NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory

[Wind_FURY]

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'.

"Misusing", but those who use Ordinals could argue that it's a feature made possible through Taproot. I believe you're mixing up opinion, both sides, from what actually is the network, which currently and obviously, Ordinals has opened a debate. Bitcoin is a network, an immutable, decentralized ledger, which is permissionless. I don't like dick pics and fart sounds in the blockchain, but the point is how can we stop censorship-resistance and permissionlessness? If you believe we could, then that will start a very dangerous premise for state attackers to take advantage.

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'.

It's not "could be used", it's actually being used. Tromp made a good post, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5437464.msg61860021#msg61860021

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.

That would be hard as tromp already posted, miners would be blocked from a good source of profit, and it starts a bad precedent. Should we tell nodes to reject transactions from North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China as well?

[1714638327]

1714638327

[serveria.com]

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'.

"Misusing", but those who use Ordinals could argue that it's a feature made possible through Taproot. I believe you're mixing up opinion, both sides, from what actually is the network, which currently and obviously, Ordinals has opened a debate. Bitcoin is a network, an immutable, decentralized ledger, which is permissionless. I don't like dick pics and fart sounds in the blockchain, but the point is how can we stop censorship-resistance and permissionlessness? If you believe we could, then that will start a very dangerous premise for state attackers to take advantage.

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'.

It's not "could be used", it's actually being used. Tromp made a good post, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5437464.msg61860021#msg61860021

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.

That would be hard as tromp already posted, miners would be blocked from a good source of profit, and it starts a bad precedent. Should we tell nodes to reject transactions from North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China as well?

No, you're mixing apples and oranges. Bitcoin shouldn't have censorship but at the same time it has to defend itself from terrorist attacks (like ordinals crap). Easier said than done, I realize that.

[BlackHatCoiner]

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.

Here's a problem though: You don't know where your hard drive dies, in comparison with a cloud service, where they will simply send you a message.

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?

Unfortunately or not, it is. But don't fall in that trap. It's the same as saying that it seems odd that the only argument repeated is that "Bitcoin is cash", meanwhile most Bitcoin users don't really care about that, and are in for the profit solely. I believe there might be a few who don't only see profit in Ordinals.

[thecodebear]

Ok I wasn't worried about ordinals cuz who would even want to do this on Bitcoin and all the NFTs on it are crap so I figured it'd be gone soon as a quick fad. But I just saw the Bored Ape company is putting an NFT collection on bitcoin now. Since they seem to be the most popular NFT company now I'm a bit worried the NFT crowd might actually start using Bitcoin and actually clogging it up for more than a few weeks.

I'm not super clear on exactly how ordinals work, but from what I can gather taproot stopped checking the size of signatures or something and ordinals cram their data into that, so it is just an unintended consequence of taproot that the developers didn't think through. Is that right? If so, can't it just be fixed and NFTs killed off with an update to the protocol that puts back in that check on size and limits it? Again, not clear on this so just wondering. If its possible to do an easy fix like this I would think this would be a top priority so that NFTs don't crowd out actual bitcoin usage and the devs would get this fix in fairly quickly. Nobody wants a bitcoin blockchain that is clogged with NFT transactions rather than monetary transactions.

[n0nce]

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.

So much for the topic of selfishness / selflessness..
But you do realize that if you leech off a system in a non-intended, harmful way, especially if done coordinated with a large number of people, you can destroy said system?

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?

Making negative assumptions like that without prior web search looks pretty silly to anyone who does know something about the topic.
For reference:

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.
[...]
Anyone with a free account can upload media to the Internet Archive.

So, if your data is part of 'All Knowledge' and it is 'on the internet', they will happily archive it forever, because that is precisely their goal. Archiving the web and even more than that. I wrote 'important' myself, maybe that was suboptimal word choice. It's just that lesser known works have likely not been archived yet, meanwhile almost every larger site and post (even some Bitcointalk threads) are archived there.

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? 

I agree! Their only goal is trying to sell JPEGs. I've been saying it all along.

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'.

