Yeah. That's what happens when bitcoin is introduced to people as an "investment" instead of a currency. We get newcomers who don't really want to use bitcoin but instead they want to become rich (in fiat).
This is exactly why some people are happy about the Ordinals Attack too, since they saw an opportunity for more profit while not caring about the fee spike and the chain spam!

There is no need read the article or know what this altcoin is, any altcoin that makes this claim is a shitcoin. There simply is no reason to make this statement other than to scam people. When Bitcoin was created it was not introduced as something that can replace the banking system or VISA, PayPal, etc. It offered some features that didn't exist anywhere else and solved a real problem which is why it continues growing.

Besides when a shitcoin is a copy of bitcoin and has its features, it can not compete with bitcoin or "replace" it LOL.

There is an outline on how a change is accepted, voted on, etc. To put simply the whole process is something like this:
1. The idea is first published on the bitcoin mailing list[1]
2. The idea is discussed by the developers (those who understand the protocol and the code). It could also be discussed elsewhere like this forum.
3. If it is useful, they publish an implementation of it and the testing begins
4. The code can be improved (bug fixes, optimization, etc.) as contributors test the code and report their results and ideas to improve it.
5. The voting mechanism is implemented for the full nodes so that the users can upgrade and miners can vote on it (eg. activate at block X if 95% of previous blocks voted for it)
6. Voting begins and if it reaches the threshold the change is locked in.

[1] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev

The dedollarisation in East Asia is speeding up these days by countries that are very surprising to see joining the "dollar dumping bandwagon". Countries like South Korea which is known for its lack of independence considering how the government has been following each and every US orders.
In recent news the central banks of both South Korea and Indonesia agreed to replace dollar with their own national currencies in their bilateral transactions.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/south-korea-indonesia-cbanks-agree-promote-local-currency-transactions-2023-05-02/

When you run an SPV client like Electrum it has to connect to a full node (in case of Electrum, an Electrum node/server) and then send that node a list of addresses to fetch the history and also each time you want to send a transaction you have to send it to those servers.
This means the server you connect to sees all your activities and your IP address so it can create a link between your addresses, your IP, etc.

When you run your own Electrum server and connect to that instead, you solve the privacy problem I mentioned above since you are connecting to your own server and it is a full node so it is connected to other full nodes and is relaying transactions like any other node so nobody can create the link between your addresses or your transaction and your IP address.

The day the Ordinals Attack started, I said it has to be stopped and moved off-chain. It is good to see others are coming to the same conclusion!

I personally believe the reason why they refused to use a side-chain (even though other solutions existed) is because they wanted to gain maximum hype possible for their scams. We know things like RSK existed but if they created a token in those platforms, they wouldn't have been able to get the same level of hype hence the same exposure. That meant a failed scam.

But creating it on mainnet by exploiting the protocol and making a lot of people angry gave them a TON of exposure hence the hype and the maximum number of "victims" to rip off.

That's why they will never use any sidechains ever.

The first tanker carrying US oil (Advantage Sweet Owned by a Swiss company called Advantage Tankers LLC) was seized in Oman sea, but yeah it is always easier to intercept vessels in the strait and that's where it usually happens like the British tanker Stena Impero in 2019 while it was being shadowed by a British Royal Navy warship.

To be clear Iran's actions are all reactionary.

It too is light oil and easy to refine. In fact most oil we see in the Eastern Bloc (Russia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.) is light and high quality.

As for importers, it is hard to say because due to sanctions it is not made public. But as far as the media tells us the biggest customer is China.
Other importers include Japan, South Korea, Singapore, US (eg. used for navy as the US senator Ernst revealed), some of the European countries (as the oil tankers routes and some news articles suggest) and I believe India. In these cases usually the purchase is either done under the radar or through third parties at higher prices.

---

Speaking of problems for Europe, the protests in France has gotten so much more violent in the past couple of weeks. Dozens of police forces were burnt and the civilian casualties is growing in what is more of a civil war than a protest at this point.
On another news cooking pots are illegal in France now

The refineries these days seem to be very active in many countries and have turned into a big source of income for those countries. The "big shuffle" that I talked about over a year ago has given a life to that industry specially with light oil coming from Russia which is easy to refine (as opposed to the heavy oil found in places like Venezuela and US).

P.S. Another US oil tanker (Niovi) was just seized. This time it is a much bigger one with a capacity of about 2 million barrels of oil... lol

To be honest I don't see anything clever in this attack. The creator doesn't even have a full understanding of the script evaluation rules, they just got lucky and found a possible exploit which they later abused to build this attack around.
As a matter of fact this attack could have been implemented in a more efficient way by exploiting other "loose rules" introduced by Taproot. But of course efficiency was not at all the creator's goal, only to scam and spam!

All I see here is the same nonsense and technobabble used for years by the altcoin scammers to empty newbies' pockets. Each point here was debunked a million times before about the Ordinals Attack so I'll just list the headlines:
- There are no tokens being created
- There are no rules or standards being enforced that could be referred to as "BRC20 standard"
- Each bitcoin (and satoshis) are as fungible as before and they have not magically gained any additional value. If anybody is selling them for higher prices, they are scamming people.
- The junk data spammed on the chain can not move or be transferred to someone else.

