On Ordinals: Where do you stand?

[DooMAD]

Indeed, it is very ironic to bring the "my freedom" (to spam) argument while at the same time act like a dictator. Whatever DooMAD says is the law and nobody can say or do anything about it. DooMAD owns Bitcoin and nobody can do or say anything against their decision.

You will eat your spam, and you will like it. The omnipotent ruler has spoken.

Cool, so I'm the "bad guy" now for telling it like it is.  You can put all your hate on me if that makes you feel better.  Shoot the messenger.  Have a good vent.  I doubt it's going to change the situation, though.  Lemme know when you're ready to listen to reason.

Until then, feel free to waste as much time as you like campaigning to ban stuff in an open-source environment where someone determined can create any number of different scripts that allow anyone to upload material to the blockchain.  Or any blockchain.  People have put this crap on Dogecoin and that doesn't even have SegWit/Taproot/"softened rules" of any kind (but no doubt, according to franky1, that's still Core's fault somehow.  Keep listening to him, he's the smartest person there is.   ).  Whatever code you might produce to try and stop them, they can just find a new route around it.  See how for you get with an endless game of cat and mouse.  Sounds like futility to me, but best of luck to you.  You'll need it.

We live in a world where idiots can upload stuff to blockchains.  It's a fact of life now.  Resist all you like.  Blame me all you want.  Makes little difference.

[1714288717]

1714288717

[1714288717]

1714288717

[1714288717]

1714288717

[1714288717]

1714288717

[franky1]

CORE WROTE THE CODE.. nearly every line today is different to the code of 2009
so yes their exploits are their fault
THEY MADE THE HOLE
oh and remember your REKT campaigns of wanting to destroy any other full node brand that was not core, that wanted to propose changes.. yep you love that core are the only rule change proposers..
so yea you evicting other potential proposer nodes off he network means you have no scapegoats left to blame..
.. and no.. an miner(ASIC) does not create code. nor does an asic choose transactions. it just SHA256 hashs a hash

as for the exploit..
YOU LOVE AND ADMIT THEY MADE THE HOLE 'coz freedom'

stop pretending that core has nothing to do with code changes of the bitcoin rules

by the way..
.. you are confused

DOGE was born as a meme
bitcoin was not.. bitcoin got turned into a meme library DUE TO CODE CHANGES DONE BY CORE DEVS that THEN spammers were able to use

i guarantee you that you were not able to put 0.5mb.. 1mb, 4mb of bloat inside one tx previous to the changes CORE DONE

yep years ago there was rules like a 520byte limit for signature space.. now gone
many other rules and checks.. gone

try to learn about bitcoin

stop pretending people always had the ability to put just 1tx with the size of upto 4mb since bitcoins genesis..

[nutildah]

People have put this crap on Dogecoin and that doesn't even have SegWit/Taproot/"softened rules" of any kind (but no doubt, according to franky1, that's still Core's fault somehow.

Dogecoin surpassed 1.1 million transactions per day yesterday, which allowed it to surpass both BTC and ETH for the first time ever, or in a long time anyway. The dumbest thing about it is the "DRC20" tokens being minted in these transactions can't be transferred, because nobody bothered to map out all the dogetoshis like they did for Ordinals. So nobody knows where the inscriptions actually are, lol.

Not that there's too many parallels between Bitcoin's situation and Dogecoin's, but the lead Doge dev announced yesterday what he would be doing to combat tx "spam" and the answer was nothing, its up to the nodes to create limits on what they will or won't relay.

https://twitter.com/patricklodder/status/1659165005370073088

He ends with,

"What I will not do, is a software release that enforces a policy once more. This is not negotiable to me.

You're in control now."

I wouldn't be surprised if Bitcoin Core devs are taking a similar approach.

[larry_vw_1955]

bitcoin had a fee formulae.
priority = sum(input_value_in_base_units * input_age)/size_in_bytes

it was just a formula. no one had to pay any attention to it if they didn't want to.

but was removed around the era when bitcoin-qt became "core" managed

miners were never able to be forced to accept zero-fee transactions. so it doesn't really matter if it was removed or not.

heck core doesnt even count bytes as bytes anymore either.

i assume you are against the segwit for some reason. but according to wikipedia, it solved the signature malleability problem and made bitcoin more scalable I guess because now the signature only had 1/4 the weight as the other transaction data. So you could stuff more transactions into a block.

you don't have to use segwit though. just use legacy addresses and vbytes equals bytes.

let alone not having rules for fee selection

if you let miners select the fee, they'll probably want the fee to be higher. if you let individual users select the fee, they'll make it as low as they can. that's what they call the fee market. that's the only rational way things can work unless you want to subsidize miners with a constant block reward that doesn't decrease by 50% every 4 years.

yep bitcoin USED to have rules where at the time of under 0.5mb of blockspace 0.05mb(10%) had a 'priority' where older coins would get priority even if they paid little to no fee..

