NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory

[ABCbits]

It's also worth to mention pace of UTXO growth remain unchanged since Ordinal-based token become popular[1]. Few months ago i mentioned massive UTXO growth at ~102.5 million UTXO[2], but now we're looking at 119.9 million UTXO[1].

When someone makes a monkey on bitcoin ordinals, does that increase the size of the utxo set though? I didn't think the monkey got stored in the utxo set...

Ordinal data indeed isn't stored on UTXO set. But,
1. There are so many new Ordinal inscription created.
2. When you create new inscription, Ordinal create 2 TX. 2nd TX usually have 1 input and 2 output. 1 input refer to "monkey" (arbitrary data) and 2 output which rerepsent change address and new UTXO which represent ownership of that Ordinals.

[1714311445]

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[larry_vw_1955]

Ordinal data indeed isn't stored on UTXO set. But,
1. There are so many new Ordinal inscription created.

2. When you create new inscription, Ordinal create 2 TX. 2nd TX usually have 1 input and 2 output. 1 input refer to "monkey" (arbitrary data) and 2 output which rerepsent change address and new UTXO which represent ownership of that Ordinals.

i thought bitcoin transactions could have as many utxo inputs as they wanted to. so why couldn't someone use 10 utxos to pay for their monkey and then that would be reducing the utxo set by 10-2=8 utxos. the only time the utxo set count would increase is if someone used only 1 utxo to pay for their entire monkey. but if i had to guess, i'd imagine the average bitcoin transaction uses at least 2 utxos.

[Wind_FURY]

This person lost his entire Ordinals collection but he's "tracking" them.

Well friends, I find myself broken this morning, as my entire ordinal collection has been sent to a miner as part of a tx fee 😔

What happened: yesterday, I used @xverseApp's BTC recovery feature to pull out some sats that had accumulated there (not much at all even). As soon as I submit the tx, wallet goes to 0, the entirety of my ordinal collection sent as part of the tx fee to the miner AntPool...including a few @sub_100k's I inscribed myself back in the early days, my @satsnames (trygg.sats) and my beloved @twelvefrog#5, which I minted on that wild night back in March.

I know it isn't much to many of you in this space, but it meant a lot to me and held value far above & beyond what the current floor prices may have been...especially the early ones I inscribed myself back in the sparrow wallet days.

https://twitter.com/tryggbtc/status/1691820182094614624

He continued with,

It was a lot to me, that's all I'll say. Yes, I know exactly which ordinals; still tracking them now. Some have already moved to other wallets 😔

https://twitter.com/TryggBTC/status/1691840685052141626

Obviously now some sats are more valuable than others, subjectively. It might either be good or bad, depending on the person, but what it probably adds is another psychological market-dynamic for pricing Bitcoin down to the lowest accounting unit, the Satoshi.

In your opinion, are we still very early in our Bitcoin journey? Are we just starting to scratch the surface?

[vjudeu]

In your opinion, are we still very early in our Bitcoin journey?

No, just the creators of software for Ordinals didn't care about implementing ownership properly. All they did, was just "Bitcoin as a cloud storage". They made a lot of mistakes, for example skipped testnet3 entirely (or any other test network). We are not "early", there were protocols that enforced ownership, just Ordinals is not one of them, because it was not the main goal, it was a side effect.

Are we just starting to scratch the surface?

Not really, because people still don't know, how many things are possible. And we can still enjoy quite empty mempool, compared to what it could be if more people would know about it.

[Wind_FURY]

In your opinion, are we still very early in our Bitcoin journey?

No, just the creators of software for Ordinals didn't care about implementing ownership properly. All they did, was just "Bitcoin as a cloud storage".

Didn't care, cloud storage? But aren't all sats in your wallet, which can only be moved if you control the keys, already represent actual ownership of the "property".

They made a lot of mistakes, for example skipped testnet3 entirely (or any other test network). We are not "early", there were protocols that enforced ownership, just Ordinals is not one of them, because it was not the main goal, it was a side effect.

My personal opinon. If there's anything to like about Ordinals "as a project", it's because they didn't ask for permission to start building. They just built it, just like how the Lightning Network developers built their network.