"Misusing", but those who use Ordinals could argue that it's a feature made possible through Taproot.

It was made possible through Taproot, but it wasn't the intended use case for it. It's like a Windows update that contains an exploitable bug in the code. Should we argue that writing a computer virus that leverages this bug is not 'misusing' the OS, because it was the update that made that exploit possible?

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'.

It's not "could be used", it's actually being used. Tromp made a good post, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5437464.msg61860021#msg61860021

You are making a definitive statement. Anything to back it up? Tromp's post doesn't back it up, either. I'm asking whether anyone is using Ordinals as 'cloud backup storage' for important files or whether it's just used to sell worthless JPEGs to misguided people (i.e. scamming them)? I'm pretty sure that it is way too expensive to realistically upload lots of important files for archival storage.

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.

Here's a problem though: You don't know where your hard drive dies, in comparison with a cloud service, where they will simply send you a message.

You're talking about partial corruption of the disk? Of course I am oversimplifying because this is not a thread about data backups. Once your drive gets to a certain age (especially SSDs with limited R/W cycles per cell), you want to replace it. But then again, you also want local redundancy through RAID and preferably multiple off-site backups, too.
If something is so valuable that you think you need to put it on the blockchain, it's probably worth it just throwing a ton of tried & tested, 'normal' backup methods at it, like every company on the world is doing (especially the top 500 and such).

[larry_vw_1955]

Ok I wasn't worried about ordinals cuz who would even want to do this on Bitcoin and all the NFTs on it are crap so I figured it'd be gone soon as a quick fad. But I just saw the Bored Ape company is putting an NFT collection on bitcoin now. Since they seem to be the most popular NFT company now I'm a bit worried the NFT crowd might actually start using Bitcoin and actually clogging it up for more than a few weeks.

that's old news but what did you expect would happen? them to not participate?

I expect no sane people would buy such stuff.

apparently if something has a low inscription # then it is valuable. who woulda thought? 

So much for the topic of selfishness / selflessness.. Grin
But you do realize that if you leech off a system in a non-intended, harmful way, especially if done coordinated with a large number of people, you can destroy said system?

that's how you teach the devs a lesson. show them what they did wrong by example. so they can see it in action right? if they don't take any action then that means everything is ok. the devs wouldn't let bitcoin die right? or would they?

So, if your data is part of 'All Knowledge' and it is 'on the internet', they will happily archive it forever, because that is precisely their goal.

and that's where you go wrong in making an assumption. why would i trust a single organization to archive my data "forever"? single point of trust equals single point of failure....

[thecodebear]

Ok I wasn't worried about ordinals cuz who would even want to do this on Bitcoin and all the NFTs on it are crap so I figured it'd be gone soon as a quick fad. But I just saw the Bored Ape company is putting an NFT collection on bitcoin now. Since they seem to be the most popular NFT company now I'm a bit worried the NFT crowd might actually start using Bitcoin and actually clogging it up for more than a few weeks.

that's old news but what did you expect would happen? them to not participate?

I expect no sane people would buy such stuff.

apparently if something has a low inscription # then it is valuable. who woulda thought? 

So much for the topic of selfishness / selflessness.. Grin
But you do realize that if you leech off a system in a non-intended, harmful way, especially if done coordinated with a large number of people, you can destroy said system?

that's how you teach the devs a lesson. show them what they did wrong by example. so they can see it in action right? if they don't take any action then that means everything is ok. the devs wouldn't let bitcoin die right? or would they?

So, if your data is part of 'All Knowledge' and it is 'on the internet', they will happily archive it forever, because that is precisely their goal.

and that's where you go wrong in making an assumption. why would i trust a single organization to archive my data "forever"? single point of trust equals single point of failure....

I mean most of the NFT type people are the ones that think Bitcoin is "old tech" and "out of date" and they prefer ethereum and random altcoins and don't understand what bitcoin and hard money is all about. So yes I'm surprised these people are actually coming over from ethereum nfts to bitcoin. Hopefully this just fails to take off and the bored ape people and everyone decide its more profitable to do this stuff on ethereum.

