On Ordinals: Where do you stand?

[larry_vw_1955]

The only positive thing I can see about this in the mid term is the possibility of developers coming with a good solution to improve scalability. Letting people to mint whatever they want and at the same time, do not spamming the mempool beyond recognition.

 

that's kind of a pipe dream isn't it?

[1714478395]

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[1714478395]

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[Wind_FURY]

By themselves they are harmless, BUT to be taken advantage by a bad actor, it could open another attack vector that could used for nefarious purposes. Perhaps to constantly make the network congested through dick pic transactions? There's probably high demand for censorhip-resistant dick pics.

It has always been a matter of whoever is willing to pay the fee is entitled to the blockspace.

The fee market, yeah, but there's real demand for censorship-resistance, and now there's a can be faked demand through Ordinals that NFT "developers" can do to repeat the process of surging fake demand through releasing project after project, like if a series of shitcoin sales were facilitated in the Bitcoin blockchain. The reason for my sarcasm on dick pics in the blockchain is, do dick pics truly need censorship-resistance?

Plus I'm not against NFT, but it will be better to push them off-chain as suggested by n0nce, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5437464.msg61688997#msg61688997

[franky1]

as for op_return
to have an identifier you only need space for a 256bit hash (32bytes) so why extend past 80bytes

OP_RETURN afaik would allow to create a NFT system similar to the current Ordinals Inscriptions but with less UTXO set bloat, for example based on Counterparty, because there would be no need to store any UTXOs for the ownership management (you basically can avoid one additional UTXO per NFT being created). OP_RETURN can also be fully pruned, while afaik the Taproot script can't because it's needed for validation (I may be wrong here though). The effect on block space itself would however be negligible.

The whole point thus would be to make OP_RETURN the most convenient means to store data.

op return only allows enough space to put a couple 256bit hashs as 'outputs'. where those hashes represent something off-network

the opreturn outputs are given 0sat thus its UTXO does not get added to the UTXOset, thus unspendable thus locking the hash reference to the blockchain database file (.blk) thus becomes a time stamp reference of a hashs creation.
(a date of birth registry system)
and being in a transaction means that it shows a spenders address which created the TX as the proof of who the parent was of that childs birth
....
taproot should be as promised "one signature length"
as that was the promise of why its different than older p2sh multisig

even 1000 a day of just 30kb small memes is alot

Yep, it would still take significant block space. But it would be a number which is currently managable by the blockchain, i.e. at weekends and often even at some hours in working days the fee would be allowed again to go down to 1 sat/vbyte.

Average block size before the Ordinals boom was about 1.2 - 1.5 MB, and 200 kB more would not have mattered much in current "crypto winter" conditions (currently the average size, with full blocks due to Ordinals, is about 2,3 MB). That would of course change in a full-scale bull market like in 2021, so I hope the ordinals boom will be over/relocate to other chains once the next hype begins (or sidechains become operational).

I also didn't say I consider this number "acceptable". It's only the number I expect it to go down to in a couple of weeks. Ideally of course it would be even much less.

a low quality image is usually 30kb+ (vs equivalent to ~46tx average payment space)
the most is <3.99mb (vs equivalent to ~6000tx average payment space)
a 'not bothered' 200k (vs equivalent to ~300tx average payment space)

when a block currently averages only 2000tx and there are silly cludy miscounting of bytes and other things imposing the 2000 to not be 6000
and where people are saying we are not bothered with delaying 46-300 payments of this imposed ~2000 average payment expectation.

it shows people dont care about a payment systems leanness nor utility optimised space.
not wanting to optimise but then saying it needs to impose restrictions on lean legacy payments and premium those simple payment formats.

doesnt seem like policy makers have the heart of the purpose of bitcoin in mind

they are more appealing to corporate sponsors desires of special bloat at the cost of normal users of simple payments

imagine if visa (usually a 2second approval tap and pay) sudden shown a message
we dont mind making you wait a further 8 seconds(4 more taptimes(blocktimes))
however if you pay us more in fees you can maybe get a taptime of 2seconds

is that really a great advert for visa payment system
yea some wont care about 8 seconds. but when that is for bitcoin a 40minute difference.. well.

