NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory

[larry_vw_1955]

Just a little observation: this ordinals madness is still going on and it's going strong, today I tried to transfer around $70-80 and had to pay for it around $1.30 in fees which is a lot I think. It's around x10 from I'm used to pay for such transactions before ordinals. The worst part is that I feel I'm paying not the miners, not the Bitcoin devs but some random teen creating billions of monkey pics hoping to get rich quickly (and I can do nothing about it). That's a pretty shitty feeling if you ask me.

if you compare that price for non-blockchain money transfer services like western union then i'm sure $1.30 is not outrageous for sending $70. we all want free but if you were using a non-blockchain service to send money what would you be willing to pay? when bitcoin gets past that then you know there's a problem. but i'd say $5 for sending $300 is not ideal but if it's an emergency then i guess it's ok for every now and then. but not all the time...

you're comparing things now to how they USED to be. those days are long gone if ordinals keeps up its pace. maybe it will but maybe it might slow down after a while but for sure it hits 10 million monkeys at some point and probably 100 million unless something is done to block the protocol. 

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[pooya87]

That's merely an opinion,

And that's your opinion because what I said is a fact.

but technically it's wrong because an "exploit" in computing is an actual attack that takes advantage of a vulnerability in a computing system. Ordinals is neither an attack, nor Taproot has a vulnerability. Newbies are reading our posts, let's not spread misinformation.

There is no vulnerability in Taproot, there is an exploit in implementation of Taproot that is in bitcoin core. The core devs either didn't foresee this attack vector or they saw it and didn't care enough to prevent it just like they'd prevented similar attack vectors in the past through standard rules.

today I tried to transfer around $70-80 and had to pay for it around $1.30 in fees

You should always report transaction fees in terms of "amount per size" instead of raw values and definitely never in dollar terms for it to be a clear and understandable value. For example right now the fee rate is between 17 to 20 sat/vbyte.

if you compare that price for non-blockchain money transfer services like western union then i'm sure $1.30 is not outrageous for sending $70.

The problem is not with the fee amount, the problem is with the reason for the high amount. Just like 2017, it doesn't sit well with users to pay a high fee just because someone is maliciously spamming the chain.

[Wind_FURY]

That's merely an opinion,

And that's your opinion because what I said is a fact.

Actually, no, and at the very least, it's debatable. But let's just agree to disagree.

but technically it's wrong because an "exploit" in computing is an actual attack that takes advantage of a vulnerability in a computing system. Ordinals is neither an attack, nor Taproot has a vulnerability. Newbies are reading our posts, let's not spread misinformation.

There is no vulnerability in Taproot, there is an exploit in implementation of Taproot that is in bitcoin core. The core devs either didn't foresee this attack vector or they saw it and didn't care enough to prevent it just like they'd prevented similar attack vectors in the past through standard rules.

Technically if there's no vulnerability, then it's not an exploit, and if it's not an exploit, then it's not an attack. At the very least again, it's debatable. Plus there will be developers who could debate that a feature was discovered.

[larry_vw_1955]

The problem is not with the fee amount, the problem is with the reason for the high amount. Just like 2017, it doesn't sit well with users to pay a high fee just because someone is maliciously spamming the chain.

But it is ok with those same people if the bitcoin fee is high for some other reason like mass adoption? Isn't the end result the same? So why be happy and fine with it in one case and not the other? I get what you're saying but for bitcoin to be usable the fees need to be reasonable. Dare I say even small.  

at least bitcoin is not like ethereum where the EVM will steal your transaction fee even if it runs out of gas and has to return your sending amount back to your wallet...

[pooya87]

But it is ok with those same people if the bitcoin fee is high for some other reason like mass adoption?

I don't know who these people are but they are just as wrong. In fact all the efforts in the past 7-8 years put into developing SegWit, second layer and even Taproot (introduction of Schnorr signature algorithm) has been to improve bitcoin scaling and its capability to handle a lot more transactions as the adoption increases. One of the results of these efforts is keeping fees low.

[zeuner]

Well, I guess these things are kind of self-regulating. People spam the chain with monkeys until it becomes unusable. Price drops. People move on. Or more likely it won't go that far because before that, transaction fees bring people back to the ground.

History proves this to be fallacy. For example ICOs are widely known to be scams, yet they are not dead yet and people are still being scammed under the same name or alternative names (ICO, IDO, IBO, IEO, ITO, STO, DeFi, NFT).

Every individual has the right not to learn from other individuals' mistakes and to lose money of their own. This alone doesn't make infeasability of certain ventures a fallacy.

They could prove useful to democratize Bitcoin, e.g. by letting people boycott sats from miners that employ policies they don't like.

That is called censorship, besides it has nothing to do with Ordinals Attack. You should try to first learn what this attack is and how it works.

