There are pros and cons to doing this:
Version 20.2 didn't support witness version 1 yet (it was added in the next release) so it can successfully reject all the Ordinals Attack spam transactions from your mempool regardless of the way they are exploiting the protocol (since they changed it to circumvent other attempts at purging them).

However, this will also [mempool] reject other witness version 1 transactions from regular users that are not malicious.
The other downside is that you no longer fully verify blocks you receive either. Since as I said your node doesn't have the code for the full consensus rules to do so. That means you are relying on the rest of the network to verify that part of the blocks and only add them to the chain if they were valid, instead of fully verifying everything yourself which is what Bitcoin stands for.

We've already established this a long time ago. I believe it was in spring!
Everyone who disagreed with me calling it "Attack" agreed that Ordinals is using an exploit in the protocol to spam the chain ergo it is an exploit itself.

Keep in mind that saying "it is functioning within the consensus rules" doesn't change the fact that it is an exploit. Consensus rules can be broken and in need of a fix too. Sometimes it is a very severe case like the value overflow incident[1], sometimes it is less severe like the countless number of cases being patched by standard rules.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident

The community needs to know the nature of this attack so it has to be explained as many times as required. Specially when the scammers run a much bigger operation on the internet advertising their scam as a legitimate thing calling arbitrary data "token" and attacking any attempt at fixing the exploit by calling it "censorship".

It is very strange to see certain users so bothered each time there is a discussion about ways to protect Bitcoin and fix the exploits that malicious projects are abusing 🤔

Sadly I think you may be right because we let this scam grow too big to be easy to contain. I've been warning this would happen for almost a year and nobody listened. The standard rules could have prevented this whole mess in early days very easily.
Although that shouldn't be the reason for not implementing the preventive measures through standard rules right now either.

I do hate seeing fees at unreasonable levels which makes it very hard for majority of bitcoin users to use Bitcoin but the reason why I have been against the Ordinals Attack was never because of fees. It was always because this is an abuse since they've turned the payment system called Bitcoin into a cloud storage!

Actually their problem with Samourai transactions was related to a limit on OP_RETURN outputs that only Knots enforces and it was not even new. Basically Knots nodes have always been rejecting their transactions.

I'm using the recent re-rise of oil price to $80 as an excuse to post some thoughts on the complexity of the economy.

I've seen people who focus too much on only one or two factors when they want to talk about economy and many other similar  topics like energy price, food situation and a lot more including bitcoin price. But the reality is that all these topics are very complex and are the result of lots of interconnected factors. Of course in certain cases the propaganda is to blame for some people thinking this way.
For example they want to bring down bitcoin price and we suddenly see how the propagandists start talking about how S&P500 has dumped and bitcoin's (non-existent) correlation with it which should dump bitcoin too!!! In fact you've probably already heard about this "correlation" specially in 2020 when the COVID recession created a dump.
We see even more propaganda in economy and energy situation, if you seen my other topics in this board you already know what I'm talking about (my favorite propaganda is "EU freezing" which they created themselves to have something to debunk pretending that's what energy crisis means LOL).

Here I'm selecting 4 factors which I believe are the main and important ones in the economy that also affect Bitcoin Price: Energy Price, Inflation, Recession and Interest Rates.
At the end I'll try to include other important factors that affect these 4 main ones while explaining the interconnected nature of all this.