the amount of people that i see say "just be patient" "just pay more" "just wait until midnight/the weekend when its less congested"
imagine if visa said the same things

visa: pay us 4x in fees for fast payment and acceptance in 2 seconds
visa: come back & buy goods at midnight you might get acceptance in 2 seconds

is that really a great advert for visa payment system

also thing like
visa: we imposed a limit to only allow 2million payments per 2seconds instead of our capability of 6million per 2 seconds. however if you use a international pisa card that allows payments in multiple currencies,
but only for amounts of:
value:a bottle of pepsi 99.999% success
value: a couple pizza's 97% successful
value:  a grocery shop 50% successful
value: a Us/UK months salary 5% success

oh and it needs 1-20 different middlemen to give permission to make the payment.
oh and if 4 million people were to be on the network the liquidity will bottleneck even more and the success rate would be less
please use that pisa network instead.

is that a great advert?

[franky1]

the "non standard" is they use an opcode that is once its in a block its treated as (default:isvalid) where it just is passed/accepted without validation rules
so that nodes can be told they dont need to upgrade, and being a fool node is acceptable

its the same as the "anyonecanspend" debate in 2016 before segwit, about using it to allow segwit.. but where there was a limit
(they eventually didnt go soft in nov 2016(as i said they shouldnt as was dangerous) and instead they hoped for hard consensus upto may2017 which didnt flourish. then they mandated hard via a MAHF in june/july. to force it so they can then use the soft opcode in august)

and now soft options are allowable since then
then after segwit,, segwit had a sub opcode for its own "anyonecanspend" but this had a semi limit on it
and with taproot sub-opcodes have their own "anyonecanspend" thing

these opcodes and sub opcodes that allow soft things have each also relaxed the limits per time
taproots subopcode of the same thing is no limit apart from the blockweights own limit

[pooya87]

Another way of looking at Ordinals is (to put simply) a brand new scam method to sell tiny amounts of bitcoin to idiots at much higher prices.

• First step is to come up with some arbitrary data which can be anything like byte presentation of a picture and create the Taproot script.
• Second step is to compute the corresponding address of that script and sending some small amount of bitcoin to it (eg. 10000 satoshi)
  
• Third step is to find some idiot who would pay a lot of money to buy 10000 satoshi (of course minus the fee so in reality in the example above they are buying 5920 satoshi) for a lot of money.
• Fourth step is receiving the money and sending them the tiny amount of bitcoin whilst revealing the garbage data you created in step one.

There are no NFTs, no arts, no ownership, ... being transferred here, individual satoshis have no extra value, ... and all the other lies they tell in step 3.
Bottom line is anybody who paid more than $1.28 for the example above is being ripped off while contributing to an attack on Bitcoin. Arguing over UTXOs and how they are involved in this spam attack is pointless in my opinion

[Artemis3]

And yet my current transaction is still pending.

Did you use RBF? I think 1 sat/vbyte without RBF is quite risky, at all times. At any moment, a surge in activity can happen and delay the tx for weeks or even months, like it happened not only 2017/18 but also in mid-2019, late 2020 and the whole first half of 2021.

Edit, having read an earlier post of yours in this thread: Fees are now slightly below 2 sat/vbyte. So my tip for you would be to RBF (or if not possible, double spend) the transaction ASAP to 2 sat/vbyte. Tomorrow (working day) this fee level will be difficult to achieve.

leaving the door open for spam abuse is a mistake.

How would you "close the door"? If there was a convincing idea which does not rely on centralization in any way, I'd be happy to support it ... But I think there is no trivial solution.

One could make Taproot more restrictive again, lowering the 520-bytes limit for data pushes, and limit these to one per output, but that's not wanted by the devs because they want to allow complex smart contracts. And anyway: without Taproot, with older methods, like Peter Todd demonstrated, data packages like the Ordinals inscriptions would pay only 15% more than with the current method.

