NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory

[mikeywith]

We should aim to get the best outcome for it together and not by fighting each other or threatening Bitcoin's destruction.

Exactly, which is why I don't understand why many people would reject any change to the protocol or even a new use case for the blockchain, people opposed Segwit, LN, Taproot, Stratum V2 and etc, the majority of those things are now alive and still running, why? because more people wanted them than not, up to this point many people say that Segwit coins are not Bitcoin, did that change a thing? no.

Do I like NFTs? hell no, will I be happy paying ten times the fees because my transaction has to beat some ugly Ape image? of course not, but I am also not happy having to download a 6000 sats transaction because uncle joe wants to see if his wallet works fine and can receive Bitcoin before he goes ahead and transfer the remaining 12k sats, do I have the right to censor uncle joe just because it bothers me? probably not.

To me VALUE is key, the majority of people who oppose bitcoin say that it uses a huge amount of unnecessary energy, thus raising the electricity cost for those who need it to keep their house warm, so the conclusion is (Bitcoin is evil and we should ban it) this is exactly the same logic that states "Storing ordinals on the blockchain makes the other normal transactions more expensive and we have to ban it".

People seem to ignore the fact that Bitcoin mining extract value, the demand for what they think is "wasted energy" creates more jobs, pays more tax, and overall benefits the economy in general, even if you have to pay $120 a month as opposed to $100 without the miners' demand, the value that has been made in the process is going to circulate back into the economy for a greater good, we can apply the same logic to these NFTs, let's just assume everyone who trades NFTs is a "retard", so 1 million "retards" buy Bitcoin and increase its value by x%, that x% is very likely to offset the extra fees you need to pay when competing against those "retards", anything that adds any sort of value to the economics of any project is good as long as it isn't a serious threat against its existence.

Are there any serious threats on Bitcoin with Ordinals/NFTs? anything vital? or it's just "No, I don't like them, kick them out of here"!

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[stompix]

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.

I see a bit of extortion happening here Mikey, should I power back (of wait, first buy back) a few of my miners to try to offset this? 
Not going to quote the entire passage but since the discussion brought up fees and a number of transactions this is a telling graph:


For those that tell miners to survive on fees but at the same time want only 1sat/b fees in the chain this is how the reward from block and fee ratio looks like, a flat line closer a lot of time to 0 more than to 1%. If you want to secure the network you can't expect miners to pay the bills for 300 exahash with 200k a day.

Like all those silly satoshidice bets?

Yeah, history repeats itself:
Do you think SatoshiDice is blockchain spam? Drop their TX's - Solution inside

[philipma1957]

I agree; that's why I also oppose NFT experiments on the 'world's reserve currency' mainnet chain..

I don't see any experiments. What is currently happening was always possible on a protocol level. People have saved texts, messages, PDFs likewise.

Colored coins had no data embedded into them.

But they do make use of OP_RETURN, which is metadata.

actual (i.e. Ethereum based) NFTs already have a bad reputation for being the ultimate cryptocurrency scam, so I don't see how this trend won't just burn itself out pretty quick

Greater fool's theory. Some poor guy will acquire the "rarest" satoshis, but with little to zero value because nobody will buy that nonsense later on.

yeah like no one wants andy warhol campbell soup limited prints

art is nuts always has been nuts. like it or not nft art is here to say.

here is one for over $500

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Andy-Warhol-Print-Campbell-s-Soup-I-Hand-Signed-COA/185787927773?


Most do not see the value of nft on the btc block chain.

I do as they mean more fees.

More fees mean more miners and more hardware = vital energy for btc.

I can tell you mining scrypt with a LTC-Doge machine will appeal to more miners than btc.

Unless NFTS can keep fees more reasonable in the higher number sense.

Frankly we used to get lots of 1 ,2 3, even 4 coins in fees.

when has anyone seen that for a btc block a year or maybe 2 years.

[pooya87]

As opposed to arbitrary payment data that is pushed to the blockchain once to stay there forever?

I don't know how to respond to that!!! You are bringing up the main reason why bitcoin was created (payment) and you argue that it could be considered arbitrary too which makes no sense otherwise why do we even bother with bitcoin in first place. lol

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.