		During the transitional phase from the Old World Order to the New World Order there will be lots of conflicts specially in proxy regions, rim-land, and resource rich regions. That has a significant effect on energy prices by destabilizing energy market, trade routes, etc. Examples are the NATO-Russia war, the booting of colonizers from Africa, the NATO-West Asian Resistance in Red Sea, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, etc. During the conflict between two sides (East vs. West) the war is not only armed conflict, it will be in resources markets too. Which shows itself as decisions like OPEC cutting supply, US releasing massive amounts of strategic reserves, Nord Stream being blown up, China going on an energy buying spree, etc. This has a significant effect on energy price by destabilizing energy supply. With rising energy prices, we see increased inflation
═════════════════	╬	═════════════════════════════════════════════════════
		With increasing inflation, governments who can not think of any other solution! start increasing the interest rates to try and keep inflation down.
═════════════════	╬	═════════════════════════════════════════════════════
		The goal of increased interest rates is to decrease liquidity since people with mortgages, businesses with loans, etc. will have to pay more money back to the banks. That means economy slows down (one of its side effects is smaller GDP or GDP growth) which means the "demand" decreases ergo inflation is controlled while the local fiat is artificially strengthened which is also good for the government's budget deficit. However, this comes at a cost and that cost is recession.
═════════════════	╬	═════════════════════════════════════════════════════
		Recession will "shrink" the economy (eg. deindustrialization, small businesses shutting down, people spending less, etc.) the silver lining of recession is that it also decreases the demand for energy which starts lowering energy price. So increased recession leads to lower energy price. We've seen that over the past 2 years and is in fact one of the reasons why OPEC countries decrease their production since there is less demand (another reasons include wanting to keep the price up and also the conflict I mentioned in first row). This is also exactly what we saw over the past 20 days as oil price broke $80 resistance and dropped to nearly $70.
═════════════════	╬	═════════════════════════════════════════════════════
		As one "chain" completes we can see effects of each factor on Bitcoin Price: I wouldn't say energy crisis itself has any direct effect on bitcoin price although it can affect mining. With increased inflation we always see people seeking investment (hedge against inflation) and bitcoin has always been a good choice ergo high inflation means increasing bitcoin price. We have seen this in many countries with high inflation, the most recent was Argentina where people on reddit claimed the bitcoin volume shot up to the moon as inflation rate reached 160%! Interest rates also directly affect bitcoin but in a negative way. With increased interest rates and as the government keeps borrowing money through very profitable "bonds", the money is sucked out of all other markets including bitcoin. So with higher interest rates bitcoin price suffers. Recession also has a negative effect on bitcoin as people would need to liquidate their assets to be able to pay their loans, cover the cost of living, etc. So higher recession means lower bitcoin price.
═════════════════	╬	═════════════════════════════════════════════════════
		There are a lot of other factors affecting the 4 main ones which I've included in this last graph. I believe they are self-explanatory. Another point about all these graphs is that some relationships (the arrows) can work in both directions. For example increased recession can force the government to decrease interest rates which would then increase inflation.

This can hopefully address questions such as "If bitcoin is a hedge against inflation, why isn't it rising now that inflation is high?" as we can see all other factors affecting the price.
Hopefully it can also be an answer to those who read a silly one-line comments/propaganda somewhere saying "US released strategic oil reserves, oil will go to $10 and energy crisis is over" or "OPEC decreased production, oil will go to $200 and everyone will freeze"!!!

In any case I hope my simple visualization helped; Let me know which relationship you don't agree with and what other factors you think are also important.

1

When we have newbies who don't understand how things work and still think the junk they're buying is a "token" and call it things like "BRC-20", it is not really surprising to see some of these newbies make giant mistakes such as paying a ridiculously high fee that makes no sense otherwise.

I don't know why this particular case happened but we know for sure that we are going to see a lot more dumb mistakes like this in the future. Even more of them if full nodes start rejecting the Ordinals Attack and the scammers are forced to use third party software to circumvent a lot of stuff...

There are a couple of contradicting views on Ordinals but the only thing that I've seen everyone agree on is that Ordinals is only possible because of an exploit they found in the protocol. This means despite they not breaking the consensus rules, preventing these transactions is fixing that exploit and it is not censorship.

Besides, we've been doing this for as long as bitcoin existed. We've been rejecting transactions that push arbitrary data to the chain (except using the standard OP_RETURN outputs). For example even before SegWit you could use an exploit in the OP_CHECKMULTISIG transactions to push a huge arbitrary data into the chain using the dummy item bug in this OP code. Why wasn't it exploited? Because we've been rejecting any tx that used this vulnerability in the protocol as non-standard.
Just like that was never called censorship, rejecting the Ordinals exploit is not either.

I'm assuming `bip32 = BIP32.from_seed(bytes.fromhex(""))` is from
https://github.com/darosior/python-bip32/blob/1492d39312f1d9630363c292f6ab8beb8ceb16dd/bip32/bip32.py#L332
In which case the library is broken because it should have rejected your input as insecure because despite what you said in the quote above the only "good practice" that you overrode was using a 0 bit entropy whereas the doc says it should be between 128 and 512 bits
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki#master-key-generation

The rest can be skipped and your derived keys would still be secure as long as the entropy was secure.
Meaning you can skip passphrase in BIP39, you can even modify the algorithm and completely remove PBKDF2 and just use a single SHA512 (removes all the hashes and usage of salt), not use any derivation path, and so on and still produce 100% secure child keys.

I still don't get why some people insist of using the false term "censorship" when referring to an "exploit fix".
But as I've said a million times, we've been "censoring" a lot of abusing transactions that would fall under similar protocol exploits for as long as Bitcoin has existed so I don't see how things would be any different if we fix this newest exploit in the protocol!

That's complete and utter nonsense. The tweet itself is a paradox! Layer suggests it is on top of something else, meaning the "base" has to work fine for the layer to also work. For example you can't apply a coat on an already corroded (rusty/pitted) iron and claim things are fine now!

If making an on-chain transaction is extremely expensive and nearly impossible for regular users because some scammers are using an exploit to spam the chain, nobody would ever bother using Lightning Network that requires on-chain settlements.

He is essentially saying that Bitcoin is for scammers that have money and incentive to spam the chain at any cost (fees) and we're not gonna do anything about it; and the real Bitcoin users should stop using Bitcoin!!!
The community needs to beware of naïve statements such as this and I'm too kind for calling it naïve and not malicious.