Are we just starting to scratch the surface?

Not really, because people still don't know, how many things are possible. And we can still enjoy quite empty mempool, compared to what it could be if more people would know about it.

That's precisely why we might just be scratching the surface. Developers nor users still hasn't seen Bitcoin's "final form". Or there might not be a "final form", it might evolve continuously. Although some parts of the network might have ossified.

[vjudeu]

Didn't care, cloud storage?

Yes, it all started from this huge, non-standard, almost 4 MB block. If the main goal for Ordinals would be something different, then they would start from something else. Not to mention that if you want to test edge cases like that, then it is way easier to do so on testnet3, signet, or even your own regtest, than to ask some pool like Luxor. And because there are a lot of non-Ordinals cloud-storage cases on testnet3, then they could focus on encouraging those users to use Ordinals first, or even just trace their "non-Ordinals inscriptions" (also because testnet3 allows non-standard scripts, so you can do more things with Ordinals on testnet3 than on mainnet).

But aren't all sats in your wallet, which can only be moved if you control the keys, already represent actual ownership of the "property".

Ordinals don't use those properties. A lot of wallets can change the order of your inputs or outputs, and boom, it breaks Ordinals. Also, because Ordinals don't care about sighashes, they are wide open if you don't use SIGHASH_ALL.

My personal opinon. If there's anything to like about Ordinals "as a project", it's because they didn't ask for permission to start building. They just built it, just like how the Lightning Network developers built their network.

There is a difference between "permissionless" and "testless". Ordinals were "testless", because they didn't write many tests they should, before going into mainnet. And that's why ownership is not enforced (nobody tested that), that's why zero satoshis can break things (nobody tested that), and that's why sighashes are not used (nobody tested that). Not to mention things like CoinJoin (also nobody tested that). Also, there are probably even more bugs in mimetypes or recursion, but they will explode later, because it is the same situation (nobody tested that).

In case of Lightning Network, it was tested, at least partially, before touching mainnet.

[Wind_FURY]

My personal opinon. If there's anything to like about Ordinals "as a project", it's because they didn't ask for permission to start building. They just built it, just like how the Lightning Network developers built their network.

There is a difference between "permissionless" and "testless". Ordinals were "testless", because they didn't write many tests they should, before going into mainnet. And that's why ownership is not enforced (nobody tested that), that's why zero satoshis can break things (nobody tested that), and that's why sighashes are not used (nobody tested that). Not to mention things like CoinJoin (also nobody tested that). Also, there are probably even more bugs in mimetypes or recursion, but they will explode later, because it is the same situation (nobody tested that).

In case of Lightning Network, it was tested, at least partially, before touching mainnet.

That's true, and I'm only giving credit to where credit is due. But the compliment given is more for Bitcoin's permissionless nature, than for the initiative to start building Ordinals by its developer Casey Rodarmor.

Plus from the rest of your reply, TIL. Thanks for the well-written post.

[serveria.com]

Not sure Ordinals or something else but my transaction is currently showing at around 150MB from tip. The fee is ~23sat/byte which is by now means small. What could be the reason for this?

[JayJuanGee]

Not sure Ordinals or something else but my transaction is currently showing at around 150MB from tip. The fee is ~23sat/byte which is by now means small. What could be the reason for this?

I have a transaction that I set at around 13 sats per vbyte within the last few days, and so I already have an understanding that it could take several days and maybe weeks to clear.

A few months ago, I had some others that took a while to go through when I set them at the lower end of the range of what had been being cleared, and surely I can see that there remains a bit of a gap between my transaction and the ones that are currently clearing in the 20-ish sats per vbyte, as you mentioned.

Wen clear?


hahahahaha

I don't really care that much.. I set my fees in that kind of way  just to watch it, but if I was transacting with a stranger, probably there would be a need to set it in the 30-50 sats per vbyte range in order to NOT piss anyone off or to risk losing reputation/credibility.

[serveria.com]

Not sure Ordinals or something else but my transaction is currently showing at around 150MB from tip. The fee is ~23sat/byte which is by now means small. What could be the reason for this?