A solution discussed by the devs in their mailing list is to allow higher byte counts in OP_RETURN outputs to make it the most convenient method. An OP_RETURN-based NFT technique like the Rare Pepes on Counterparty, would have some slight advantages to Ordinals.

Trying to make miners and nodes not relaying transactions with inscriptions, like I read earlier in this thread? That's not fault-proof at all. It could make waiting times for them a little bit longer, but there will always be miners happy to include these transactions to harvest the fees.

At the end, I think rollups/sidechains (like drivechains) are the best long term solutions, but they will take a while to materialize. For the time being I think the best strategy is to support a "relocation" of the Ordinals project to another chain like NMC, LTC, Doge or GRS ...

Yes, thank you for your suggestion. I am simply sharing a situation here, i can do that at any moment. Currently my 1 sat/b transaction has taken 48hours and is still pending, it has moved forward a bit but the spam is always cutting in line with the slightly higher fee. I think someone mentioned they are using 1.05, but in the future they can change this value, it will depend on their market. We should also not focus only in Ordinals/Luxor, what if others join? This is what I'm trying to say.

I know there won't be a perfect solution, but clearly this can be abused, even if right now you could just rise the fee to 2. In the future we may need to just rise the fees to 20 or 200, or hey, use (parallel blockchain) more... It seems to me that some rules were relaxed like franky1 says and this opened the door for worse spamming that we are now witnessing (pun? ).

In any case the situation is there for open discussion. I do hope the devs come with something different than ignoring it altogether because "it should solve itself". No it won't, this is only a warning, and a friendly one at that. People less "nice" than Ordinals may be preparing something now that the demonstration has been publicly made. Ordinals can be fair players and move to Namecoin, great, but the issue remains so this is not against them in particular, but concern Bitcoin in its current state.

Spam should be addressed. Why don't we move those smart contracts to Namecoin as well?

[Bitcoiner317]

Shouldn’t miners’ revenue go up with all this ordeal? I’m confused.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_miners_revenue_per_day

[franky1]

Shouldn’t miners’ revenue go up with all this ordeal? I’m confused.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_miners_revenue_per_day

miners are the ones putting them into blocks mostly
their money into tx =their money into coinreward = their money back to themselves
no cost to them

they are the block template data collators. they can accept a 3.99mb tx with a fee of 0
because consensus is gone too soft and allows such
those saying not to use code to create rules .. but instead make everyone pay more.. is not the solution
code can make rules and fees are not rules nor solutions (as shown in first statement of this post)

[n0nce]

The only positive thing I can see about this in the mid term is the possibility of developers coming with a good solution to improve scalability. Letting people to mint whatever they want and at the same time, do not spamming the mempool beyond recognition.

Solution which involve sidechain (e.g. RSK and Liquid) or LN (e.g. RGB and Taro) doesn't seem to be popular among NFT user (who owns Bitcoin) though.

Do you know if there is a particular reason why? In my imagination, NFT users are not Bitcoiners (or any-coiners) whatsoever and are mostly interested in those images and getting rich quick with them. So they obviously prefer leeching off of other people's resources (full node operators' disks) instead of putting in some work and setting up something like a Lightning node themselves. But I may be wrong..

I'd honestly like to know what their objection is against NFTs on Lightning or any other maybe really fun experiments they may come up with. It is objectively the better platform for something like that.

[franky1]

lightning has no blockchain so there is no timestamp log of ownership transfer
liquid is a federated reserve (blockstream fiduciary system) where they control the transaction formats thus unable to use their sidechain as a timestamp log of ownership for bloaty stuff

there are other subnetworks however they dont have the right opcodes to allow such mucky mess

also rootstock is ethereum based logic that just throws its latest blockheight into a bitcoin coinbase output to be used as a reference and they call it "merge mining" by giving which ever pool adds that tx a reward for doing so

bitcoin is a few years behind in the offering of side/subnetworks because devs promised everyone that the two L networks will be the utopian dreams of promise... and 7 years later we are still waiting for something that has not arrived

[larry_vw_1955]

I'd honestly like to know what their objection is against NFTs on Lightning or any other maybe really fun experiments they may come up with. It is objectively the better platform for something like that.

think of it like spray painting grafitti onto some walls on an underground tunnel just because it's there that's why you do it and because maybe it's not really meant to be done that's an added bonus. there doesn't have to be any financial motive.