You are making a wrong conclusion based on false data. In 2017 bitcoin was experiencing the biggest spam attack of its entire history (biggest until today too). The number of transactions then can not your baseline.
In reality if you check the stats rarely released by payment processors, check out number of merchants that are accepting bitcoin each year, countries adopting bitcoin as legal currency, legal tender, reserve currency, for international trade and a lot more you can clearly see that usage of bitcoin as a currency has been increasing by a lot.

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.

Lets fact check your assumption.
3675 blocks had "barely any transactions" and a small size between 2015-01-01 and 2017-03-09 (a rough 2 year window).
632 blocks had "barely any transactions" and a small size between 2021-01-01 and 2023-03-09 (a rough 2 year window).
That's an 82% reduction!

I intentionally chose 2015 to 2017 because the end date is approximately when the spam attack gets worse and also the huge bull run and the bubble has not yet started. The window from 2017 to 2019 isn't that better though (~1400 ie. ~55% reduction) which proves my point about increasing adoption as a payment network.

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.

No. You can't even begin to compare using bitcoin for payment (whether for a cup of coffee or a house) and using bitcoin as a cloud storage.

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.

Miners are already "extracting fees" they don't need Ordinals for that unless you mean spam attacks like 2017 which artificially inflate the fee is a "good thing"!

but I would not mind sucking all the value from all those altcoins into BTC, if that's what the people want -- why not?

If that's what you want then there is a much simpler way without filling bitcoin with garbage and making it unusable which is to use a side-chain. There is already a couple of projects out there like RootStock that actually create real smart contracts and transfer actual tokens around instead of the fake thing in Ordinals that has no value.

[philipma1957]

As opposed to arbitrary payment data that is pushed to the blockchain once to stay there forever?

I don't know how to respond to that!!! You are bringing up the main reason why bitcoin was created (payment) and you argue that it could be considered arbitrary too which makes no sense otherwise why do we even bother with bitcoin in first place. lol

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.

You are making a wrong conclusion based on false data. In 2017 bitcoin was experiencing the biggest spam attack of its entire history (biggest until today too). The number of transactions then can not your baseline.
In reality if you check the stats rarely released by payment processors, check out number of merchants that are accepting bitcoin each year, countries adopting bitcoin as legal currency, legal tender, reserve currency, for international trade and a lot more you can clearly see that usage of bitcoin as a currency has been increasing by a lot.

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.

Lets fact check your assumption.
3675 blocks had "barely any transactions" and a small size between 2015-01-01 and 2017-03-09 (a rough 2 year window).
632 blocks had "barely any transactions" and a small size between 2021-01-01 and 2023-03-09 (a rough 2 year window).
That's an 82% reduction!

I intentionally chose 2015 to 2017 because the end date is approximately when the spam attack gets worse and also the huge bull run and the bubble has not yet started. The window from 2017 to 2019 isn't that better though (~1400 ie. ~55% reduction) which proves my point about increasing adoption as a payment network.

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.

No. You can't even begin to compare using bitcoin for payment (whether for a cup of coffee or a house) and using bitcoin as a cloud storage.

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.

Miners are already "extracting fees" they don't need Ordinals for that unless you mean spam attacks like 2017 which artificially inflate the fee is a "good thing"!

but I would not mind sucking all the value from all those altcoins into BTC, if that's what the people want -- why not?

If that's what you want then there is a much simpler way without filling bitcoin with garbage and making it unusable which is to use a side-chain. There is already a couple of projects out there like RootStock that actually create real smart contracts and transfer actual tokens around instead of the fake thing in Ordinals that has no value.

Let me ask you about the jan 2021 to april 2021 fee pattern.

and by that before china killed off the bull run by 1/2ing the bull run.

fees were very high and miners were whaling .

then the hash crash came along with better LN coverage and fees have yet to recover.

Mark my words if ordinal and nft fade and fees don’t rise.

scrypt will flourish since doge does not half.

mining will slide to Ltc/Doge if fees continue the way they are.


I wish I was 25-35 it would be easy move to play. As this will al unfold in the years around 2056.

