NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory

[NotATether]

Actually you can store any data with Ordinals. Even the example of an inscriptions use plain text[4].

Exactly. We now have a user friendly way to upload stuff that Craig Wright doesn't like (for example) such as the whitepaper.

If someone tries to ban a book from publishing? Upload it to the blockchain.

Computer software? Well provided that it is small enough, compress it with zlib, split into parts, and store on the blockchain...


At this point it's like someone tying to use Tor for streaming and their client gets banned from using it by node operators. Then people would run away from Tor because they'd think that Tor Network censors people.

[larry_vw_1955]

I don't think there's anyone to blame, because as I've already said there's no bug in the first place. This extra space some of us consider trash and others "NFT" is what's censorship resistance all about.

i wasn't talking to you about that anyway, i was responding to pooya. but i guess the real question is, bitcoin "nfts" not withstanding, why do we need witnesses in transactions to be so large? got any answers to that?

I don't know that, source?

there's a few threads on reddit about pcloud...

A friend of mine uses it without problems.

so that's why you think it's worth mentioning and/or recommending to others? 

I can't believe you're really arguing someone should send their files to thousands of strangers' hard drives instead of just buying a hard drive themselves.

i'm saying that i have considered doing it. not that i am asking other people to do that. for me it might make sense to do that. but i would have to plan what exactly i wanted to store first so i could make the most of my money. hard drives fail and have to be replaced.

I hope you can acknowledge the latter being more expensive to do.

expensive in what way? for storing one small text file under a megabyte?

[Wind_FURY]

Because Bitcoin is permssionless and censorship-resistant, I believe not all who uses the Bitcoin blockchain as a "cloud-storage" is attacking the network, ALTHOUGH Ordinals could open attack vectors for bad actors to congest the network, drive fees higher, while also being incentivized to do it to continue doing it.

Solution:

Push a network upgrade that increases the weight of Tapscripts, when calculating the Weight Units of the transaction.

Although in this form it would require a hard fork, maybe there is a node policy that influences the few calculation that can be tweaked specifically for bitcoin Core (it seemed to work for mempoolfullrbf, at the price of disgruntled hackers stealing the coins of a strong supporter dev).

If that's truly what you believe is the solution, then make BIP, and open the debate for the community to decide why, or why not. The network congestion caused by Ordinals will be coming soon. Although it will be a fair fee market, Bitcoin will be annoying to use as a network for payments, causing many users to go to those "faster blockchains".

[vapourminer]

glad i found bitcoin in 2011, before all the drama stared to pile on. back then you just used it was meant: unstoppable payments.

consider:

if i had heard of bitcoin during the 2016 block wars well maybe i still would have had go at it but i would of had no clue and prolly fell for fud and bet wrong and lost huge. at that point i would have become biggest the most vocal no coiner you could imagine. FAIL

if i had just heard of bitcoin today with the nft crap i would have spent all of 2 seconds to say NOPE what kinda crap is a payment network that embeds cartoons in the blockchain. FAIL

but here we are.

now, bitcoin has survived worse and im (reasonably) sure it will survive this. but i must say im disappointment in the devs not anticipating how this taproot(?) thing could be abused in such a way as to actually SLOW DOWN monetary transactions by sticking images in it that take up valuable  space for actual transactions.

disclaimer: i know next to nothing about programming so maybe im being too hard on the devs.

[OgNasty]

glad i found bitcoin in 2011, before all the drama stared to pile on. back then you just used it was meant: unstoppable payments.

Everything was so much better back then.  People supported each other and helped build on each other's ideas.  Sending BTC was cheap, hell, it was free if you knew how to create the transaction.  The community was positive and friendly.  Scammers hadn't yet infiltrated the space (for the most part) and people were here because they liked the idea behind Bitcoin and wanted to change the world.  In 2013 that started to change and by 2017 the community was so full of trolls and scammers that it's basically impossible to create any community projects here without being fudded to death and being extorted or harassed into leaving.  Damn I miss the good old days... 

I think if it were 2011 today, people would be trying to build on the Ordinals project, not trash it and say it's killing Bitcoin (think colored coins).  Negativity came with the expectations of profits as Bitcoin's price rose and the community is worse off because of it.

