On Ordinals: Where do you stand?

[dragonvslinux]

Why do we have to sacrifice anything? Bitcoin can be what matters and it can also be fast and cheap simultaneously.

Unless it becomes more popular, and there appear to be more transactions on-chain. I wonder what will be your excuse then. "Bitcoin must split, because we can't handle everyone in 1 MB blocks" -  

Becoming popular has nothing to do with the number of transactions. Bitcoin IS popular as an asset, hedge against inflation, store of value, investment etc. You mean if it becomes more popular as a currency or payment method? Well, we have LN for that.

It was difficult to read past your first sentence here as your claiming that Bitcoin's popularity has nothing to do with number of transactions whereas Bitcoin's "popularity" (quantifiable utility I assume) has to do with a lot of things, not just it's value. The number of transactions, value of transactions, number of users, number of accounts, these are all metrics that matter to Bitcoin in order for it to qualify as popular, which continue to increase. Whether you like it or not, Ordinals and other BRC20's are making these metrics increase, therefore increasing Bitcoin's popularity. Even if it's not in a way that you like, support or agree with.

Also you say that no. of txs is irrelevant because we have LN, which also proves a point that we don't need to be making small payments over the mainnet right? If so then why is it a concern that transactions are expensive if we instead use LN or other L2 solution? If we're all using Lightning, then the use of mainnet is simply to increase/decrease liquidity of channels, or otherwise open them. No offence but I'm really struggling to understand your argument if you're complaining about high fees but yet claiming that LN is the payment method (the latter I agree with).

This solution is being considered right now by LN devs I believe. Moving all NFT transactions to LN could potentially free up the mempool. Regular payments are not an issue - the amount of legit payments is low enough for the blockchain to handle for years to come. The issue however is to transfer all spam to L2.

This is more or less what I've been trying to say for a while now, that "generic" transactions should be moved over to LN, whether that be BRC20 or low-value transactions, as both clog up the mempool and cause congestion, so it's good to hear LN devs considering this. Despite others (or one particular person) in this thread thinking it's not possible to move inscriptions over to a sidechain, it clearly is possible, and not only that would be cheaper as well as better for everyone. I'm otherwise not convinced the amount of "legit payments" will be low enough to handle on the mainnet for years to come, eventually it will become too costly.

For example it might only be around 20 sats/vB ($1) right now with a busy mempool, but that could quite easily be $10 or $100 per transaction in the near future with price increases, with or without BRC20 inscriptions. It's likely that we'll look back at 2023 and the high fees and be grateful that it kick started real development and adoption of L2 solutions that will be desperately needed in the future for Bitcoin to remain affordable. Just like we can look back at 2017 and in hindsight see how it helped the adoption of segwit due to the rising fees, otherwise it's unlikely that this adoption would have happened as quickly as it did.

This is precisely the reason why L2 solutions are in development, because ultimately Bitcoin's mainnet is un-scalable and therefore L2 solutions are a basic requirement in order to continue expansion of Bitcoin network. It's not because they are needed right now, although are or would be useful, but because it will be a necessity in the future, there is little to no question about that based on Bitcoin's utility growth. Baring in mind that the likes of segwit is not  a scaling solution, it's a one-off implementation to allow roughly twice as much data per block. That's not scaling, that's basically a plaster on the problem to buy time.

This is why overall I'm in favour of Bitcoin network facing this sort of "stress test". In computing, this helps to encourage and incentivize development in the direction that is required to resolve problems, just like in 2017. There's the old saying "If it's not broke don't fix it". This is why people feeling like Bitcoin's network is "broke" due to high fees (even if it's obviously not) is exactly what's needed to encourage future development.

[1714466282]

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[larry_vw_1955]

This solution is being considered right now by LN devs I believe. Moving all NFT transactions to LN could potentially free up the mempool. Regular payments are not an issue - the amount of legit payments is low enough for the blockchain to handle for years to come. The issue however is to transfer all spam to L2.

so they can just take peoples' normal transactions and re-route them to the Lightning Network without their permission? Just because they determine something is spam? Even if they already paid a normal fee? Sounds like censorship to me. Or maybe I just don't understand how the mechanism would work.

This is more or less what I've been trying to say for a while now, that "generic" transactions should be moved over to LN, whether that be BRC20 or low-value transactions, as both clog up the mempool and cause congestion, so it's good to hear LN devs considering this.

Considering what exactly? What power does a LN dev have over forcing someone to use Lightning Network?