[larry_vw_1955]

but I would not mind sucking all the value from all those altcoins into BTC, if that's what the people want -- why not?

i knew miners didn't give a damn about what bitcoin is used for as long as they can collect their fee. they would be happy to see transaction fees skyrocketing if the blocks can still stay full.

If that's what you want then there is a much simpler way without filling bitcoin with garbage and making it unusable which is to use a side-chain. There is already a couple of projects out there like RootStock that actually create real smart contracts and transfer actual tokens around instead of the fake thing in Ordinals that has no value.

don't you see that's the problem though? you can show them alternatives but they don't care. they just want larger transaction fees in their back pocket. anything that does that for them is welcomed with open arms. apparently. that shouldn't really be suprising to us though. that's how the world works. people with money are the ones that doors get opened for and welcomed in...people without the money they get the cold shoulder.

[NotATether]

Do I like NFTs? hell no, will I be happy paying ten times the fees because my transaction has to beat some ugly Ape image? of course not, but I am also not happy having to download a 6000 sats transaction because uncle joe wants to see if his wallet works fine and can receive Bitcoin before he goes ahead and transfer the remaining 12k sats, do I have the right to censor uncle joe just because it bothers me? probably not.

About the transaction fee part, that's only going to eat up your finances if you are sending transactions in large volumes like an exchange such as Binance would do.

For the average person, paying 1sat/byte makes no difference from paying 10sats/byte because the USD denomination of the latter is just $0.50 or somewhere around that.

That is still much less than any VAT, taxes, card loading fees, 3rd party commission fees, etc. that you can get charged with with fiat money.

[pooya87]

Let me ask you about the jan 2021 to april 2021 fee pattern.

We were talking about adoption and it can not be analyzed in such a tiny window.

But since you asked you are ignoring a couple of things. First of all hashrate has been rising even when the fees were low. So making arguments trying to say miners are only here for the fees is just dumb.
Secondly the fees in the window you chose were rising (and falling) because we had the most volatile market in that window. Price went from trying to break $42k+ in Jan to crashing down to $28k and then rise back up to ATH at $65k in April.
Obviously with such huge price swings comes loads of more transactions hence higher fees.
You are also ignoring the fact that afterwards fees came down back to 1 sat/vb and hashrate continued growing by a lot despite the price coming down too!

scrypt will flourish since doge does not half.
mining will slide to Ltc/Doge if fees continue the way they are.

You are forgetting that SHA256-ASIC and Scrypt-ASIC are different and you can't use one for the other. In simple terms bitcoin's hashrate can not "slide" to shitcoins like LTC and Doge.
If we go with your logic the hashrate should slide into another SHA256 coin!

[Wind_FURY]

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.

But don't you believe that no "arbitrary data", whatever they may be, should be the same? Because once Ordinals become very VERY popular, and once many of those "creators" of shitNFTs are done, and leave their projects, the Bitcoin blockchain will become a garbage dump for "dick pics and fart sounds", and all other shitNFTs, making IDB harder and harder.

[mikeywith]

You are making a wrong conclusion based on false data. In 2017 bitcoin was experiencing the biggest spam attack of its entire history (biggest until today too). The number of transactions then can not your baseline.

Oh ok then it's even worse, taking 2017 out of the equation means the number of transactions per day/month had no real growth from 2015 to 2023.

In reality if you check the stats rarely released by payment processors, check out number of merchants that are accepting bitcoin each year, countries adopting bitcoin as legal currency, legal tender, reserve currency, for international trade and a lot more you can clearly see that usage of bitcoin as a currency has been increasing by a lot.

So ditch the on-chain data and find reliable info on the news websites? doesn't seem like something I'd do, furthermore, your claim was that number of people using bitcoin as payment has been ever increasing,  that's different from how many countries taking BTC as a legal currency, and the only valid source for such a claim is on-chain.

Here is a chart of Bitcoin transactions, each input is the average 30 day transaction (30 days worth of transaction / 30)




This is 4 years' worth of solid on-chain data which clearly shows no sign of transaction growth, in fact, it's showing the exact opposite of what you claim, during the 4 years we had all kinds of bull and bear markets, nothing affected the overall direction of the trend.