[BlackHatCoiner]

I think if it were 2011 today, people would be trying to build on the Ordinals project, not trash it and say it's killing Bitcoin (think colored coins).

I can justify this little emotional burden of yours who's been here since the early days, but objectively speaking, peer-to-peer unstoppable cash is no close to bloating a network of computers with unnecessary information. We already have censorship resistant file sharing; it's called BitTorrent. This Ordinal thing proposes all users store all users' information instead, which is plain stupid and can't work in practice due to enormous storage costs. It's pretty clear to me that it's just quick profit.

[garlonicon]

I think if it were 2011 today, people would be trying to build on the Ordinals project, not trash it and say it's killing Bitcoin (think colored coins).

There is a difference between "trying to build on the Ordinals project", and "putting every image on-chain". For example, you can read again, what Satoshi wrote about BitDNS, and what we both rewarded with 50 merits: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg28917

And then, the question is: if you agree that BitDNS should be a separate network, and "The networks need to have separate fates.", then why you don't think it is the same case with NFTs?

Also, as far as I understand, people are worried mainly about:

1. Storage: That could be solved with some separate network, it is the same case as with BitDNS, where it was proposed to store information about domains in a separate chain. Even if you consider using NameCoin (which is not what BitDNS was about), then still, that network is still alive, and it shows us that a separate chain can remain alive for years.

2. Transaction standardness: Because this is the only way to stop it, rejecting mined blocks is not an option. There are opinions like "Miners shouldn't follow non-standardness, but pure profit", but again, in that case testnet fits better than mainnet, and using a separate chain is even better. Also, when it comes to "being alive for years", testnet3 is alive and well, and was not resetted in the last 10 years.

Negativity came with the expectations of profits as Bitcoin's price rose and the community is worse off because of it.

I'm sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume.

Well, I still prefer the case with "very large transaction volume". However, it doesn't mean that every single transaction has to be executed directly on-chain.

And with NFTs, there were even proposals to trace single satoshis, by just tracing on-chain blocks, but to assign the content with signatures, instead of putting everything on-chain. You can cover a lot of cases with signatures, then touching on-chain coins is not needed at all, just signing them, and broadcasting signature to all interested parties, or even to some separated network, if you are worried about storage.

But even if there is a need to track ownership on-chain, then still, commitments are sufficient to cover that. Then, you can have Proof of Work protection, that can determine, who mined which NFT first, but again, you don't have to put the content on-chain, because you won't enforce the right order in that way (those Taproot-based scripts are huge OP_NOPs, they cannot enforce anything, they are used only for storage).

think colored coins

Again, it depends which proposal it was. Because there were cases, where amounts in satoshis were directly connected with amounts of colored coins, and that approach was simply wrong, for many reasons. If you want to create colored coins, then it can be simply done by using zero satoshis on testnet3, and then executing any non-standard script you want. And again, all other proposals mentioned above, with separate network, signatures, and commitments, also can be used here.

[OgNasty]

I think if it were 2011 today, people would be trying to build on the Ordinals project, not trash it and say it's killing Bitcoin (think colored coins).

I can justify this little emotional burden of yours who's been here since the early days, but objectively speaking, peer-to-peer unstoppable cash is no close to bloating a network of computers with unnecessary information. We already have censorship resistant file sharing; it's called BitTorrent. This Ordinal thing proposes all users store all users' information instead, which is plain stupid and can't work in practice due to enormous storage costs. It's pretty clear to me that it's just quick profit.

Sure, right now it's a market that makes no sense.  I wouldn't buy an Ordinal for the art or the non-existent current use cases beyond look at these pretty sats...  However, as someone who has supported a community organization plagued with issues by 3rd parties disappearing or changing the rules when they get into positions of control, I think that Ordinals are a possible solution.  A way for organizations to operate as 'collections' and distribute to supporters via the tracking of sats.  I could envision access to websites being granted by signing a message with your wallet containing sats that can be identified as passes.  I could even see a messaging or voting system setup around this.  It could be awesome, but it would bloat the blockchain for sure.  This is why I have been pushing for merged mined sidechains to handle things like this for a long time.  I think the space will get there, as it's the logical solution that would meet everyone's needs.  For whatever reason people don't support merged mined chains yet though.  I blame the focus of core developers on the lightning network.  Maybe this will have people taking a second look at what could be possible to achieve without bloating the blockchain.  I always thought blockchains would be more useful as gears than layers and I still believe that's where we'll end up.