Despite others (or one particular person) in this thread thinking it's not possible to move inscriptions over to a sidechain, it clearly is possible,

how is it possible and would people with monkeys agree to it?

[jokers10]

...
how is it possible and would people with monkeys agree to it?

No one is interested in paying too much fees so why "token" holders and issuers won't use LN if it will be additionally improved for it? Best way to make someone to do something is to make it profitable and comfortable, they will use it themselves.

LN devs are developing now several things which should make token transactions easier and layer 2 transactions to demand less approving through main chain. The more usable and easy becomes LN the more users will use it and so the load on the bitcoin blockchain will be lower.

You don't have to force anyone if you can make what you want them to do attractive to them.

[Mauser]

If we'd talked about what will happen if to implement something new it was a matter of choosing the future rules. But now we already have Ordinals and we already have those ones who use it. Taking away from someone else what is not ours is a bad idea. I'm not a fan of Ordinals, I'm not going to use any kind of "tokens" in bitcoin blockchain, but it is not a question of my own preferences, it is a question of expropriating someones belongings. Don't I understand that Ordinals bring instability and thus less security? I understand. But as Benjamin Franklin said: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." If we'll start to take something from someone for our own convenience, what will be the difference from centralized systems?

Do we have a problem? Yes. Should a solving be worse than a problem?

I agree with you that taking away something that is already used by others is a bad idea, and is contrary to the freedom and independence idea behind crypto currencies. It took me a while to understand the concept of ordinals and still I am not convinced that they are really needed. Which doesn't mean that others can't see a great value in them. I also never bought any NFTs and found the whole idea of owning digital pictures a bit out of order. But just because it's nothing for me I don't want to decide for everybody else. My main concern is the impact of the transaction fees for bitcoin. If fees keep increasing because of the idea demand than it's a bad situation for all of us and needs to be addressed. We still need to figure out however how long lasting the whole idea is. With NFTs it was a huge initial boom that eventually quite down, maybe with ordinals it will be the same.

[franky1]

sily thing about the lemmings that love LN, they are now trying to ride the hype of "tokens".. but the LN lemmings dont even know how LN works to realise it wont work.. but hey they dont care as long as they can recruit people to syphon value from them.

value does not leave a channel. meaning no "token" moves around the route path of LN
imagine
btc1pUTXO123 (0.001) -> LNpartner123A (0.0001)
                                       LNpartner123B (0.0009)
all LN does in channel is change the value A or B has of the utxo WITHIN THAT CHANNEL

B for instance then has a DIFFERENT channel with a DIFFERENT UTXO(well not all channels have funded utxo actually)
btc1pUTXO657 (0.001) -> LNpartner657B (0.0001)
                                       LNpartner657C (0.0009)

the onion packets of LN payments along a route are not transfering bitcoin tx's. they are just msat numbers of how much each participant wants to borrow from each other along a route. which is not settled. so its a IOU system

C does not get anything from btc1pUTXO123.. he only gets value from btc1pUTXO657
nothing transfers from
btc1pUTXO123 to btc1pUTXO657 in bitcoin form

imagine channels like this

the A-B beads stay within the cream frame(channel). they never actually move to the other blue frame
the B-C beads stay within the blue frame(channel). they never actually move to the other cream frame

thus you cant transfer tokens on LN

they just re-tally who OWES who (IOU) within the cream OR blue frame where
A contracts(loan agreement) to borrow B's balance within blue channel to C where eventually A will give B balance in A's cream channel if B agrees to use his blue frame value to C

but A never touches or gives blue any A balance
C never gets cream balance

again. the funds in cream channel do not move to C. the msats of A do not go to C. nor do the utxo Sats that A might give B later. those too dont go to C
..
its really a shame that those that promote crap cant even be bothered to even learn their crap to atleast understand the crap they are promoting

so LN wont be the arbiter nor transfer of any crap. because crap never leaves a channel

now back to the "crap"
the junk of ordinals is not even using any intrinsic value or any form of proof of transfer that is true to cryptography or tagging an output to be a destination. meaning anyone even if they see something in a blockchain can use a "special explorer" to pretend to one person that person X owns it while on another explorer pretend that person Y owns it. whereby in a court. the hopeful owner has no case of ownership and the scammy seller can deny ever making a sale thus no crime committed. and try to counter sue the person that got scammed for false claim. by saying the scammed victim is actually a scammer trying to claim something thats not theirs because they thought it was.. kind of how CSW does things

[DooMAD]

value does not leave a channel. meaning no "token" moves around the route path of LN

Bitcoin never leaves the blockchain and value never leaves the channel.  But yet, the ownership of funds within that channel can be changed and then confirmed back to the blockchain.  If the ownership of funds can be changed, so can the ownership of assets.