Lets fact check your assumption.

I intentionally chose 2015 to 2017 because the end date is approximately when the spam attack gets worse and also the huge bull run and the bubble has not yet started. The window from 2017 to 2019 isn't that better though (~1400 ie. ~55% reduction) which proves my point about increasing adoption as a payment network.

Here is another chart showing the average 90 days block size



More blocks that are almost half empty than blocks that are almost full, in 2022 the average blocksize was 630kb, which is closer to 50% than to 100% as per my previous "assumption", in fact, we can still smooth out 5-6 years worth of data regarding blocksize and it's more likely than not for this assumption to hold, unless we would cherry pick periods of when blocks were almost full.

And by the way, you seem to confuse adoption with usage, just because more people adopt bitcoin and buy it, doesn't mean there are more transactions, the adoption per see has without a doubt increased it can be seen through the increasing value of Bitcoin, but that doesn't mean everyone who buys bitcoin will transact it, most of it will just sit there.

Miners are already "extracting fees" they don't need Ordinals for that unless you mean spam attacks like 2017 which artificially inflate the fee is a "good thing"!

We need every bit of value we can extract, you will have very hard time finding a miner who would mind getting paid more be it the result of spam or NFTs.

which is to use a side-chain.

The NFT folks can tell you the same thing, you can use a side-chain for payments as well, LN works great.

You are forgetting that SHA256-ASIC and Scrypt-ASIC are different and you can't use one for the other. In simple terms bitcoin's hashrate can not "slide" to shitcoins like LTC and Doge.
If we go with your logic the hashrate should slide into another SHA256 coin!

I am pretty sure he is talking about money flowing to those altcoins, not the miners themselves, someone who wants to invest  1m in mining gears would rather buy those Scyrpt miners and extract more money, a valid point on Phil's behalf, look at all the money we let go to those shitcoins just because we don't want to allow anything to be built on BTC blockchain.

That is still much less than any VAT, taxes, card loading fees, 3rd party commission fees, etc. that you can get charged with with fiat money.

Indeed, I am not arguing that it's using your credit card is cheaper than sending a transaction on bitcoin (although most of the time it is), the point is, that a tiny transaction is going to sit on the blockchain forever, despite the fact that many people would label it as "useless".

i knew miners didn't give a damn about what bitcoin is used for as long as they can collect their fee. they would be happy to see transaction fees skyrocketing if the blocks can still stay full.

Not sure why you quoted tromp on that, it was actually me who wrote that and yes, as a miner I can confirm that I will be very happy to see transaction fees skyrocket, but miners do care about the well-being of bitcoin probably more than anyone else, miners have so much lose, they put billions of dollars at stake, build infrastructure, hire people, go through the legal process, having to fight against those who think Bitcoin is useless and is wasting energy resources, Bitcoin is worth nothing without miners securing it, not sure why many people want to label miners as "devils".

In fact, Bitcoin users should make sure that miners are always "happy" even if they dislike them or hate them, they are keeping your money safe and the fees you pay are not charity work it's for the work they provide, if you are not happy about it, start mining your own bitcoin and code your software to reject what you think of as "spam" and save Bitcoin from the devils.

But no, most people don't contribute anything to bitcoin, they don't mine bitcoin, they don't code shit, don't even run a full node, they just want to buy cheap bitcoin, send it for free to their hardware wallet, wait for the price to increase, send it back to the exchange for 1sat/vbyte and sell it to fiat and still want to boss around people telling them how to use the blockchain.

I see a bit of extortion happening here Mikey, should I power back (of wait, first buy back) a few of my miners to try to offset this?  

Ya bro, sharpen your miners, looks like the NFT market is going to bring you back to business, you are getting back your devil title soon.

[pooya87]

Here is another chart showing the average 90 days block size

When you use a broken tool you'll get broken results. The chart is most probably the result of running an old client that is no longer "full" node (is ignoring SegWit so they have been receiving "stripped blocks" that are smaller).

Here is a better chart from blockchair showing a similar but technically very different picture.
The difference between peak and bottom in your wrong chart is big (about 250 kb) whereas in reality the average size in that peak was around 1.25 MB as seen in the picture below and the average size in the bottom plateau in your chart is actually around 1.15 MB which is only slightly lower (8% diff versus 30%) and blocks are still considered full on average.