[larry_vw_1955]

I did quick search and rather than few threads, i'd say some threads on many different subreddit (r/pcloud, r/DataHoarder, r/cloudstorage, etc.).

 it's like someone said that for their "lifetime" plan, as soon as you hand over your money to them, you become their liability. you and your data. 

[pooya87]

Because Bitcoin is permssionless and censorship-resistant, I believe not all who uses the Bitcoin blockchain as a "cloud-storage" is attacking the network, ALTHOUGH Ordinals could open attack vectors for bad actors to congest the network, drive fees higher, while also being incentivized to do it to continue doing it.

Wrong.
First of all not letting people abuse this payment system that is supposed to handle money transfers is not against censorship-resistance or permissionlessness of bitcoin. In fact it is enforcing them. You see these concepts doesn't mean you should allow people to do whatever they want. Rejecting such attack transactions is also not new, there are dozens of tx types that we are rejecting. In order to keep the integrity of the system we need to do that.

It also doesn't need malicious actors to spam the network, the spam would take place naturally and ruin bitcoin as a payment system. Don't forget that it wasn't malicious people who used cryptokitties or buy any other shittoken on shitplatforms like ethereum!

[Wind_FURY]

Because Bitcoin is permssionless and censorship-resistant, I believe not all who uses the Bitcoin blockchain as a "cloud-storage" is attacking the network, ALTHOUGH Ordinals could open attack vectors for bad actors to congest the network, drive fees higher, while also being incentivized to do it to continue doing it.

Wrong.

First of all not letting people abuse this payment system that is supposed to handle money transfers is not against censorship-resistance or permissionlessness of bitcoin. In fact it is enforcing them. You see these concepts doesn't mean you should allow people to do whatever they want. Rejecting such attack transactions is also not new, there are dozens of tx types that we are rejecting. In order to keep the integrity of the system we need to do that.

Because it is permissionless, you have your right to an opinion on what the network should be used for, but a "feature" was found so it can be used for something other than intended, what right do we truly have to say  "no" in a censorship-resistant, permissionless system?

Are you proposing that the community should call on the miners to censor those transactions? That would be against the philosophy Bitcoin was built on.

[pooya87]

Are you proposing that the community should call on the miners to censor those transactions? That would be against the philosophy Bitcoin was built on.

No, we should call on nodes to reject spam transactions that are abusing the system and never relay such transactions. This is in accordance with the principles of bitcoin, the peer-to-peer electronic cash system and is against the principles of bitcoin, the permit anything file storage system.

[tromp]

No, we should call on nodes to reject spam transactions that are abusing the system and never relay such transactions.

These are transactions that miners *want* to include because they still pay competitive feerates.

So users will find a way to relay them directly to willing miners (as ordinals.com already does), and if not relayed normally, the mempool will show a distorted view of the fee market.

You're trying to fight basic economics in a permission-less system.

is against the principles of bitcoin, the permit anything file storage system.

Bitcoin is by design a transaction storage system, since the entire tx history must be verifiable.
Bitcoin also cannot effectively distinguish between financial scripts and data storage scripts (note that a less efficient data storage in fake P2PK outputs is possible as well).

[kano]

I don't think there's anyone to blame, because as I've already said there's no bug in the first place. This extra space some of us consider trash and others "NFT" is what's censorship resistance all about.

i wasn't talking to you about that anyway, i was responding to pooya. but i guess the real question is, bitcoin "nfts" not withstanding, why do we need witnesses in transactions to be so large? got any answers to that?

Before Taproot, big witness definitely needed for multi-signature address and LN which utilize HTLC. But since Taproot which has signature aggregation, i don't know any practical usage of big witness size.

...

Hang on, isn't witness data completely free coz core decided it should be, when they implemented segwit, and thus punish people using '1' addresses?

So if these super large NFTs are in the segwit witness data, then they don't cost anything extra for the transaction?

[n0nce]

And if it's not personal data (e.g. your phone number), you can even upload it to Internet Archive for free[3].

i wouldn't trust a non-profit for storing my data sorry. 