You just wasted a large amount of words to say "it'll work just fine and franky1 is the derpiest troll that ever derped in all of trolldom".  


//EDIT:

thus you cant transfer tokens on LN

Wrong because franky.  Surely by the law of averages you should have got something correct by now.   

[BlackHatCoiner]

If fees keep increasing because of the idea demand than it's a bad situation for all of us and needs to be addressed.

Don't take this personally, but didn't you know that the more usage means the more fee rate? Fees increasing sounds more like a good situation to me.

If the ownership of funds can be changed, so can the ownership of assets.

Not necessarily. Ordinals (and tokens in general) is all about proving ownership to the wide public, but lightning is all about proving ownership to your partner. You can't prove ownership of funds in lightning to the public, you can only prove ownership of channel.

I don't think it's even possible to implement a non-fungible token transfer in lightning; surely in another off-chain solution, but not that.

[DooMAD]

If the ownership of funds can be changed, so can the ownership of assets.

Not necessarily. Ordinals (and tokens in general) is all about proving ownership to the wide public, but lightning is all about proving ownership to your partner. You can't prove ownership of funds in lightning to the public, you can only prove ownership of channel.

I don't think it's even possible to implement a non-fungible token transfer in lightning; surely in another off-chain solution, but not that.

I was of the impression that Taro was designed for that sort of thing?  Admittedly I don't know too much about it yet.  But I know it would be glorious if something powered by Taproot or LN is actually the solution to a thing that franky1 is whining about.   

[pooya87]

Miners, users, Satoshi himself, did make usage of it, when there was surplus in block capacity.

The protocol is slightly flexible in some places where it can be used like that. For example when Satoshi inserted that text in the coinbase of Genesis block. But it is both within the rules without any exploitation and also it is very limited to 100 bytes.
You can't even begin to compare that with the Ordinals Attack that is both exploiting the protocol and injecting as much data as they can into the blocks with basically no limit apart from the block size.

But honestly, let's assume you censor -or as you call it "fix the exploit"- and make Ordinal transactions invalid; what if they adopt another encoding scheme, which wasn't "exploited", like OP_RETURN? What then? You'll soft fork and make OP_RETURN with data_size >= x invalid? What if they switch to completely indistinguishable monetary transactions? That's right. What if they send 0 coins to plethora of 256-bit addresses? Until when will you scrutinize other people's transactions to enforce your Bitcoin ideals?

What you are forgetting is that we've already done all of that! There is a limit on everything to keep spams like Ordinals out. It has been like this forever. OP_RETURN size is limited. Every output size is also limited to standard outputs (P2PKH, P2SH, etc.) witness sizes (for version 0) are limited, stack item sizes are limited, transaction sizes used to be limited, and a lot more that I have iterated too many times in this topic!

Nobody has ever complained about preventing spam for 14 years until the Ordinals Attack appeared which is pretty weird to me if I'm honest with you.

But, when these ideas were raised, no one took issue with it.  I don't recall anyone at that point in time saying "No, Bitcoin is just for money" and that it can't be anything else.

They did take issue with it from day one, and by they I include Satoshi himself. For example by principle the BitDNS project was like Ordinals, storing data on bitcoin blockchain:

Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale.

Bitcoin and BitDNS can be used separately.  Users shouldn't have to download all of both to use one or the other.  BitDNS users may not want to download everything the next several unrelated networks decide to pile in either.

This is not the only time either. Ethereum was also supposed to be as part of Bitcoin and we all know how that ended up.

We also didn't sit idly by just rejecting everything anybody proposes, other better solutions were proposed. For example for BitDNS the NameCoin as a separate cryptocurrency was created. For turing complete smart contracts the Ethereum was created. Even to help these smaller projects not to have a weak security things like merge mining were invented.
And a lot more including the existing bitcoin side-chain projects.

My hope is merely that the silly-picture-brigade loses momentum and people go back to looking at the more "legitimate" use-cases regarding property rights and such.

The problem doesn't lie in the content at all. After all BitDNS idea was cool and useful too and yet it shouldn't have happened on bitcoin blockchain because the problem is that they are trying to swat a fly using a sledgehammer.

[BlackHatCoiner]

You can't even begin to compare that with the Ordinals Attack that is both exploiting the protocol and injecting as much data as they can into the blocks with basically no limit apart from the block size.