[larry_vw_1955]

 Hopefully this just fails to take off and the bored ape people and everyone decide its more profitable to do this stuff on ethereum.

doubtful. ethereum has had really high gas fees in the past. did that stop people from making nft collections? or buying them? no it didnt.

[pooya87]

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.

The legacy addresses (starting with 1 or 3) and their transactions are the same as they ever were, nothing has changed and nothing is being "penalized". In other words SegWit transactions being cheaper doesn't mean the legacy transactions became more expensive!

That would be hard as tromp already posted, miners would be blocked from a good source of profit, and it starts a bad precedent.

lol it's funny that you never complained about blocking all other forms of spam transactions in the past decade like rejecting a transaction containing an OP_RETURN that is bigger than 80 bytes, but all of a sudden you are so worried about rejecting this new type of spam!!!

Should we tell nodes to reject transactions from North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China as well?

Apples and oranges...

[NotATether]

No, you're mixing apples and oranges. Bitcoin shouldn't have censorship but at the same time it has to defend itself from terrorist attacks (like ordinals crap). Easier said than done, I realize that.

Not to be a dictionary person here, but a "terrorist attack" is supposed to involve terror (force, violence, etc.)

I haven't synced the ordinals program for days since it's taking too long doing absolutely nothing. But once something is created, it is almost impossible to make it go away, as in - more programs for this will appear.

Should we though, at this point? It will just make average people think that Bitcoin is ran by a bunch of dicks and then they will lose faith in it (for reasons that have nothing to do with Bitcoin's fundamentals itself).


Side note:

This only took off after the Bitcoin developers made a protocol upgrade for completely unrelated purposes (Taproot).

So it might be possible that other advancements are unlocked after future protocol upgrades - as in, layer 2 networks.

[Wind_FURY]

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'.

"Misusing", but those who use Ordinals could argue that it's a feature made possible through Taproot. I believe you're mixing up opinion, both sides, from what actually is the network, which currently and obviously, Ordinals has opened a debate. Bitcoin is a network, an immutable, decentralized ledger, which is permissionless. I don't like dick pics and fart sounds in the blockchain, but the point is how can we stop censorship-resistance and permissionlessness? If you believe we could, then that will start a very dangerous premise for state attackers to take advantage.

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'.

It's not "could be used", it's actually being used. Tromp made a good post, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5437464.msg61860021#msg61860021

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.

That would be hard as tromp already posted, miners would be blocked from a good source of profit, and it starts a bad precedent. Should we tell nodes to reject transactions from North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China as well?

No, you're mixing apples and oranges. Bitcoin shouldn't have censorship but at the same time it has to defend itself from terrorist attacks (like ordinals crap). Easier said than done, I realize that.

Mixing apples and oranges? Ser, I believe you didn't get the point. I don't like dick pics and fart sounds in the Bitcoin blockchain, but calling Ordinals a "terrorist attack", or "crap", that has to be "defended against" is merely a personal opinion. Because Bitcoin is permissionless, AND because a "hack" was found to use Bitcoin in another way than it was supposed to be used, it's technically supposed to be "OK" for Ordinals to exist. Its existence will not depend on my or your opinion.

That would be hard as tromp already posted, miners would be blocked from a good source of profit, and it starts a bad precedent.

lol it's funny that you never complained about blocking all other forms of spam transactions in the past decade like rejecting a transaction containing an OP_RETURN that is bigger than 80 bytes, but all of a sudden you are so worried about rejecting this new type of spam!!!

Ser, have you not been listening?

Should we tell nodes to reject transactions from North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China as well?

Apples and oranges...

But should we?

[serveria.com]

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'.

"Misusing", but those who use Ordinals could argue that it's a feature made possible through Taproot. I believe you're mixing up opinion, both sides, from what actually is the network, which currently and obviously, Ordinals has opened a debate. Bitcoin is a network, an immutable, decentralized ledger, which is permissionless. I don't like dick pics and fart sounds in the blockchain, but the point is how can we stop censorship-resistance and permissionlessness? If you believe we could, then that will start a very dangerous premise for state attackers to take advantage.