I have a transaction that I set at around 13 sats per vbyte within the last few days, and so I already have an understanding that it could take several days and maybe weeks to clear.

A few months ago, I had some others that took a while to go through when I set them at the lower end of the range of what had been being cleared, and surely I can see that there remains a bit of a gap between my transaction and the ones that are currently clearing in the 20-ish sats per vbyte, as you mentioned.

Wen clear?


hahahahaha

I don't really care that much.. I set my fees in that kind of way  just to watch it, but if I was transacting with a stranger, probably there would be a need to set it in the 30-50 sats per vbyte range in order to NOT piss anyone off or to risk losing reputation/credibility.

My transaction cleared minutes after I published this post. It went up from 150mb from tip to the very top immediately. Perhaps a bug in my wallet software or something as I found no evidence Ordinals or any other NFT spam intensifying.   

[JayJuanGee]

Not sure Ordinals or something else but my transaction is currently showing at around 150MB from tip. The fee is ~23sat/byte which is by now means small. What could be the reason for this?

I have a transaction that I set at around 13 sats per vbyte within the last few days, and so I already have an understanding that it could take several days and maybe weeks to clear.

A few months ago, I had some others that took a while to go through when I set them at the lower end of the range of what had been being cleared, and surely I can see that there remains a bit of a gap between my transaction and the ones that are currently clearing in the 20-ish sats per vbyte, as you mentioned.

Wen clear?


hahahahaha

I don't really care that much.. I set my fees in that kind of way  just to watch it, but if I was transacting with a stranger, probably there would be a need to set it in the 30-50 sats per vbyte range in order to NOT piss anyone off or to risk losing reputation/credibility.

My transaction cleared minutes after I published this post. It went up from 150mb from tip to the very top immediately. Perhaps a bug in my wallet software or something as I found no evidence Ordinals or any other NFT spam intensifying.  

You are not exactly wrong in terms of the point that you are making which we can see that since about the first few days of September, the mem pools have not really been clearing transactions in the lower 10s.. sats per vbyte, and largely staying above 20 sats per vbyte.. so surely it sometimes might even take a while to clear those in the 20s and 30sats per vbyte unless some of the transactions can get cleared out.  I might have to start to get worried in a couple of weeks if my transaction has not yet cleared.. at least in terms of considering if I might want to try to do something about it or to even send another transaction with a higher fee in order to serve in the place of the one that I had sent but did not have a rush in terms of it reaching its destination.

I tend to get my mempool historical information from here.  https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,3m,weight

And, I will also look at what various wallets are suggesting for the high, medium and low fees.

PS.  By the way, @serveriawhich website are you using to figure out how far your pending transaction is from the tip?

[larry_vw_1955]

You are not exactly wrong in terms of the point that you are making which we can see that since about the first few days of September, the mem pools have not really been clearing transactions in the lower 10s.. sats per vbyte, and largely staying above 20 sats per vbyte.. so surely it sometimes might even take a while to clear those in the 20s and 30sats per vbyte unless some of the transactions can get cleared out.

probably has something to do with this:

Bitcoin Network Faces Congestion with Over 470,000 Pending Transactions
https://cryptopotato.com/bitcoin-network-faces-congestion-with-over-470000-pending-transactions/

I wonder if it's bitcoin nfts causing it. imagine needing to pay someone but there's almost half a million transactions ahead of you. and it can only do 7 transactions per second. 

[nutildah]

I wonder if it's bitcoin nfts causing it. imagine needing to pay someone but there's almost half a million transactions ahead of you. and it can only do 7 transactions per second.  

Its mainly BRC20 these days, which are small inscriptions denoting the transfer of Bitcoin-native tokens. 336k BRC20 transactions just yesterday:

https://dune.com/cryptokoryo/brc20

According to one of the graphs in the above link, BRC20 transactions now account for 55% - 60% of all Bitcoin transactions. Pretty nuts. But I am certain they will eventually die down. Still, it is annoying and super expensive for me to do my own non-standard transactions with Counterparty, lol.