The final peak is the result of Ordinals attack which is another indication of your chart being wrong since it doesn't show that at all.

Even the lowest average block size (in 2021) is 1007 KB (~1MB) not ~620 KB that your wrong chart shows.

We need every bit of value we can extract, you will have very hard time finding a miner who would mind getting paid more be it the result of spam or NFTs.

That doesn't mean we should indulge miners. They also enjoyed and most probably funded the 2017 spam attack.

The NFT folks can tell you the same thing, you can use a side-chain for payments as well, LN works great.

LN is not a side-chain, it is a second layer.

[mikeywith]

When you use a broken tool you'll get broken results. The chart is most probably the result of running an old client that is no longer "full" node (is ignoring SegWit so they have been receiving "stripped blocks" that are smaller).

Alas, but even your chart isn't showing any "full blocks", block 748918 which was mined long before these Oridnals has a size of 2.77MB, in fact, in theory, if all transactions were just witness data blocks should be 4MB, but given segwit adoption, blocks should be AT LEAST 2MB for us to call them "full", in the chart you posted, most blocks are close to 1MB than to 2MB, so closer to 50% than to 100% as per the first assumption I made prior to diving into all of this.

This shows that there is a lot of room to be filled, people are not using it, and someone else now is, which is why we started to have nearly full blocks now.

Oh and by the way, here is another chart from Blockchair that shows the transaction trend and how it has been in a downtrend and fewer and fewer transactions are happening on the blockchain from 2019 to date.



Anyway, my question to you, and I hope you answer reasonably, aside from the fact that you think this is "useless data" stored on the blockchain, what other reasons do you have to support the exclusion for Ordinals? let's just assume everyone who agreed with you gathered together and you are going to start lobbying to ban Ordinals, you are going to have to convince mining pools, exchanges, the devs, nodes operators, and a few others, what proposal do you have for them and how are you going to convince those people to ban Ordinals?

Up to this point, and after a few discussions with different people, if I were to start lobbying against Ordinals, the only single valid point that I would use would be the point that you pointed out here.

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.

While this is a great argument to start with, I am afraid it isn't enough, we are going to need to find more "value" in banning those "spammers", if not, people will just nag about it for a few weeks and then let it slide forever, or until it dies on its own.

[BlackHatCoiner]

We need every bit of value we can extract, you will have very hard time finding a miner who would mind getting paid more be it the result of spam or NFTs.

That doesn't mean we should indulge miners.

Who's "we"?

I'm sorry that I'm responding without reading the last page with devotion, but it's just frustrating observing established experts going against the Bitcoin spirit without noticing. There is no "we" in transactions. I don't expect the majority of you to approve my transaction from an ethic standard when I make it. Nor do I expect you to feel I have circumvented your space. I don't even expect you'll attend to talk about it. The only thing I expect is that it will be done in 10 minutes.

You know you can't have both the most freedom preserving currency in the world and simultaneously dictate miners how to do their business or which transactions pass the collective approval.

[philipma1957]

Let me ask you about the jan 2021 to april 2021 fee pattern.

We were talking about adoption and it can not be analyzed in such a tiny window.

But since you asked you are ignoring a couple of things. First of all hashrate has been rising even when the fees were low. So making arguments trying to say miners are only here for the fees is just dumb.
Secondly the fees in the window you chose were rising (and falling) because we had the most volatile market in that window. Price went from trying to break $42k+ in Jan to crashing down to $28k and then rise back up to ATH at $65k in April.
Obviously with such huge price swings comes loads of more transactions hence higher fees.
You are also ignoring the fact that afterwards fees came down back to 1 sat/vb and hashrate continued growing by a lot despite the price coming down too!

scrypt will flourish since doge does not half.
mining will slide to Ltc/Doge if fees continue the way they are.

You are forgetting that SHA256-ASIC and Scrypt-ASIC are different and you can't use one for the other. In simple terms bitcoin's hashrate can not "slide" to shitcoins like LTC and Doge.
If we go with your logic the hashrate should slide into another SHA256 coin!

do you mine most likely not.