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'.

It's not "could be used", it's actually being used. Tromp made a good post, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5437464.msg61860021#msg61860021

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.

That would be hard as tromp already posted, miners would be blocked from a good source of profit, and it starts a bad precedent. Should we tell nodes to reject transactions from North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China as well?

No, you're mixing apples and oranges. Bitcoin shouldn't have censorship but at the same time it has to defend itself from terrorist attacks (like ordinals crap). Easier said than done, I realize that.

Mixing apples and oranges? Ser, I believe you didn't get the point. I don't like dick pics and fart sounds in the Bitcoin blockchain, but calling Ordinals a "terrorist attack", or "crap", that has to be "defended against" is merely a personal opinion. Because Bitcoin is permissionless, AND because a "hack" was found to use Bitcoin in another way than it was supposed to be used, it's technically supposed to be "OK" for Ordinals to exist. Its existence will not depend on my or your opinion.

At this point, questions arise: why are you defending this openly spam venture? what are your reasons? what was the purpose of starting this thread? paid shill? or perhaps Mr Rodarmor himself? 

[larry_vw_1955]

"Misusing", but those who use Ordinals could argue that it's a feature made possible through Taproot.

i'm of the opinion that anytime some new functionality is introduced that this functionality should be well defined and not allow for any unintended or unforeseen use cases. and if those happen then, it needs to be tightened up the belt buckle needs to be strapped up a bit tighter...should have been done in the first place but since you can't go back in time, you have to fix it by applying a patch.

[mikeywith]

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.

But bitcoin is no longer a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" as far as the majority of people are concerned it became more like a "store of value", there are fundamental aspects of Bitcoin that keep it from being a perfect "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" like the average block time and the value instability, it's not useless in that regard, but it's far from perfect, which is the reason why things like Lightning Network came to existence.

In fact, it's almost impossible for bitcoin to become what i was intended for, that's not anybody's fault, Bitcoin turned out to be too good to be spent, and since "bad money drives out good." it's safe to assume that BTC will work better as a store of value than anything else.

Now that we shifted way too far from any "principles", it's probably a good idea to reconsider who are the real users of BTC? you can argue that the real users are those who just use the blockchain for regular transfers, to many others, the real users are the ones who contribute value to the blockchain, at this point, the exact definition of "spam" is going to be lost.

I never liked NFTs, never believed they had any value to me, even the ones that sell for 100k I personally wouldn't pay a penny to buy them, but that's just me, however, maybe we can consider these Oridnals as an added value to the blockchain, at least from the security side of things.

I could be biased as a bitcoin miner, but do hear me out, what gives bitcoin any value to start with, what is more important to bitcoin, my miners or me wanting to keep the system NFT-free? it's without a doubt that my miners are more important, they secure the network, and my thoughts on what should be on the blockchain have exactly no value.

I hope we all agree that the more valuable bitcoin is -- the more it is secured, there is a direct correlation between (how much value the miners can extract from the blockchain) and (how secured the blockchain is), the more value -- the better for BTC.

As of today, that might not be so crucial, but at some point in the future, the block rewards will hardly keep "enough" miners online, to them, it doesn't matter if they are getting paid by someone transacting value or sending some arbitrary data, as long as all "users" are competing and paying high fees -- miners will stay online.

We were discussing the hashrate trend in the mining section a few days ago, and it does seem like there is enough room for more growth given the average worldwide power rate, but that growth can't be sustained, at one point the network will be saturated and no further growth can happen, when we arrive at that equilibrium, every drop in BTC price will result in a drop in the hashrate and thus a drop in the overall security of the whole system, and all of this could happen while the block rewards are at 6.25 BTC, when those are halved a few times over the years, we are going to need BTC to be worth a few millions of dollars to keep it as secured as it is today.

eventually, BTC's price will have to settle at a very narrow range just like anything of a value does over time when it grows large enough, every halving that occurs then will have a major impact on BTC's security, that "lost value" needs to come from somewhere, if it can't come from the average user who transfers ones a month paying 1 sat/vbyte, it has to come from elsewhere, be it someone paying 100 sats to transact or to store their naked picture is somehow irrelevant to the miners and the security they provide for the system.