There are nearly infinite ways to inject arbitrary data to the chain. Doing so only pushes Ordinal fans to adopt another encoding scheme, putting Bitcoin principles at risk. As I have already said, they can even represent Ordinals as indistinguishable Bitcoin transactions, and at that point you will have made things worse, because then we'll have to keep these trash outputs in the UTXO set forever.

What you are forgetting is that we've already done all of that!

We have never censored a type of transaction because of denial to accept it fits our Bitcoin standards.

There is a limit on everything to keep spams like Ordinals out. It has been like this forever. OP_RETURN size is limited.

Reusing OP_RETURN is not. Yes, you can put up to 10,000 bytes in an OP_RETURN output, if I'm not mistaken, but nothing prevents you from re-doing it, essentially injecting as much data as you want.

Every output size is also limited to standard outputs (P2PKH, P2SH, etc.) witness sizes (for version 0) are limited, stack item sizes are limited, transaction sizes used to be limited, and a lot more that I have iterated too many times in this topic!

A protocol change is beyond standardness. Let's not kid ourselves, you want Ordinals invalid, not non-standard.

Nobody has ever complained about preventing spam for 14 years until the Ordinals Attack appeared which is pretty weird to me if I'm honest with you.

And nobody ever complained about using Bitcoin beyond as just currency. From the very early days, we had NFTs. Now, someone wants to take advantage of censorship-resistant cloud storage, who am I to tell him what to do with that money; especially when there is no manner to prevent him.

I was of the impression that Taro was designed for that sort of thing?

I haven't read it. I know how lightning works in theory, and it just doesn't make much sense but maybe it's possible.

[nutildah]

Ordinals Attack

Grow up.

Your personal spam attack has had zero effect on anything remotely related to resolving the issue.

Stop spamming the Bitcointalkchain.

[DooMAD]

I was of the impression that Taro was designed for that sort of thing?

I haven't read it. I know how lightning works in theory, and it just doesn't make much sense but maybe it's possible.

Having read a bit more, it certainly sounds encouraging. 

So yes, this is what "devs need to fix it" looks like.  Not "HuRr DuRr BaNz ThEmZ nAo PlZ!" like the censorship supporters want.  The provision off an off-chain solution is ideal for this sort of thing.  Although I'm sure franky1 will still hate it for reasons known only to him.   

[serveria.com]

Ordinals Attack

Grow up.

Your personal spam attack has had zero effect on anything remotely related to resolving the issue.

Stop spamming the Bitcointalkchain.

Hey nutildah, grow up. Our freedom is to freely spam anyone, so please provide your email address here in this thread and we'll spam the sh*t out of it. That's our freedom to do so! I swear, we'll only use the legitimate servers with PTR, DMARC, DKIM in place, so we won't be breaking any email rules to spam you! Oh yeah and btw I promise you'll even be able to use your inbox (from time to time)   

[Faisal2202]

And then there's also the issue of fungibility considering that a Satoshi assigned with a unique inscription such as an image or even a video is no longer the same with the rest.

What is your opinion on this? Are you in favor of this or not?

As you have aforementioned, many threads on this topic have already been made and which indicates the interest of the people and how they think of it as like whether are they against it or in support of it. And i have replied in almost every topic. here are some:

• Bitcoin Civil War
• Why BTC Transactions Fees are Skyrocketing?--> My own topic
• Ordinals/BRC-20 Tokens
• Are you for or against ordinals?
• [WORK IN PROGRESS] How to use `ord` to make Bitcoin Ordinals--> i just do not understand this topic because he has already made a topic Bitcoin Civil War and still using the same ordinals. Maybe i misunderstood it.

The list is not small, the point is, as i have recently replied in the Civil War of BTC topic that i am against this ordinal's BRC -20 tokens because they have affected the reputation of BTC and i dislike that. If any solution is made to comprehend the transactions fee and congestion problem so that the delay could be solved on each transaction then i have no problem with BRC-20 tokens well there are nor ORC-20 and DRC-20 tokens too. Well, you might have heard that Dogecoin is also making DRC-20 Token. All of these things are base-less and really is not the main idea behind the origin of BTC. as BTC was made to provide financial freedom to the people so that they could live an independent life from centralized figures and manage their funds on their own while keeping their value of there money save and if it is growing over time then its a combo.

No wonder, these BRC-20 token have made many people rich, and BTC has been used as a way to make people rich from scratch or i would say from garbage as these NFTs/images they are inscribing in the BTC blockchain is garbage. i hope this would be solved soon and i also hope the ones who have invested their money in these shit tokens do not lose their value because money is everything and i hope in this war i stand in favor of both parties and that things go easy on both.