[Hispo]

I'd honestly like to know what their objection is against NFTs on Lightning or any other maybe really fun experiments they may come up with. It is objectively the better platform for something like that.

think of it like spray painting grafitti onto some walls on an underground tunnel just because it's there that's why you do it and because maybe it's not really meant to be done that's an added bonus. there doesn't have to be any financial motive.

It can have a financial motive actually, keeping in mind your first explanation.
For example, NFTs users are aware that Bitcoin is the most important blockchain both in value, case use, adoption, security, etc.

So if I minted a NFT on some altcoin blockchain and I did the same on Bitcoin's, obviously that minted on the Bitcoin network has more chances of increasing in value and volume.
An equivalent would be to present your art piece at the Louvre in comparison to do it in your local museum.

[larry_vw_1955]

It can have a financial motive actually, keeping in mind your first explanation.
For example, NFTs users are aware that Bitcoin is the most important blockchain both in value, case use, adoption, security, etc.

So if I minted a NFT on some altcoin blockchain and I did the same on Bitcoin's, obviously that minted on the Bitcoin network has more chances of increasing in value and volume.
An equivalent would be to present your art piece at the Louvre in comparison to do it in your local museum.

you seen some of the crap people are uploading there? uploading the same exact crappy image a million times. how many bitcoin logos do we need sitting there taking up blockchain space? and how many pixelated images of a slice of pizza do we need? yeah i'm sure people are going to be tripping over themselves trying to buy these pieces of junk.

the devs could have at the very least put in some code to mitigate duplicate images. but no...

[Hispo]

-snip-

you seen some of the crap people are uploading there? uploading the same exact crappy image a million times. how many bitcoin logos do we need sitting there taking up blockchain space? and how many pixelated images of a slice of pizza do we need? yeah i'm sure people are going to be tripping over themselves trying to buy these pieces of junk.

the devs could have at the very least put in some code to mitigate duplicate images. but no...

Last time I checked I only saw some gifs of pokemons, which I admit looked good.
But I have no doubt people are spamming the blockchain with literal garbage, like they do on Ethereum.

Also, I do not know how easy it would be to implement some code to prevent duplicate images to reach a block, sounds like something that would need an artificial intelligence to work or taking the weight or pixels of the image as reference.

Even if it worked at first, I am sure people would manage to go around it by making small alterations on the properties of the picture.

[larry_vw_1955]

Last time I checked I only saw some gifs of pokemons, which I admit looked good.
But I have no doubt people are spamming the blockchain with literal garbage, like they do on Ethereum.

yeah but ethereum doesn't store the images.

big difference. 

[Hispo]

I would like to highlight something I just noticed today. I was checking the growth of the blockchain's size through time and it was very stable.

However, when I zoomed in I realized that we could be witnessing a new trend on the blockchain's growth, assuming this usage to mint NFTs continues through time.

I decided to jump onto Excel and tried to made some basic calculations considering the growth rate of these last four days. i am aware that this is pretty raw data since ideally I would need to wait more to see how the blockchain behaves.

I have come to the conclusion the blockchain grew at an approximate rate this last year of 4676 Mb/Month
Since the implementation of the NFTs, the weight has been going around 70% faster these last 4 days, at a pace of 7959 Mb/Month.

In that rough estimation (Where  Y= weight in Mb and X= Time (month). Being month 0 February 2022).

Within a year (Month 24 in the model) the blockchain should weigh around 503339 Mb (503 Gb), but if the current NFT mania continues like this, it may reach 644920 Mb (644 Gb). 141 Gb of difference in a year.


Again, just rough estimations and extrapolations, which could not be accurate but I think some of you would be interested on having some numbers.
If you find some math mistake, I apologize in advance, I just made this and it is almost 2 am.