I also understand that the average user who doesn't mine BTC, doesn't consider the hashrate to be the #1 aspect of value to BTC, and isn't into all of this NFT stuff wants to be able to transact at the cheapest possible, so ya, it's pretty difficult for anyone to convince anyone else as to what's best for BTC!
 

[larry_vw_1955]

I also understand that the average user who doesn't mine BTC, doesn't consider the hashrate to be the #1 aspect of value to BTC, and isn't into all of this NFT stuff wants to be able to transact at the cheapest possible, so ya, it's pretty difficult for anyone to convince anyone else as to what's best for BTC!
 

Those were some nice thoughts and it's nice to hear from someone that is a miner on this issue. To me the thing that is the most troubling is that this nft functionality is just kind of an accident. If it would have gone through some type of standardization and voting process like a BIP and people weighed in on the pros and cons and everyone had a fair chance to put in their 2 cents worth and a community vote turned up that the majority wanted the functionality then you can't really say anything about that. But it kind of just got thrust upon us and there was no vote or anything.

Also this goes without saying but if it would have gone through some type of standardization process they might have been able to come up with something more suitable and technically more sound than this "ordinals" solution. Franky has pointed out how there's really not a ownership that gets transferred more like you have to follow a chain of transactions back to some original transaction so not ideal. But i don't know all those details...

[pooya87]

But bitcoin is no longer a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" as far as the majority of people are concerned it became more like a "store of value",

Money is store of value and bitcoin was supposed to become money hence a store of value from day one. If you say it is already a store of value them it means bitcoin has succeeded in becoming money.

there are fundamental aspects of Bitcoin that keep it from being a perfect "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" like the average block time and the value instability

Bitcoin was never supposed to be perfect but the average block time is not the reason for it.

Now that we shifted way too far from any "principles", it's probably a good idea to reconsider who are the real users of BTC? you can argue that the real users are those who just use the blockchain for regular transfers, to many others, the real users are the ones who contribute value to the blockchain, at this point, the exact definition of "spam" is going to be lost.

We haven't established that bitcoin has shifted away from its principles. The number of people using bitcoin for payment has always been increasing regardless of how many "investors" exist who don't. That means bitcoin has never shifted away from those principles to begin with.
Besides it still doesn't justify spamming the blockchain with useless data and use it as personal cloud storage.

however, maybe we can consider these Oridnals as an added value to the blockchain, at least from the security side of things.

We can't because these are not "tokens", they are not even smart contracts, they do not transfer anything to anyone, they also don't add any value to the blockchain. These are arbitrary data that is pushed to the blockchain once to stay there forever, pointlessly increasing the chain size.

As of today, that might not be so crucial, but at some point in the future, the block rewards will hardly keep "enough" miners online, to them, it doesn't matter if they are getting paid by someone transacting value or sending some arbitrary data, as long as all "users" are competing and paying high fees -- miners will stay online.

This argument has been made ever since block reward was 50BTC and now it is 6.25BTC and yet the hashrate is at an all time high and increasing.
Now look at it this way, in another possible scenario when the spammers will have had filled each block with "cryptokitties" and increased the fees the rest of the bitcoiners would abandon bitcoin and dump their coins which would crash the price. In which case the miners would be the first to see the consequences. The token hype dies like it died in 2018 and bitcoin wouldn't even be used for that anymore.

We were discussing the hashrate trend in the mining section a few days ago, and it does seem like there is enough room for more growth given the average worldwide power rate, but that growth can't be sustained, at one point the network will be saturated and no further growth can happen, when we arrive at that equilibrium, every drop in BTC price will result in a drop in the hashrate

The real question is "when". I'd say the growth will stop in at least another 2 decades and by then market has grown big enough and matured enough that there will no longer be big drops and small drops like 2% is not going to affect the hashrate enough to be considered a problem.