I have tremendously cheap power.

But not infinite amounts of it.

So If I have 100000 watts of power

and I have

 100000 watts of paid scrypt asics
 100000 watts of paid sha asics
 100000 watts of paid gpus


I care about $ per watt no more no less

so kill off fees for BTC and keep doing the ½'s and it will be  in trouble under 40 years.

since Scrypt = a non ½ ing coin doge and a ½ ing coin LTC it will never run out of reward coins for miners.

If you think I am the only guy with 3 types of paid off gear and 0 debt with the option to pick what I want to mine you are wrong.

I am simply pointing out:
  Crypto was based on power makes wealth

not my idea it was satoshi's

I only wish I were 25-30 and planing for my retirement at 55-60

vs 66. 

This plays out so simple

get dirt cheap power = yes
get 3-4 types of paid off miners = yes
switch to best algo to mine = yes

Now BTC has a shot to fix the issue with NFTs and ordinals  and guess what shortsighted people don't see what I see.

Damn I wish I could live long time like 106 just to see me be right.

Meanwhile I do 3 separate algos and shift around to match my cheap power.

when I buy I do buy BTC as I hope the NFT+Ordinal world saves btc.

[larry_vw_1955]

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.

most of what you are saying there is your opinion. but lets talk facts. none of the developers anticipated ordinals. enough said.

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.

not in the same way that pcloud is a single point of failure though. for the bitcoin blockchain to go away, it would almost require the internet to go away. if that happened, what good would your data be anyway? 

I care about $ per watt no more no less

so kill off fees for BTC and keep doing the ½'s and it will be  in trouble under 40 years.

so you're saying satoshi didn't design bitcoin properly because this halving thing doesn't work? i still have yet to hear a reasonable explanation for why the block reward needs to be halved every 4 years or however often it is...unless bitcoin goes up in price to counteract the halving then miner income is in jeopardy unless transaction fees can pick up the slack which won't happen unless new use cases open up like this ordinals. is that what you were thinking?

[philipma1957]

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.

most of what you are saying there is your opinion. but lets talk facts. none of the developers anticipated ordinals. enough said.

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.

not in the same way that pcloud is a single point of failure though. for the bitcoin blockchain to go away, it would almost require the internet to go away. if that happened, what good would your data be anyway?  

I care about $ per watt no more no less

so kill off fees for BTC and keep doing the ½'s and it will be  in trouble under 40 years.

so you're saying satoshi didn't design bitcoin properly because this halving thing doesn't work? i still have yet to hear a reasonable explanation for why the block reward needs to be halved every 4 years or however often it is...unless bitcoin goes up in price to counteract the halving then miner income is in jeopardy unless transaction fees can pick up the slack which won't happen unless new use cases open up like this ordinals. is that what you were thinking?

Well you are close.

BTC was desperate to scale.

Tried a few ideas and while LN does scale it cuts fees.


LTC+Doge came up with two  problems solved.

Scaling due to much faster blocks for both Coins and secondly the the ½ issue is blended by having one coin  do a ½ ing and one coin not half.

I have proposed slower block times and ½ ings for btc most don’t see this as a good idea.

Make the 2024 ½ happen then stretch the 2028 to 2030.

we would be able to do this by changing from one block in 10 minutes to 1 block in 15 minutes.

Same 21million coins just spread longer.

Most people do not understand the issue of fees being too small that miners will say fuck it and switch to other algos.

 well the value of these coins are based on power burned = wealth created.

As a guy with a lot of solar power burning and mining. I want a coin that makes $$ per watt.

part of my long plan is wait for a downturn in Scrypt which will allow me to have equal gear in btc,ltc/doge,gpus

I have enough btc asics and enough gpus but am just a bit short of scrypt asics.

I routinely switch algos if it pays to do so.

It is tough but  btc needs to get it grew like mad due to ½ ing speed but with maturity slowing the ½ will keep miners mining it.

