skipping through the thread i did notice someone having a problem and it seems like some software or package they were using was out of date. and i guess they were banging their head against the wall for a while over it. no thanks. i've had enough of that type of thing and i'm not looking for more of it. i have enough trouble getting python installed and running properly let alone an entire linux distro with bitcoin core and lightning on top of that. no way for me.  :o unless someone offered me a million dollars.

that raspberry pi thing looks sweet. course, both of those are linux based. i guess windows is not the place for doing it.

the faq listed a couple options for people like me that are just normal users so i think in that case the options i would want to try are:

Bitcoin newbies: BlueWallet

Regular users: Phoenix Wallet, Breez Wallet, Blixt Wallet

that's about all the research i want to do to be able to use it  ;D

What’s frightening on this thread I learned is, miner can choose their own transactions that are to be mined. Imagine someday greedy miners try to mine only higher fee payers and thus keeping those who are paying less fees for their transactions.

Will it be possibility? In addition to that what effect this could have on the mining, the network, the transactions that are getting piled up in the pending list? Isn’t this is something one could not believe can happen as normal user of bitcoin. Is this also stands as drawback of having mining power and also if goes beyond certain limit then one could control the network. That seems not impossible.

Normally, this is not the first time Bitcoin network congestion will happen but the recent one seems to be out of hand cause it will trigger by Ordinal Inscriptions and BRC-20 Tokens.
Meanwhile, that doesn't justify Bitcoin not being the ideal payment method since there's an alternative which we both know as Lightning Network but the major problem is that most BTC hasn't adopted it.

  ;D
The idea of not key not your crypto is the best to secure one investment in crypto and the network congestion shouldn't be the reason for anyone to start using the centralized platform as storage just to escape the transaction fee.

Wow, that's a pretty quick change of mind! ;D

Yes; nobody runs Windows servers unless he's masochistic or something.

It's a bit outdated; thanks for bringing this up. BlueWallet is dead. Try Breez first, if there are any issues, have a look at Phoenix.

Yes, it is possible and that's precisely what is happening all day, every day. That's why people pay higher fees: to get their transactions confirmed more quickly, since miners will prioritize them.