Besides if you think something like "token scam" is needed to keep bitcoin alive in the future, there is no need to add it now! You are basically saying that just because something may happen in the far away future we should ruin bitcoin today while it is working fine and has no problems!

[tromp]

These are arbitrary data that is pushed to the blockchain once to stay there forever, pointlessly increasing the chain size.

As opposed to arbitrary payment data that is pushed to the blockchain once to stay there forever?
Like all those silly satoshidice bets? Or the transfers of the NFTs? Or all the "test" transactions that people do to feel more secure about the "real" transaction?

In the end nobody can decide what is arbitrary or not. Only fees can. The higher the fees, the higher the barrier for frivolous use, and thus the less arbitrary.

Users will always find a way to relay their txs to miners more than willing to earn those higher fees.
There's nothing you can do to stop that, only try to make it a little less convenient by imposing standard-ness rules. But with high enough fees, there will always be middleman like ordinals.com to make that process as convenient as can be.

If you want less "arbitrary" data, allow all uses of the blockchain to compete and the fees to be raised. Which has to happen anyway if bitcoin is to maintain any long term security.

[mikeywith]

We haven't established that bitcoin has shifted away from its principles. The number of people using bitcoin for payment has always been increasing regardless of how many "investors" exist who don't. That means bitcoin has never shifted away from those principles to begin with.

Maybe you haven't, but many others had, and no, people using bitcoin for payment have not been increasing, it's actually the opposite, there were more transactions in 2016 and 2017 than were in the last 3 years, take a look at the transaction count, to be very generous and not call this a downtrend, it's flat at best.

Do you know what is actually in an uptrend? it's the number of BTC going out of circulation buried in the "hodlers" wallets for god knows how long, if you were to check the average block size for the past 3 years, it would be closer to 50% than to a 100%, there are days where blocks barely had any transactions, the worldwide percentage of people using bitcoin to transact rounded to the nearest whole number is exactly zero, and it will only get worse over time, the more valuable BTC become the less people will transact it.

Besides it still doesn't justify spamming the blockchain with useless data and use it as personal cloud storage.

Someone could make the same argument about someone else making a transaction for a cup of coffee, a few sats worth a transaction that is going to sit on thousands of hard drives forever, it's pretty difficult to define what is useless and what's not.

We can't because these are not "tokens", they are not even smart contracts, they do not transfer anything to anyone

They do add value to the users who want to own those sats that point to something of value to them, furthermore, they add value for miners to extract as fees.

, in another possible scenario when the spammers will have had filled each block with "cryptokitties" and increased the fees the rest of the bitcoiners would abandon bitcoin and dump their coins which would crash the price. In which case the miners would be the first to see the consequences. The token hype dies like it died in 2018 and bitcoin wouldn't even be used for that anymore.

This sounds a lot more like a reasonable argument against Ordinals, a much better one than "hey they are spamming the blockchain". the counter-argument to this however has been discussed, these NFTs have a huge market, probably worth a dozen times more than the average joe paying 1 sat per byte to transfer his 0.01BTC, the value extracted by those interested in these things could very well pass the value of the users who shares your view, of course, it could also be the other way around, we don't know what we don't know, but I would not mind sucking all the value from all those altcoins into BTC, if that's what the people want -- why not?

[serveria.com]

We haven't established that bitcoin has shifted away from its principles. The number of people using bitcoin for payment has always been increasing regardless of how many "investors" exist who don't. That means bitcoin has never shifted away from those principles to begin with.

Maybe you haven't, but many others had, and no, people using bitcoin for payment have not been increasing, it's actually the opposite, there were more transactions in 2016 and 2017 than were in the last 3 years, take a look at the transaction count, if I was to be very generous and not call this a downtrend, it's flat at best.

Lightning Network? 

Do you know what is actually in an uptrend? it's the number of BTC going out of circulation buried in the "hodlers" wallets for god knows how long, if you were to check the average block size for the past 3 years, it would be closer to 50% than to a 100%, there are days where blocks barely had any transactions, the world-wide percentage of people using bitcoin to transact rounded to the nearest whole number is exactly zero, and it will only get worse over time, the more valuable BTC become the less people will transact it.