There's been some strife and turmoil within the Ordinals community recently. Turns out Rodarmor hates BRC20 and is looking for ways to sabotage them.

https://twitter.com/rodarmor/status/1705369258426036526

Can't you grief BRC-20 holders by spamming their addresses with transfer inscriptions, locking their balance, which they would then need to send back to themselves in order to unlock their balance?

[serveria.com]

Not sure Ordinals or something else but my transaction is currently showing at around 150MB from tip. The fee is ~23sat/byte which is by now means small. What could be the reason for this?

I have a transaction that I set at around 13 sats per vbyte within the last few days, and so I already have an understanding that it could take several days and maybe weeks to clear.

A few months ago, I had some others that took a while to go through when I set them at the lower end of the range of what had been being cleared, and surely I can see that there remains a bit of a gap between my transaction and the ones that are currently clearing in the 20-ish sats per vbyte, as you mentioned.

Wen clear?


hahahahaha

I don't really care that much.. I set my fees in that kind of way  just to watch it, but if I was transacting with a stranger, probably there would be a need to set it in the 30-50 sats per vbyte range in order to NOT piss anyone off or to risk losing reputation/credibility.

My transaction cleared minutes after I published this post. It went up from 150mb from tip to the very top immediately. Perhaps a bug in my wallet software or something as I found no evidence Ordinals or any other NFT spam intensifying.  

You are not exactly wrong in terms of the point that you are making which we can see that since about the first few days of September, the mem pools have not really been clearing transactions in the lower 10s.. sats per vbyte, and largely staying above 20 sats per vbyte.. so surely it sometimes might even take a while to clear those in the 20s and 30sats per vbyte unless some of the transactions can get cleared out.  I might have to start to get worried in a couple of weeks if my transaction has not yet cleared.. at least in terms of considering if I might want to try to do something about it or to even send another transaction with a higher fee in order to serve in the place of the one that I had sent but did not have a rush in terms of it reaching its destination.

I tend to get my mempool historical information from here.  https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,3m,weight

And, I will also look at what various wallets are suggesting for the high, medium and low fees.

PS.  By the way, @serveriawhich website are you using to figure out how far your pending transaction is from the tip?

I'm not using any website actually, my wallet software reports this. I'd prefer to not disclose the name for opsec reasons. Btw, i tried to send some more coins yesterday and the fee suggested by the wallet software was even higher (something like 50-60sat/byte). Crazy times...

There's been some strife and turmoil within the Ordinals community recently. Turns out Rodarmor hates BRC20 and is looking for ways to sabotage them.

Hahaha! The spammer encourages to spam other spammers! Let him have a gulp of his own medicine. 

[stompix]

There's been some strife and turmoil within the Ordinals community recently. Turns out Rodarmor hates BRC20 and is looking for ways to sabotage them.

https://twitter.com/rodarmor/status/1705369258426036526

Can't you grief BRC-20 holders by spamming their addresses with transfer inscriptions, locking their balance, which they would then need to send back to themselves in order to unlock their balance?

And right below that:

The biggest Bitcoin Ordinals mint so far is going to mint out in the next hour. This mint was deployed in early March and has been minting continuously for the last 6 months, accounting for over 21 million transactions on the Bitcoin network.

If you don't like ordinals and you have a pending tx sitting there for weeks, don't open this link:
https://mempool.space/address/bc1qjap03xvl7gajpvfyedvt4rxq7lxk7kdhzwk493
or
https://mempool.space/address/bc1q76kjngqpawa2meqnd4uec7ctlj32m3je382ngr
you might smash something 

Oh, and besides monkeys, now it seems we are storing also election results in the blockchain 
As long as we're still below 25sat/b it's worth the popcorn!

imagine needing to pay someone but there's almost half a million transactions ahead of you. and it can only do 7 transactions per second. 

You pay 50 cents extra and you're in the first block, it doesn't matter how many tx are in the mempool it matters how much they are willing to pay and for ordinals high fees are not economically feasible.