I see. But do you mind you don't trust non-profit? Internet Archive has been around for 26 years ago.

And Bitcoin node operators do so without profit, too... We gain nothing from storing other people's JPEG's. Sounds like a double standard to me.

I don't understand much the need for lifetime cloud service. I don't trust any of those companies' lifespan to begin with. Leaving my files saved somewhere outside my place for 10 years doesn't provide the same confidence, whether it's a trillion dollar company like Apple keeping them, or a pCloud. If you want to keep your files "forever", buy a hard drive, and make backups every once in a while.

I'd argue that you want a combination of the two. On-site hard, physical backup and off-site secondary backup. As soon as one fails, you replace it from either live data or the other backup. Since it is extremely unlikely that your local NAS and the cloud storage provider die at the same exact moment, your data will be secure enough with double or triple redundancy. It's not much different than seed word storage. You want multiple ones in a few locations, too.
If you can't handle 2-3 data backups, you probably can't handle 2-3 seed phrase backups and if you don't have that, you may find yourself in a pretty bad situation in the future.

Exactly. We now have a user friendly way to upload stuff that Craig Wright doesn't like (for example) such as the whitepaper.
If someone tries to ban a book from publishing? Upload it to the blockchain.
Computer software? Well provided that it is small enough, compress it with zlib, split into parts, and store on the blockchain...

That works with Torrents over Tor, as well. In fact, Torrents have been used to bypass censorship for a while now...

For example, you can read again, what Satoshi wrote about BitDNS, and what we both rewarded with 50 merits: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg28917

Pure gold. Thanks; satoshi basically wrote his position on Ordinals here:

Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale.

Bitcoin and BitDNS can be used separately.  Users shouldn't have to download all of both to use one or the other.  BitDNS users may not want to download everything the next several unrelated networks decide to pile in either.

The networks need to have separate fates.

Are you proposing that the community should call on the miners to censor those transactions? That would be against the philosophy Bitcoin was built on.

You are mixing up 'misusing the Bitcoin blockchain because it is technically possible' and 'censorship of monetary transactions'. We want Bitcoin to be censorship-free in the sense that anyone can send any amount of BTC to anyone on the world at any time. Filling the mempool and the blockchain with JPEGs though, inhibits this goal and should be regarded as an attack. Attacking Bitcoin is pretty surely not in line with 'the philosophy Bitcoin was built on'.


It seems odd to me that the only real argument repeated over and over again here is that 'Bitcoin could be used as censorship-resistant forever storage of data', meanwhile NFT people don't really care about any of that and are just out to sell JPEGs for profit?
You are basically defending 'JPEGs' with 'cloud backup storage'.

[larry_vw_1955]

And Bitcoin node operators do so without profit, too... We gain nothing from storing other people's JPEG's. Sounds like a double standard to me.

everyone SAYS they are non-profit but we all know no one does something for free and people are getting paid and siphoning off money for playing golf and expensive cars, etc. show me one non-profit that is not corrupt. i doubt one exists. except for noble bitcoin node operators that just want to support the network and maybe have a bit more privacy for their own transactions...

We want Bitcoin to be censorship-free in the sense that anyone can send any amount of BTC to anyone on the world at any time. Filling the mempool and the blockchain with JPEGs though, inhibits this goal and should be regarded as an attack. Attacking Bitcoin is pretty surely not in line with 'the philosophy Bitcoin was built on'.

i can't believe we're having to revert back to this discussion.  i thought everyone agreed on this as a matter of principal but bitcoin got so screwed up now because of this nft thing. crazy!

[n0nce]

And Bitcoin node operators do so without profit, too... We gain nothing from storing other people's JPEG's. Sounds like a double standard to me.

everyone SAYS they are non-profit but we all know no one does something for free and people are getting paid and siphoning off money for playing golf and expensive cars, etc. show me one non-profit that is not corrupt. i doubt one exists. except for noble bitcoin node operators that just want to support the network and maybe have a bit more privacy for their own transactions...

So.. you just contradicted yourself?
'no one does something for free' [...] 'except for noble bitcoin node operators that just want to support the network'

You do remark that we gain non-monetary benefit from running nodes, like better privacy for our own usage. Likewise, The Internet Archive folks and donators gain something non-monetary as well: archiving of webpages and other important data.