Store of value... you have any problem with that? I don't see this as a problem...

Besides it still doesn't justify spamming the blockchain with useless data and use it as personal cloud storage.

Someone could make the same argument about someone else making a transaction for a cup of coffee, a few sats worth a transaction that is going to sit on thousands of hard drives forever, it's pretty difficult you define what is useless and what's not.

No, why? It's not difficult at all - using the oldest and most mature blockchain to store kitty pics is retarded. It's a fact.

We can't because these are not "tokens", they are not even smart contracts, they do not transfer anything to anyone

They do add value to the users who want to own those sats that point to something of value to them, furthermore, they add value for miners to extract as fees.

I love dancing and I want to dance right in front of a ticket gate on a subway during rush hour. I don't care people who want to pass can't do it and they start to queue behind me but I don't care cause this is art and my way to self-express and it's cool. I can even film it and stream it to tiktok or IG and earn some money! 

, in another possible scenario when the spammers will have had filled each block with "cryptokitties" and increased the fees the rest of the bitcoiners would abandon bitcoin and dump their coins which would crash the price. In which case the miners would be the first to see the consequences. The token hype dies like it died in 2018 and bitcoin wouldn't even be used for that anymore.

This sounds a lot more like a reasonable argument against Ordinals, a much better one than "hey they are spamming the blockchain". the counter-argument to this however has been discussed, these NFTs have a huge market, probably worth a dozen times more than the average joe paying 1 sat per byte to transfer his 0.01BTC, the value extracted by those interested in these things could very well pass the value of the users who shares your view, of course, it could also be the other way around, we don't know what we don't know, but I would not mind sucking all the value from all those altcoins into BTC, if that's what the people want -- why not?

"hey they are spamming the blockchain" looks reasonable enough to me. The question is: how many people want it? What % of all Bitcoin users? 

[n0nce]

So much for the topic of selfishness / selflessness.. Grin
But you do realize that if you leech off a system in a non-intended, harmful way, especially if done coordinated with a large number of people, you can destroy said system?

that's how you teach the devs a lesson. show them what they did wrong by example. so they can see it in action right? if they don't take any action then that means everything is ok. the devs wouldn't let bitcoin die right? or would they?

Are you being serious right now? The Bitcoin developers are not some kind of 'evil corporation' who we need to 'teach lessons' by threatening to destroy 'their product'; you don't seem to grasp this is an open-source project, where we as the users already have the power, especially through the decentralized nature of nodes as seen in UASF.
We are all Bitcoin, there is no 'us against them'. We should aim to get the best outcome for it together and not by fighting each other or threatening Bitcoin's destruction.

So, if your data is part of 'All Knowledge' and it is 'on the internet', they will happily archive it forever, because that is precisely their goal.

and that's where you go wrong in making an assumption. why would i trust a single organization to archive my data "forever"? single point of trust equals single point of failure....

I already said to use multiple backups. Do note that if you use the blockchain as your single backup, it will be a single point of failure, as well.

Calling Ordinals a "terrorist attack", or "crap", that has to be "defended against" is merely a personal opinion. Because Bitcoin is permissionless, AND because a "hack" was found to use Bitcoin in another way than it was supposed to be used, it's technically supposed to be "OK" for Ordinals to exist. Its existence will not depend on my or your opinion.

I already asked, but got no answer, maybe you got one now; the gist was: Is something usually considered 'okay' because it is technically possible or because people established and agreed on what is 'okay / good' and what is not?

It was made possible through Taproot, but it wasn't the intended use case for it. It's like a Windows update that contains an exploitable bug in the code. Should we argue that writing a computer virus that leverages this bug is not 'misusing' the OS, because it was the update that made that exploit possible?

Actually, every computer virus in existence was 'technically possible', so therefore those attacks were all legitimate and morally & ethically good? Would you go as far as saying that infecting machines can be their new intended use case, because it is technically possible through bugs, the same way you claim it may be a legitimate use to store JPEGs on the blockchain, because it is technically possible ^{[through a bug(?)]}?