[JayJuanGee]

You are not exactly wrong in terms of the point that you are making which we can see that since about the first few days of September, the mem pools have not really been clearing transactions in the lower 10s.. sats per vbyte, and largely staying above 20 sats per vbyte.. so surely it sometimes might even take a while to clear those in the 20s and 30sats per vbyte unless some of the transactions can get cleared out.

probably has something to do with this:
Bitcoin Network Faces Congestion with Over 470,000 Pending Transactions
https://cryptopotato.com/bitcoin-network-faces-congestion-with-over-470000-pending-transactions/

I wonder if it's bitcoin nfts causing it. imagine needing to pay someone but there's almost half a million transactions ahead of you. and it can only do 7 transactions per second. 

I imagine if there are 470k transactions pending, then I am going to try to adjust my fee setting to the amount that I think that the transaction will clear in the amount of time that I would like the transaction to go through. 

There are probably several levels of confidence, and if I can try to figure out how the fee system works in bitcoin, then I would try to set my fees in order to attempt to accomplish the level of satisfaction that I would like to get without necessarily pissing off people with whom I am transaction or losing any of my credibility if there either might be a relationship that I am trying to maintain or that I am not trying to unduly cause tarnish on my own reputation.

Of course, with some strangers, I might not give any shits about my reputation - and so then the receiver has to make sure that s/he is protected and does not give over the good or service without some kind of guarantee that the payment has gone through or will go through.

If I am dealing with a complete stranger and there is a timeline for the payment to be received, then likely I am going to set my fees at some percentage above the fees that had been clearing 20% to 50% higher should be good, unless the fee rate is moving around erratically.  Of course, some wallets are better than others at predicting reasonable fees, and surely more and more wallets are allowing the ability to customly set fees.

In my response to this post, I went to look at my 13 sats per vbyte transaction from nearly a week ago, and it is appears that it has cleared within the last 5 hours.. and there looks like there was a bit of a spike down in the pending transactions around the time that mine for 13 sats per vbyte cleared.. so yeah, that one took nearly a week to clear. but there wasn't any rush on it.. and maybe I would not have started to get worried until about mid-October, if it had not yet cleared by that time.

[philipma1957]

Once again there are other chains

LTC and Doge which are well protected by lots of asic gear.

I know every one get pissed when I write these posts but scrypt algo does 2x the ltc blocks and 10x the doge blocks.

Moves value cheap and easy and fast.

Plus it is not going away.

Also both Doge investors and Ltc investors have an interest in clogging the btc blockchain.  thus keeping there chains in action

I know no one like me to point it out, but

BTC 144 blocks x 6.25 x 26,500 = 23,850,000 usd a day

LTC 288 blocks x 6.25 x 65 = 117,000 usd

DOGE 1440 blocks x 10,000 x .06 = 864,000 usd

so 24 million vs 1 million daily in mining income

and the ½ will lower BTC mining income while keeping scrypt the same.

Seems to me a lot of pressure on the BTC mem pool will continue.

LN has yet to alleviate it.

the 2024 ½ ing will be fun.

[larry_vw_1955]

Once again there are other chains

LTC and Doge which are well protected by lots of asic gear.

I know every one get pissed when I write these posts but scrypt algo does 2x the ltc blocks and 10x the doge blocks.

Moves value cheap and easy and fast.

Plus it is not going away.

yeah lets be honest. who among us here hasn't had a bit of coin on an exchange and said to themself "nah, i think i'll just use litecoin since the fees are way cheaper!" ? its sad that bitcoin can't actually be usable with very low fees but as this thread shows, you got people waiting weeks for their txn to confirm. who can afford to pay a fee AND wait weeks? not me!

Its mainly BRC20 these days

so the monkeys got obliterated off the face of the blockchain by these BRC20s. i guess the bitcoin nft hype is over.

Still, it is annoying and super expensive for me to do my own non-standard transactions with Counterparty, lol.

bitcoin power user here ^^^^  

There's been some strife and turmoil within the Ordinals community recently. Turns out Rodarmor hates BRC20 and is looking for ways to sabotage them.

that's ironic for sure. he's the one that started it all.

by the way i wonder where franky is. this is an ordinals thread so franky would naturally gravitate here to explain why they are not real nfts. neglecting that the entire nft market has kind of become worthless not just bitcoin ones.  

[stompix]

Do you know which TX store such data? Anyway, one could argue election result is more important than monkey image or fart sound.