[Artemis3]

Its only a fad, it will pass on its own...



Keep waiting people...

[d5000]

Its only a fad, it will pass on its own...

Well, fads normally don't last only a couple of days. At least some weeks, and most of them a couple of months. But not more than half a year, normally.

BRC-20 and other small text-type transactions are already on a downward trend since at least a week, so they were probably a very short fad. The peak seems to have been May 7, with 314988 small text inscriptions. Now it went down to 200-240K per day. The reason that the total size of all inscriptions is still high seems to be that we see now a little bit more slightly bigger inscription transactions (probably NFTs) again.

But transaction fees are returning to reasonable levels again (I consider everything reasonable which lets you send BTC for less than $2-3, BTC was always bad for microtransactions, but ok for $50 txes and more). Yesterday they fell for a moment below 14 sat/vbyte, the first time in 2 weeks, that's around 50 cents for a standard Segwit transaction. I believe it will be difficult to get to 1 sat/byte again, but that fee level anyway was mostly reachable in bear markets and we're now very likely in the first phase of a bull market.

[larry_vw_1955]

They do actually -- or some of them, anyways. They're called on-chain NFTs. One of the most famous such projects is called Autoglyphs.

it must be expensive nowadays to store the image on ethereum. strange how they only made 512 of those when obviously the possibilities are more than there are bitcoin private keys.  

One of my favorite ones is the CryptoDickbutts. I don't own any of them, but they are funny.

https://decrypt.co/resources/how-are-nfts-stored-on-chain-off-chain-and-decentralized-storage

that article is way out of date now. they don't even mention the biggest on chain storage option which is ORDINALS.  

oh, by the way, I checked out Anton Antonopolus youtube channel and he hasn't really been active there in the past year. maybe he put up 2 or 3 vids but that was about it and NOTHING about ordinals. so I guess you have to pay for his patreon to find out what he thinks about monkeys on the bitcoin blockchain...

[franky1]

Its only a fad, it will pass on its own...

Well, fads normally don't last only a couple of days. At least some weeks, and most of them a couple of months. But not more than half a year, normally.

BRC-20 and other small text-type transactions are already on a downward trend since at least a week, so they were probably a very short fad. The peak seems to have been May 7, with 314988 small text inscriptions. Now it went down to 200-240K per day. The reason that the total size of all inscriptions is still high seems to be that we see now a little bit more slightly bigger inscription transactions (probably NFTs) again.

all they want to do is create scammy fads. its their business model. create a new hype, con idiots into handing over value. let the idiots realise its a scam. run off with victims money and restart new fad

its a fad because its only the crap creators spending tx fees to themselves and when they realise no one is buying because not everyone is an idiot they give up.. and start a new fad

the thing is they gave up when no one bought the jpeg memes and then tried brc-20.. now they realise brc-20 doesnt work so i guess they will try brc-70.. then next month brc-721 then july brc777 and then august brc 1155.. and then and then.. you the the drift

[DooMAD]

Having read a bit more, it certainly sounds encouraging.  

So yes, this is what "devs need to fix it" looks like.  Not "HuRr DuRr BaNz ThEmZ nAo PlZ!" like the censorship supporters want.  The provision off an off-chain solution is ideal for this sort of thing.  Although I'm sure franky1 will still hate it for reasons known only to him.  

Now it comes down to hardest part, where people need to convince Ordinal user switch to Taro Taproot asset rather than Ordinal to create NFT/token.

"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink".

All that can be done is to present favourable conditions in which to transact more efficiently.  But it involves sacrificing a small amount of security in order to gain the cheaper method of reaching their destination.  On-chain will always provide the most security, but it's not the most efficient method.  If people choose to take the inefficient and costly route and are prepared to pay for it, that's their prerogative.  This applies equally to both financial and non-financial transactions.  At the end of the day, the protocol is going to recognise all of them as valid.

[dragonvslinux]

Its only a fad, it will pass on its own...



Keep waiting people...

Precisely, this is why you see the mempool go from blue to green txs, because the fees are declining and there is less demand for high fee transactions. People said the same nonsense back in 2017/2018 when fees were very expensive for around 3 months (more expensive than they were this year), claiming fees would "never go back to normal", and regardless of segwit they did come back to reality quite quickly.

The only difference is there aren't people trying to shill BCH over high fees like back then, not much else. Just pay your $1 fee like a normal person and get over yourself.