It's funny when the idiots trying to sell the Ordinals Attack haven't even checked what the attack is doing

It indicates that the spam attack this time is a lot bigger and much more successful compared to the spam attack in 2017 specially since unlike the 2017 attack which mainly took place using the legacy transactions (ie. 1MB block size max) they are now using the increased block space for their spam (ie. 4MB block weight limit).

There are also some fee estimators that return wrong high fee rates whether because they have a broken implementation or they are maliciously trying to inflate the fee rate such as the https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ website which could be the reason why someone would pay very high fees (like the 5x and 15x cases).

This is why I keep saying that it is wrong to argue about the type of the content being injected into the blockchain using the Ordinals Attack. You can always find a content that is useful. But that doesn't make this any less of an exploit.

The only thing that matters is that they are injecting arbitrary data into a ledger meant for monetary transfers. This is an abuse of the system no matter what the data is, be it monkey pics, music or cure for cancer.

There are alternative methods and blockchains that are created for this exact purpose which are far more efficient too, and they should be used instead.

There are loads of examples where we've introduced consensus and standard rules that prevented abuses and spams or made it extremely difficult:
- Block size limit set on very early days to be 1 MB max
- Limits on the size of coinbase script size to prevent miners from spamming the chain.
- Preventing people from abusing the lack of outputs' scriptpub validation to inject massive size arbitrary data to the blockchain by introducing standard rules
- Introduction of OP_RETURN rules so that people can use that to inject their data into the blockchain but under controlled rules
- Limitations on data size that can be pushed to the stack in scripts
- Changes in fee and dust rules a couple of times over the year with the price changing
- Setting standard rules first and turning them into consensus rules regarding the dummy data in OP_CHECKMULTISIG(VERIFY) operations that could be abused to spam the chain like Ordinals does
- Same exact thing done with conditional operations' true/false stack item that could have been abused to spam the chain with junk
- Existing limits on number of OP codes, SigOp codes, etc. that a block can contain to prevent other types of attacks
- Limits on witness count and size for version 0 witness program
- Enforcing "empty stack" requirements after script evaluation ends to prevent junk data spam into the chain by abusing that (one or more junk data pushed to the stack at the end that will never be popped).
...

These are cases of the top of my head and almost all of them are abuse cases that are very similar to the Ordinals Attack.

What bitcoin miners and other PoW altcoin miners do is literary called "work". There is no money earned without work anywhere including in the cryptocurrency world. Of course your definition of "work" may be flawed if you think work is only something you physically perform with your hands or a shovel!

Using bcash (and similar shitcoins) as an example in this context is wrong because in the bcash scenario the bitcoin community did NOT split into two. What happened was that a handful of people created a copy of bitcoin and tried scamming people with it.

"Community splitting into two or more" requires a large percentage of miners, mining pools, full nodes, investors, businesses, etc. existing on each side (eg. 50-50 split or 3x 33% split, etc.).

People don't run bitcoin full nodes because they are bored! They run them to secure the money they are using, whether by contributing to the security of the network or by having full control of the complete verification of everything in the blockchain. That is more than enough incentive for them to keep them safe.

How are they a weakness?! YOUR node will always verify everything so regardless of what other nodes do, you remain safe.

That is not crazy, that is a lie. There is no correlations between the amount field of the output in a transaction and the data that is being injected into the witness script of the inputs of that transaction.

In simple terms, someone found an exploit in the most recent change to the protocol called Taproot. They are abusing the fact that the consensus rules are not strict about the size of the witness in Taproot scripts to inject arbitrary data into the blockchain (something that was previously done using OP_RETURNs with a limit). They falsely refer to that as "NFT" which is another lie.

It does but the biggest problem is not about their size (although that is a big problem itself). The biggest problem is that the Ordinals Attack is creating an incentive to spam the blockchain by creating a possible parallel market where people scam each other by selling these transactions containing arbitrary data.
If the said market grows, the resulting spam could quickly fill the blocks with transactions that could even pay very high fees. Fees that are higher than what a normal user is willing to pay.

Every now and then someone asks a similar question and each time I ask why don't people just buy bitcoin right now. It is not like we've reached the maximum price possible! Funny thing is that if you check the price at that time against current price you can see what those who didn't buy then, have already missed out.

For example you can see in this topic some people say "they would have bought $X worth of bitcoins". Price that month dropped as low as $6k and today it is 5x higher! Do you think any of those guys bought bitcoin then instead of wishing they had a time machine?

Who knows, maybe in a couple of years from now I find this topic and post it as an example for someone else who will have asked this question again

The chance is always there but so far the majority of those into Bitcoin seems to be that we say we either reach majority consensus or don't change anything at all (ie. Bitcoin works fine as it is).

I haven't bothered checking the link because this argument is pointless considering that from early days to just recently we have had many upgrades and changes in the protocol. From BIP16 (P2SH activation) all the way to BIPs 341-342-343 (Taproot activation).
We've reached majority consensus for each of them before they were activated too.