No idea, I actually tried to at least find out what they are at all storing in the chain, as the example just shows the hash of the used block but, I assume it's nothing on the size of ordinals as it would make little sense since you have to store all of them in a limited time frame as the polls close, so under 1 hour for all polling sections.

Here is how it looks:
https://verify.simpleproof.com/TSE/P-000024/5eb5f203667489b8c6e045fc3ee2205b5e500557821cd770f5c696e2594bc434
a lot of my VPNs got blocked on it, just letting you know.

yeah lets be honest. who among us here hasn't had a bit of coin on an exchange and said to themself "nah, i think i'll just use litecoin since the fees are way cheaper!" ?

Everyone trying to get a small amount from Binance when they were charging 0.001 BTC for a withdrawal at a time that was close to $30. 

[JayJuanGee]

Once again there are other chains

LTC and Doge which are well protected by lots of asic gear.

I know every one get pissed when I write these posts but scrypt algo does 2x the ltc blocks and 10x the doge blocks.

Moves value cheap and easy and fast.

Plus it is not going away.

yeah lets be honest. who among us here hasn't had a bit of coin on an exchange and said to themself "nah, i think i'll just use litecoin since the fees are way cheaper!" ? its sad that bitcoin can't actually be usable with very low fees but as this thread shows, you got people waiting weeks for their txn to confirm. who can afford to pay a fee AND wait weeks? not me!

You are wanting to go back to the ever-repeated BIG blocker arguments that became popular in 2016 and maybe still lingering - a kind of expectation that everyone should be able to have free or close to free transactions on the main chain?

Certainly, I am not suggesting that everyone can wait, but surely there are ways to attempt to be somewhat strategic with figuring out how much of a rush you are in with regards to your transactions and what kinds of transactions are worth paying the higher fees..

So it seems that the last couple of weeks we had a bout of congestion in which:

1)  10 to 20 sats per vbyte (30¢ to 60¢ as long as it was coming from ONLY 1 address) had chances to confirm within several days to maybe even a week, but could take longer (maybe even a month on the lower end of the range),

2) 20-30 sats per vbyte (60¢ to 90¢) had chances to confirm within an hour but could take a 1-3 days, especially on the lower end of the price range,   

3) 30-60 sats per vbyte (90¢ to $1.80) had pretty decent chances to confirm within ten minutes to an hour, and of course, the higher up on the scale the more likely that your transaction would end up getting into the next block.

Even if we presume someone does not have time to wait, those are not outrageous fees for anyone sending $100 or more, yet of course with smaller value transactions they might become less economical for those who want to get their transactions to go through quickly. 

Sure, we can reasonably presume that several of these kinds of fees are going to become more costly with increased traffic times, yet we can still calculate how much BTC are we moving in order to decide how much it might cost to pay, and it does not seem unreasonable for the fees to go up even 10x during busy periods, and still there would be choices regarding how much value are we sending?  If the fees are up 10x from the ones of the last week, then surely we might choose to increase our lower limits in transactions, so instead of ONLY sending transactions of $100 or more, we might choose to ONLY transact on chain when the transactions are valued at least $1k or more.  We can decide for ourselves based on fees (and what we see as mempool congestion levels - or wallets might be showing/suggesting).

Lightning network does seem to be another plausible release valve for the lower transaction values during those kinds of higher fee times.. even though we have been finding lighting network to not always be very reliable.. so we seem to be in fairly early days for both seeing how the lightning options perform and also verifying that people have lightning options available to them - of course, the more self-autonomous concerned bitcoiners are going to want to make sure that self-custody options are available, but if we are merely talking about saving fees on lower transactions, there might not be any kinds of existential threats to sovereignty if some custodial solutions are being utilized during high congestion periods and if many people still might keep their main bitcoin stashes in various on chain private locations.. so maybe many less rich people might have bitcoin savings that are "ONLY" $1K to $50k in value, so they still would have a lot of sovereignty, even if onchain fees have periods of being high.. and maybe instead of sending their value around on chain every time it reaches $100, they might wait until it is more than $1k before sending it from off-chain (such as lightning network) to onchain locations.. in order to attempt to better strategize the fee situation.