If it was not obvious enough:

Source: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/blocks-size

[nutildah]

I'd honestly like to know what their objection is against NFTs on Lightning or any other maybe really fun experiments they may come up with. It is objectively the better platform for something like that.

think of it like spray painting grafitti onto some walls on an underground tunnel just because it's there that's why you do it and because maybe it's not really meant to be done that's an added bonus. there doesn't have to be any financial motive.

I'm not sure what the motivation was for Casey Rodarmor to put his system together -- experimentation is often fueled by simply wanting to test the bounds of what can be done -- but the people creating NFTs with it are certainly doing it out of financial motivation, for the most part.

The novelness is already beginning to wear off, however, and it will be a matter of interest maintenance to keep prices high, just like every other NFT project... constant social maneuvering to maintain relevance in the face of a flood of new NFTs being created across a dozen blockchains every day.

I think we're witnessing a rush for people to get their stuff inscribed now in case changes are made to the protocol to prevent such "abuse" from happening in the future. There is just something about putting your art on the Bitcoin blockchain that is so damn appealing.

The potential applications for this beyond art are limitless, however. A lot of potential utility here. Art NFTs just happen to be the gateway to onboarding normies to crypto.

[Wind_FURY]

Another way of looking at Ordinals is (to put simply) a brand new scam method to sell tiny amounts of bitcoin to idiots at much higher prices.

• First step is to come up with some arbitrary data which can be anything like byte presentation of a picture and create the Taproot script.
• Second step is to compute the corresponding address of that script and sending some small amount of bitcoin to it (eg. 10000 satoshi)
  
• Third step is to find some idiot who would pay a lot of money to buy 10000 satoshi (of course minus the fee so in reality in the example above they are buying 5920 satoshi) for a lot of money.
• Fourth step is receiving the money and sending them the tiny amount of bitcoin whilst revealing the garbage data you created in step one.

There are no NFTs, no arts, no ownership, ... being transferred here, individual satoshis have no extra value, ... and all the other lies they tell in step 3.
Bottom line is anybody who paid more than $1.28 for the example above is being ripped off while contributing to an attack on Bitcoin. Arguing over UTXOs and how they are involved in this spam attack is pointless in my opinion

We can't determine, nor debate, what can and what can't have value, or what actually has value, except for the market to accept "it" for the fair asking price. We also can't demand for those NFT transactions to be censored, because it would be a failure to Bitcoin's Ethos if it actually happens. I believe we just have to merely accept it, BUT we shall agree that the development of NFT in the Bitcoin blockchain is not pushing the boundaries of Science anymore. It's actually in the world of stupid. Censorship-resistant dick pics and fart sounds are stupid.

[pooya87]

We can't determine, nor debate, what can and what can't have value, or what actually has value, except for the market to accept "it" for the fair asking price. I believe we just have to merely accept it, BUT we shall agree that the development of NFT in the Bitcoin blockchain is not pushing the boundaries of Science anymore. It's actually in the world of stupid. Censorship-resistant dick pics and fart sounds are stupid.

We talk about the uselessness of NFTs and their scam nature but that is not the debate.

Bitcoin was not invented to become some sort of cloud storage where people upload their files. The debate about NFTs and other tokens on bitcoin blockchain is also not about their usefulness, their value or anything like that. It is all about using a system in a way that it is not supposed to be used.

We also can't demand for those NFT transactions to be censored, because it would be a failure to Bitcoin's Ethos if it actually happens.

Bitcoin is meant to be a currency people use for payment, using it for anything else is actually against its "Ethos". Also:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5437787.msg61733370#msg61733370

[Lamkuthang]

Every day, another blockchain project is announced and most of them end up failing. At this rate the future looks bleak for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The only thing that can save bitcoin from becoming valuable or from being displaced as the dominant cryptocurrency is the slow and systematic addition of infrastructure and safeguards to ensure the security of the underlying protocol. After looking at the pros and cons I believe that people should be given the freedom to implement their own features as long as they don't affect the base layer.