When there is an incentive, we can resort to lightning network.
We had a record net opening of channels, and record of Lightning nodes.

yeah

new jump soon

Wasting money by denial-of-service... by no means, is that new to us at all. It's going to cool down eventually, because blokes will either run out of money or realize that throwing away mountains of several million satoshis is literally throwing their money down a sinkhole never to return again.

There is a non-zero chance that the message encrypted in the genesis block is a regular timestamp with a headline from the first fresh newspaper Satoshi came across to document that the bitcoin network was launched no earlier than January 3, 2009.

Of course, the early cypherpunk movement was thoroughly imbued with romantic rebellious spirit of protest against the existing financial system. But is it necessary to look for hidden political subtext here? If Cypherpunk is considered a political movement, then it is a political movement against politics, in a sense it is anti-politics, a protest against the dominant role of politics in our ordinary daily life. At least that's how I understand it.

Well, you're of course right that Bitcoin and Ethereum are the safest blockchains, and in Ethereum the cost/security equation is worse, but I actually pointed to some Bitcoin-based alternatives which would be more accepted by even the "maxi" community (OP_RETURN based tokens, Taro ...).

But I believe the cause of the distortion is related neither with "security" nor "cost". The distorsion comes from the high prices the Ordinals fans mean to be able to reach with their speculative action. Even if only a tiny minority of early adopters will actually really earn money with these BRC-20 memecoins, a lot more think they could make it, and thus pay these enormous fees (Seriously, who wants to own a coin called "DICK", a 10-year-old kid? Is that really a "public" they should direct their marketing efforts to, so much money to make with kids?). Thus the high expected prices weaken the disuasive power high fees otherweise have.

Eventually the BRC-20 users will conclude that it's not worth anymore to transact that much with Ordinals derivatives, at least at this level. But they will have congested the network for weeks (maybe months) and that's not exactly good for other BTC use cases, it even may drive some businesses out of BTC.

This could happen again every year or so with another fad or hype, be it memecoins, NFTs, new kinds of DeFi, derivatives etc.. And Bitcoin with decentralized sidechains and a highly liquid LN would be better prepared to deal with that.

The problem I see here is: The whole Ordinals hype distorts the incentive structures.

Normally, for meme tokens you should go for the cheapest option (i.e. the one which uses the smallest amount of blockchain space). I think currently (if you really, really insist to use the BTC blockchain for that) that should be something Lightning-enabled like RGB or Taro. But BRC-20 is probably even less efficient with space than the oldest coloured coin protocols, like EPOBC.

Very interesting. If I'm not mistaken Shrinkage is a fraudulent practice that can undermine consumer trust in a brand. While it can help a company maintain profit margins in the short term, it can ultimately lead to long-term losses as customers may seek alternatives.

To combat inflation, companies can explore various strategies such as increasing efficiency in the production process, negotiating better prices from suppliers, or finding alternative sources of raw materials. They may also consider offering products at different prices or offering discounts for bulk purchases. I think the solution for the win win solution is transparency is the key. Communicating openly with customers about price increases can help maintain trust and loyalty.

The op has a good point, a point that is often forgotten. Indeed, holding Bitcoin can be a political choice, a choice not to trust traditional financial institutions and fiat currencies, regulated by authorities. And that can be done without expectations that Bitcoin will rise and merely because of the importance of supporting something that introduced unprecedented financial freedom, sort of like people give money to support a cause sometimes.

To those asking how it weakens strongholds, I believe that the act of holding Bitcoin is already a statement. A statement that I don't need a bank to store or send my money, and that I don't need an official fiat currency to store it in, either. This undermines the role of traditional institutions because it shows that they aren't as necessary as they want us to think they are.

Yeah I noticed this also. Basically when you go shopping you will notice two things

1) Products which cost 50% more

2) Products which cost 10-20% more but less quantity

Basically the bag is the same size except the label has indicated there is less contents inside. Very common with potato chips and cereal boxes.

I hate it when companies reduce quantity (and often quality too) of product to sell it at same price as before to combat inflation. Oh and don't forget those, "30% Extra" labels.

Inflation makes everything rise, so might as well keep the original quantity and just increase the price.

Do you agree? How would you combat inflation if you were running a company?

Although I agree with the sentiment, I really think we should be pushing more of a 'you do you' kind of thing.
Possibly you want to hold, I want to trade, and that other person over there wants to get BTC so he can buy stuff.

We should be helping people do what they want with no preconceived notions.

Yes, we can point out the good / bad / ugly of what they may or may not want to do. But beyond that, it's their coin. Do with it as they want.

-Dave

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

Sure I do it all the time. I am a small commercial farmer maybe 160kwatts.


I mine multiple coins and hodl profits. At current prices the only way I spend BTC is buying new gear to grow the mine. Even though btc price is meh gear prices dropped. So using low priced btc to buy low priced ming gear is good.

If not hold the btc.

Just an observation: Now (in late April/early May 2023) the focus of the Ordinals community seems to have been directed to smaller inscriptions like BRC-20 tokens which could already have been achieved without Taproot because they're definitely below the 10K script size limit.

(BRC-20 tokens are basically tokens like those possible with Omni or Counterparty, only that they're using Ordinals to store a JSON text file with the parameters of each token/transaction. I'm still wondering why they use that silly and ultra-inefficient approach).

Now these small inscriptions are causing fees to grow even more than the first big Ordinals wave in February/March. The reason is actually simple: storing a 50K picture with 10 sat/bytes is already expensive, but a small token transfer of no more than 300-400 bytes is perhaps even possible with 100 sat/bytes.

This could lead me to conclude that the bigger Inscription transactions aren't really the problem for the current blockchain bloat. The problem are periods of extremely high blockchain activity when some kind of "hype" is going on, regardless of the size of the individual transactions. And such a hype could have been already possible with pre-Taproot rules.

So I think the solution is not hard forking into a new limit. Instead sidechains should be made finally possible, because these could provide enough space to get rid of the problems when these "hypes" arise.

With Stacks providing already a relatively descentralized method for sidechains, why not fork Stacks and use a decentralized (non-premined) merged-mined token to power a sidechain supported explicitly by the Bitcoin community, to make transactions smooth again?

(PS: Reading the last posts, isn't this exactly your idea @Wind_FURY?)

Biggest is only 192629 bytes - only 6 above 180000 bytes, so they must be mostly '1' address transactions, not NFTs

In my country inflation are manipulated by adding or removing products or goods to the inflation basket that has minimal impact. The inflation statistics are a poor reflection of the true inflation in the country. Example : Vegetable Oil went up the most and it was removed from the inflation basket. 

The Reserve Banks play "smoke & mirror" games with the money printing and inflation and citizens does not understand the long-term impact of those measures.   

I don't subscribe to the manipulated CPI conspiracy theory, but the asset inflation is a good point.

I don't know what you mean about food crisis other than price increases. Where I live at least there have been no shortages. In that sense the food crisis would fall under the global inflation crisis that was exacerbated by the Ukraine war but started before that due to massive printing and restrictive fossil fuel policies.

In my opinion, dividing money into many types of investments is a safer and more profitable thing, if there is an investment that drops, we can still rely on others, and of course the biggest portion at the moment, in my opinion, is bitcoin, this is because of the short-term potential or less than a year from bitcoin is very good compared to gold and silver.