We want Bitcoin to be censorship-free in the sense that anyone can send any amount of BTC to anyone on the world at any time. Filling the mempool and the blockchain with JPEGs though, inhibits this goal and should be regarded as an attack. Attacking Bitcoin is pretty surely not in line with 'the philosophy Bitcoin was built on'.

i can't believe we're having to revert back to this discussion.  i thought everyone agreed on this as a matter of principal but bitcoin got so screwed up now because of this nft thing. crazy!

I find it crazy that people go from 'Bitcoin prevents censorship of monetary transactions' / 'Bitcoin allows anyone to send anyone money' basically to 'Bitcoin is the next cloud storage provider because of a bug in the code because freedom'.
Next up, we call it censorship if operating system developers fix kernel bugs, because those fixes block malware to 'freely' access affected servers? I'm joking but I hope you understand what I mean.

[pooya87]

No, we should call on nodes to reject spam transactions that are abusing the system and never relay such transactions.

These are transactions that miners *want* to include because they still pay competitive feerates.

So users will find a way to relay them directly to willing miners (as ordinals.com already does), and if not relayed normally, the mempool will show a distorted view of the fee market.

You're trying to fight basic economics in a permission-less system.

I'm not trying to fight anything, this IS how we have been fighting spam all along. The same arguments you made about miners being able to include non-standard transactions could have been made about literary any other form of injecting garbage into the blockchain (eg. placing ~1 MB garbage entirely in your scriptpub).

Bitcoin is by design a transaction storage system, since the entire tx history must be verifiable.
Bitcoin also cannot effectively distinguish between financial scripts and data storage scripts (note that a less efficient data storage in fake P2PK outputs is possible as well).

You can't distinguish among the standard scripts that contain the garbage but you can easily distinguish it when they are doing something non-standard. In case of the Ordinals Attack things are actually too obvious to distinguish.

Hang on, isn't witness data completely free coz core decided it should be, when they implemented segwit, and thus punish people using '1' addresses?

So if these super large NFTs are in the segwit witness data, then they don't cost anything extra for the transaction?

Witness parts of transaction contribute less to the transaction weight, hence they are cheaper not "completely free".
To be honest I'm not sure if you are trolling since it is very surprising to see one of the oldest forum members and the owner of one of the oldest mining pools has no idea how Bitcoin works!

[larry_vw_1955]

You do remark that we gain non-monetary benefit from running nodes, like better privacy for our own usage.

ok so maybe bitcoin node operators are no so selfless as we thought. but i want to ram my data into their hard drive just the same if the protocol allows it. that way they can help me store data that is important to ME.

Likewise, The Internet Archive folks and donators gain something non-monetary as well: archiving of webpages and other important data.

who decides what is "important" or not though? what if i say my data is important and they don't agree? does that mean they can drop it?

I find it crazy that people go from 'Bitcoin prevents censorship of monetary transactions' / 'Bitcoin allows anyone to send anyone money' basically to 'Bitcoin is the next cloud storage provider because of a bug in the code because freedom'.

yes that is quite a leap of logic i don't understand how someone can make that type of leap of logic. its obviously flawed.

i dont understand why someone would buy stuff like this: https://ordswap.io/collections/tradifilines
it's just junk right? 

[kano]

Hang on, isn't witness data completely free coz core decided it should be, when they implemented segwit, and thus punish people using '1' addresses?

So if these super large NFTs are in the segwit witness data, then they don't cost anything extra for the transaction?

Witness parts of transaction contribute less to the transaction weight, hence they are cheaper not "completely free".
To be honest I'm not sure if you are trolling since it is very surprising to see one of the oldest forum members and the owner of one of the oldest mining pools has no idea how Bitcoin works!

Sorry I shouldn't ask leading questions, it would seem that's not allowed on this forum.
I'll remove the ? key from my keyboard.

Yep I have no idea about how the 4/1 witness weight code worked coz I've never read it.
Though my question clearly showed I didn't know

So, looking for it now ... ...
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0141.mediawiki#transaction-size-calculations

OK so only the '1' addresses are penalised 4x, but the witness data gets through at the same 1/4 cost as non '1' addresses.

Well, pretty bad