I don't care about the "attack". I'm just looking at the technical concept.

By the way, it's more accurately called "free market". People not wanting to buy products they don't like has nothing to do with censorship. The line might be thinner if we were talking about government authorities deciding about what to boycott and what not. But that's not what I'm talking about.

But using that concept to push for more content being put on-chain seems counterintuitive in presence of all the progress made to reduce the burden on the chain.

Bottom line is no matter how a small group of people swing this, Ordinals is an exploit since it is using it in a way that is should not be used, ergo it is categorized as an attack on bitcoin.

Bitcoin's voyage away from central authorities and towards decentralization won't succeed if we arbitrarily judge transactions to be "attack" or "non-attack", respectively. The on-chain transaction protocol left plenty of open ends on purpose, so that future innovation is possible. This means that the blockchain will always also contain transactions that some users will find more useful than others.

[kano]

...
Technically if there's no vulnerability, then it's not an exploit, and if it's not an exploit, then it's not an attack. At the very least again, it's debatable. Plus there will be developers who could debate that a feature was discovered.

NFTs dramatically reduce the number of transactions confirmed per block.
They increase the number of unconfirmed transactions, which has been high for quite a while.

2023-03-25T20:27:37.244548Z CreateNewBlock(): block weight: 3984936 txs: 485 of 49756 fees: 0.09462871 sigops 2187

Not sure why anyone wouldn't call that an attack and an exploit.

[larry_vw_1955]

Plus there will be developers who could debate that a feature was discovered.

well i doubt that would be a believable argument. they would have to do better than that. and explain why they hid it in the first place.

[tromp]

Is that so? https://monerodocs.org/ Only monetary transactions are possible. Technically possible.

Monero allows embedding of arbitrary data (aka spam), though only a small fraction of transaction size.

Besides the 32-byte tx_extra field you can also put arbitrary data into each output stealth address (making it unspendable as a side effect).
Since each output must be accompanied by a rangeproof of 416 bytes for Bulletproof++, this amounts to about 7% of spam, but this percentage would increase by a lot if you aggregate all the rangeproofs of many outputs into one that's only logarithmically bigger.

The most spam resistant chain is probably Grin, allowing only a few bytes of spam [1].

[1] https://forum.grin.mw/t/ordinals-on-grin/10336/2

I didn't realize it at the time, but Monero's tx_extra field is nearly unlimited in size [1].

This has recently been taken advantage of to implement ordinals on Monero [2].

Meanwhile, on some Grin clone, attempts to store data on-chain have failed miserably [3].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/11xvi03/comment/jd76w83/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

[2] https://mordinals.gitbook.io/handbook/how-does-it-work

[3] https://forum.grin.mw/t/public-transaction-data-is-a-huge-risk-vector/10426/14

[d5000]

@tromp: Very interesting, thanks! So Monero was "hacked", too ... d'oh. I'll try to investigate further how MimbleWimble coins achieve this spam resistance, and if there's really no way for a tx sender to "leak" information about previous transactions, for example.

(Ah, and to those who still think Taproot is the culprit ... Doge has some weeks ago implemented "Doginals", completely with "legacy" methods - they have not even Segwit afaik. So no, Taproot wasn't necessary at all for this to work.)

[cryptosize]

I don't think BTC will ever adopt MimbleWimble (it would require a hard fork), but I guess you can have a look at BEAM.

The only drawback of MimbleWimble is that you have to be online to receive money.

[larry_vw_1955]

I didn't realize it at the time, but Monero's tx_extra field is nearly unlimited in size [1].

This has recently been taken advantage of to implement ordinals on Monero [2].

i wonder how monero users feel about that. 

[sha420hashcollision]

I don't think BTC will ever adopt MimbleWimble (it would require a hard fork), but I guess you can have a look at BEAM.

The only drawback of MimbleWimble is that you have to be online to receive money.

Grin is a better implementation than Beam imo

[serveria.com]

Guys, enough of this shitcoin talk here in this thread. There's a nice altcoin forum part where you can share opinions on your beloved shitcoins and discuss all the news, including NFTs on your blockchain etc. This thread is for Bitcoin and ordinals. 

[ABCbits]

--snip--

I didn't realize it at the time, but Monero's tx_extra field is nearly unlimited in size [1].

--snip--

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/11xvi03/comment/jd76w83/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

--snip--

It's surprising the idea to limit size of or remove tx_extra field seems to be well received on Monero community. Meanwhile suggestion to make OP_PUSH or Taproot script size bigger than X bytes become non-standard has more mixed response on Bitcoin community.

I don't think BTC will ever adopt MimbleWimble (it would require a hard fork), but I guess you can have a look at BEAM.