Many Bitcoiners including me have been calling Ordinals an attack for nearly a year now and I have to say the fact that part of the Bitcoin community needed the fees to go up first before they could see Ordinals as it really is shows the community has still not reached complete maturity and I dare say some of them have not yet understood what bitcoin is.

A mature community would have been this concerned a year ago when the attack began by exploiting the protocol and when the attackers abused bitcoin blockchain by turning it into a cloud storage; not when fees went up and it started affecting them individually.

Yes, but there are still some major differences too.
For example remember your own first days with bitcoin. How many transactions did you make in first week or first month? 1? 10? Multiply that with 100k new users and it still wouldn't be as many transactions per minute as the spam attacks inject into the mempool. There are currently 340k transactions in the mempool.

There is a big difference.
When you stake a PoS shitcoin, you can exit it at any time and in a blinking of an eye. All it takes is to dump it for another coin or convert back to fiat or bitcoin. However, when you have mining equipment, you can't just sell those equipment any time or quickly. It is also difficult to switch to another coin specially since mining algorithms are different for a lot of coins.

That's not to mention that in PoS you are only rewarded for having money while not doing anything at all. In PoW you have to actually work to get paid. Now with the fact that shitcoins such as ETH have a massive premine, you can see who PoS benefits the most

There is definitely a problem but it is not the fees. The problem is developers that have refused to provide the option in full node implementations such as bitcoin core for users to reject these spam transactions that are exploiting the protocol.

The "concept" was never about being cheapest payment system. The main thing was to be a decentralized censorship resistant payment system that is secure (immutable blockchain).
We strive to keep the capacity in a level that prevents prolonged congestion. We can't do anything about spam attacks except patching exploits and rely on the fee market to make the attack expensive for the attackers.

It's not the time to get into who's behind the attack, it's time to find a solution to remove this exploit in the protocol and prevent the spam. For the time being, I'd say the community should start letting the dev teams know what they demand of them. We'll discuss other options if they continue refusing to fix the exploit or at least give users the option to not-relay these spam transactions.

They're not in the same spirit either. Hashrate going from 500 to 10 makes bitcoin 100% vulnerable. However, fixing an exploit in the protocol is not going to damage anything, in fact it would get bitcoin's "healthiness" back!

Maybe you need to check out the policy rules that we've been enforcing for the past decade to see that it is not "me" that is telling miners what to mine and what not to. The whole community has been preventing a large number of exploitable ways malicious people could use to spam Bitcoin, that is of course until this new exploit was found in the protocol which is being abused heavily these days.

BTW I brought up the miners' revenue in response to the claim that miners need that additional revenue from the spam.

That's a good point about resource, this is indeed a growing concern and it is global. As the (human) population grows and in cases the fish population shrinks, fishermen will start venturing further and sometimes in other territorial waters. For example we've seen clashes between England and France over fishing rights and they've seized other country's fishing boats in the past too.

There are two things wrong here and people only responded to one of them so far.
The obvious one that when we talk about adoption we aren't talking about a situation when you can buy anything anywhere at any time. That would be more like replacing fiat which is not the goal.

The other one that nobody addressed is that altcoins will never become mainstream or even be used as long as their purpose is to be pumped and dumped. For years the altcoin creators only made new projects to make money themselves, hence the premines and ICOs and PoS and so on. Until that changes, we won't see "other cryptos" ever be used for anything meaningful.

We always make spam harder not impossible. Every single standard rule can be broken if you contact a miner. But mining pools aren't the most willing to become pariahs in the Bitcoin community by explicitly accepting something that is being rejected by majority of the network as non-standard (assuming it gets implemented for Ordinals Attack!) which means we make it "harder" to spam.

You should also consider the pool owner's fear of having their mined block rejected. Take a look at this case here. A perfectly valid but non-standard transaction that they refused to include in their blocks regardless of its high reward. It took more than a year and an actual block being mined on testnet to show them it is valid to get it picked up.

Automatically yes but never hard-code such a rule to ban a certain implementation because of its "changeable preference".

As a full node or a light client, we connect to full nodes for many different reasons not just to push transactions. Which means having the most options to connect to is better.

We also have little ways of knowing why a node rejected a transaction we just sent it. It may be a bad signature, it may be an overloaded mempool that has dynamically increased the fee rate or it could be a standard rule aka preference that the user changed. For example a bitcoin core node can reject a transaction containing an OP_RETURN output that is 10 bytes while a bitcoin Knots node can accept an OP_RETURN output that is 500 bytes just because the user can easily change those limits. They are not hard-coded.

It's up to the developer of your client to have already handled all these cases automatically and in a general way not a hard-coded case-by-case way through their user-agent just because they had a fight with that other developer on Twitter