 2024.     3.125
2028.     1.5625.   or 2030 1.5625
2032.    0.78125. or 2036 0.78125
2036     0.390625 or 2042 0.390625
2040.    0.1953125 or 2048 0.1953125
2044.    0.097656 or 2054 0.097656

the 6 year ½ will help miners stick with btc and not shift to scrypt

To me I think NFTs and Ordinals could help Btc stay attractive to miners.

[larry_vw_1955]

I have proposed slower block times and ½ ings for btc most don’t see this as a good idea.

Make the 2024 ½ happen then stretch the 2028 to 2030.

seems reasonable but why not just get rid of the halvings completely. and have a fixed block reward. yes that is inflationary but people are losing bitcoin all the time too so it probably has no affect.

we would be able to do this by changing from one block in 10 minutes to 1 block in 15 minutes.

but no one wants slower block times. 7 transactions per second is slow enough 

Most people do not understand the issue of fees being too small that miners will say fuck it and switch to other algos.

it's a self-regulating system. if fees become too small then the hash rate goes down less competition for miners until it reaches a new equilibrium i guess. of course the downside is that it lowers the security of the network due to lower total hashrate. but as long as a 51% attack doesn't happen it really doesn't present a problem right?

To me I think NFTs and Ordinals could help Btc stay attractive to miners.

as long as they don't mind storing jpegs of monkeys and the occasional naked person on their hard drives then yeah. with bigger fees they can expect a bigger commitment to bitcoin in terms of data storage and also competition from more miners entering the space to capitalized on the increased transaction fees.

[pooya87]

Anyway, my question to you, and I hope you answer reasonably, aside from the fact that you think this is "useless data" stored on the blockchain, what other reasons do you have to support the exclusion for Ordinals? let's just assume everyone who agreed with you gathered together and you are going to start lobbying to ban Ordinals, you are going to have to convince mining pools, exchanges, the devs, nodes operators, and a few others, what proposal do you have for them and how are you going to convince those people to ban Ordinals?

It's pretty simple, Ordinals is an abuse of the system and abuse has to be prevented to ensure the systems survival. Every tool or a system is created for a clear purpose and when you use it for anything else, that is abuse. For example you could convert a movie to hex and use a bot to post the hex string in a series of comments on bitcointalk. That is abuse and those responsible for bitcointalk will prevent that by banning you. It's the same with Bitcoin but with a different approach used for a decentralized system when someone uses this peer-to-peer digital cash for something else like as a cloud storage.

As I've said many times before this is not the first time we are facing such dilemma, we have been fighting abuse for a very long time mostly through standard rules, from the time people abused the lack of validation for scriptpubs of outputs to store junk in the blockchain which was prevented by standard rules to the spam attacks that is prevented by fee market. Every time there are people who argue against that fight at the time and disappear after the fight succeeds and Bitcoin's future is ensured.

Who's "we"?

The same "we" that rejects you perfectly valid transaction if it contains arbitrary data in its scriptpub. Something that has been going on for years and nobody ever complained that it is against "Bitcoin spirit".

[tromp]

It's pretty simple, Ordinals is an abuse of the system and abuse has to be prevented to ensure the systems survival. Every tool or a system is created for a clear purpose and when you use it for anything else, that is abuse.

Nonsense. Ordinals is an unforeseen use of the system, just as open timestamps is. Neither has to be prevented to ensure bitcoin's survival.

Due to the eventually disappearing block subsidy, bitcoin's long term survival is dependent on full blocks creating a fee market, so one clear purpose of bitcoin is to support all uses which help to fill blocks.

[philipma1957]

It's pretty simple, Ordinals is an abuse of the system and abuse has to be prevented to ensure the systems survival. Every tool or a system is created for a clear purpose and when you use it for anything else, that is abuse.

Nonsense. Ordinals is an unforeseen use of the system, just as open timestamps is. Neither has to be prevented to ensure bitcoin's survival.

Due to the eventually disappearing block subsidy, bitcoin's long term survival is dependent on full blocks creating a fee market, so one clear purpose of bitcoin is to support all uses which help to fill blocks.

A nice practical thought for blockchain use  over  purity  blockchain use thought..

Miners are practical and already have more than enough gear to do  weird shit to algos. In general they simply are looking to turn profit.

Which is why there are multiple algos to mine. Not just one.