And even if it's implemented, it'll require opt-in from user to preserve some backward compatibility which doesn't solve spam/arbitrary data problem.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Grin is a better implementation than Beam imo

I also find it better, because the developers have better priorities in my opinion. Grin devs prioritize decentralization, while Beam devs user experience.

Meanwhile suggestion to make OP_PUSH or Taproot script size bigger than X bytes become non-standard has more mixed response on Bitcoin community.

Honestly, do you think this is going to work? Whether we like it or not, Ordinals form an economy-- a small one for the time being, but an economy. Even if the majority of Bitcoin users disagree with this idea of "abusing nodes' storage to store arbitrary data instead of transacting peer-to-peer", and make Ordinals non-standard, do you think the miners will follow? Whatever follows the consensus rules is clearly in favor of the Bitcoin network, and with the necessary demand it will find its way to get in-- as long as Bitcoin is censorship resistant.

[sha420hashcollision]

Grin is a better implementation than Beam imo

I also find it better, because the developers have better priorities in my opinion. Grin devs prioritize decentralization, while Beam devs user experience.

Meanwhile suggestion to make OP_PUSH or Taproot script size bigger than X bytes become non-standard has more mixed response on Bitcoin community.

Honestly, do you think this is going to work? Whether we like it or not, Ordinals form an economy-- a small one for the time being, but an economy. Even if the majority of Bitcoin users disagree with this idea of "abusing nodes' storage to store arbitrary data instead of transacting peer-to-peer", and make Ordinals non-standard, do you think the miners will follow? Whatever follows the consensus rules is clearly in favor of the Bitcoin network, and with the necessary demand it will find its way to get in-- as long as Bitcoin is censorship resistant.

NFT type stuff gives me huge ponzi scheme vibes, I know not all are scams but it seems to me the ultimate "pass your debt onto the next guy" scheme and I am not even an experienced cryptocurrency user and I am too disgusted to try and sell those to people.

[Wind_FURY]

...
Technically if there's no vulnerability, then it's not an exploit, and if it's not an exploit, then it's not an attack. At the very least again, it's debatable. Plus there will be developers who could debate that a feature was discovered.

NFTs dramatically reduce the number of transactions confirmed per block.
They increase the number of unconfirmed transactions, which has been high for quite a while.

2023-03-25T20:27:37.244548Z CreateNewBlock(): block weight: 3984936 txs: 485 of 49756 fees: 0.09462871 sigops 2187

Not sure why anyone wouldn't call that an attack and an exploit.

Because saying it, and convincing everyone that it's "truly a fact", is wrong. It's not an actual fact, it's merely an opinion taken from another viewpoint, and at the very least saying it as a "fact" = debatable. The Ordinals users could also argue that "the definition of what Bitcoin truly is keeps moving after each discovery of the network's capabilities".

Having that said, but an actual attack CAN be built through the use of Ordinals, maybe to keep spamming the network to price out onchain financial transactions from the blockchain, or to attack Bitcoin's fungibility.

[pooya87]

Bitcoin's voyage away from central authorities and towards decentralization won't succeed if we arbitrarily judge transactions to be "attack" or "non-attack", respectively. The on-chain transaction protocol left plenty of open ends on purpose, so that future innovation is possible. This means that the blockchain will always also contain transactions that some users will find more useful than others.

You are just playing with words and bending the truths. The abuse of the system is not an arbitrary opinion. In fact the Ordinals abusive behavior is pretty clear since it is turning bitcoin (aka a payment system) and its blockchain (aka a ledger to store monetary transactions) into a cloud storage. As abuses go, it doesn't get any clearer than this!

As for the protocol, it is left "loose" in some places so that it can be extended but always within the same utility category that Bitcoin is supposed to offer, not to turn Bitcoin into something else like cloud storage!

do you think the miners will follow?

Their alternative would be setting up a website that would publicly accept transactions that majority of full nodes rejected. Apart from the fact that it would make them pariahs, the miners aren't known for doing such things, they are too scared of producing an invalid block and losing money. Look at how long it took to mine a simple non-standard transaction that was using uncompressed public key in its version 0 witness program, just because they were scared of losing revenue.

[BlackHatCoiner]

NFT type stuff gives me huge ponzi scheme vibes

To me it just gives greater fool vibes.

Apart from the fact that it would make them pariahs, the miners aren't known for doing such things, they are too scared of producing an invalid block and losing money.

Sure, but they can just run an older version of the client which treats them as standard. I don't think your argument that miners are afraid of such transactions holds true now, because comparably to just one uncompressed Segwit transaction (which would require pool owners to get involved seriously with the case), Ordinals as we speak hold a steady income in case there is an empty mempool. Also, it's worth to note that an uncompressed Segwit transaction was always non-standard, it didn't switch from standard to non-standard.