"priority" was just a suggestion. miners didn't have to pay any attention to it if they didnt want to, i would assume. a rule is something that must be followed. priority was not a rule.

there were other things too that helped keep fees low for the average users.. but that has all changed. and NOW its just a 100% bidding war with no controls, no formulae, no rules to keep fees low.. instead its the opposite

i'm kind of surprised to see you saying statements like this franky. you know how bitcoin works. and you very well know there is no way to create a set of rules that would keep the fees low. all you have is the fee market. and you just described how it works. i thought you realized that's how it works when you started using bitcoin in the very beginning, didn't you realize bitcoin fees are based on a competitive bidding thing aka fee market? and now you want that changed? changed to what?

but hey it seems you have been suckered into the spoon feeds of an ass kisser lulling you to sleep with his fake charm..  rather then doing the research. well goodluck with that. doomad has a new clan member. enjoy it.

ok so i have an idea, lets introduce a new consensus rule let's call it franky's consensus rule which says that any transaction paying more than $10 cannot be a valid transaction. you'll have to help out a little though in the sense that every week, you should update the bitcoin network on what $10 is worth in satoshis. then miners will use franky's consensus rule to make sure that no one pays more than $10 worth of satoshis in bitcoin fees.

CORE WROTE THE CODE.. nearly every line today is different to the code of 2009

i always said that for me, if bitcoin would have just stayed the same exact way it started, not adding on all these extra things like segwit and taproot, i could be just fine with using just legacy addresses and op_return if i was really feeling like storing some monkey. but bitcoin got way more complex now. maybe you're starting to agree with me that designing something once and never changing it unless it is to fix some serious bug is the way to go? the KISS principle at work. do one thing and do it well. don't try to do too many things because then you might not be doing any of them well...

with that said, we're in the minority if we believe that philosophy so the only option is forking bitcoin to be the way it used to be way back in 2009. fork it at a way earlier block height too.  but we already had bitcoin sv but it didn't adhere to that philosophy as it turns out...

[thecodebear]

Indeed, it is very ironic to bring the "my freedom" (to spam) argument while at the same time act like a dictator.

DooMAD is of the opinion that being free to transact, as in freedom, is more important than being free to transact, as in beer. But even if you prioritize transaction costs rather than censorship-resistance: the Bitcoin network being congested should be seen as the normal state. I don't want to disappoint you, but you'll have to be more generous with the miner, because sooner or later you'll become his main income. There is no bright future for Bitcoin without a shitload of unconfirmed transactions, so if you're here for low costs, better study second-layers.

Yes of course congested is always going to be the normal state of Bitcoin. We wouldn't want it any other way, because if it isn't congested that means people aren't using it. But there is a huge difference between congested with monetary transactions and congested with stupid crap like using it for cloud hosting of silly images. Most people I think want it congested because it is useful money, and don't want the people who use it as useful money to have a hard time using it because it is instead congested with stupid jpeg cloud hosting.

We're at a problem now when unintended uses are starting to spam the blockchain. It's not a huge problem at the moment, but during the next bull market, or in a few years when 10x as many people use Bitcoin as today, it's gonna be a serious problem if these Jpeg pushers are still around taking away space from people who are actually trying to use Bitcoin for its intended purpose.

[pooya87]

Indeed, it is very ironic to bring the "my freedom" (to spam) argument while at the same time act like a dictator.

DooMAD is of the opinion that being free to transact, as in freedom, is more important than being free to transact, as in beer. But even if you prioritize transaction costs rather than censorship-resistance: the Bitcoin network being congested should be seen as the normal state. I don't want to disappoint you, but you'll have to be more generous with the miner, because sooner or later you'll become his main income. There is no bright future for Bitcoin without a shitload of unconfirmed transactions, so if you're here for low costs, better study second-layers.

Yes of course congested is always going to be the normal state of Bitcoin. We wouldn't want it any other way, because if it isn't congested that means people aren't using it. But there is a huge difference between congested with monetary transactions and congested with stupid crap like using it for cloud hosting of silly images. Most people I think want it congested because it is useful money, and don't want the people who use it as useful money to have a hard time using it because it is instead congested with stupid jpeg cloud hosting.

We're at a problem now when unintended uses are starting to spam the blockchain. It's not a huge problem at the moment, but during the next bull market, or in a few years when 10x as many people use Bitcoin as today, it's gonna be a serious problem if these Jpeg pushers are still around taking away space from people who are actually trying to use Bitcoin for its intended purpose.

Exactly. Just one correction: the content of what they store on bitcoin blockchain is not important at all. I keep saying that even if they store the cure for cancer (as opposed to monkey pics), it still is malicious.

Generally speaking the arguments about decentralization, censorship resistance, fee market, etc. that some users like DooMAD keep bringing up are not wrong on their own, the problem is that they have nothing to do with this topic! Since we aren't arguing about normal usage of bitcoin, this Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System that led to all these troubles. We are arguing about a malicious usage of this system for something it is not designed to be (a cloud storage) that is causing problems.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Yes of course congested is always going to be the normal state of Bitcoin. We wouldn't want it any other way, because if it isn't congested that means people aren't using it. But there is a huge difference between congested with monetary transactions and congested with stupid crap like using it for cloud hosting of silly images.

There's obviously a difference between storing jpegs and doing monetary transactions, but as a Bitcoin user, I have absolutely no interest in knowing both, because both obey to the same rules. Just as meaningless a monkey might seem to you, the same meaningful seems a transaction moving a million dollars worth of bitcoin to me; zero, I don't care about the business of complete strangers, I only care about mine.

We are arguing about a malicious usage of this system for something it is not designed to be (a cloud storage) that is causing problems.

It is a cloud storage, more or less. No matter how it shouldn't be used likewise, it can be a very inefficient, expensive cloud storage. Miners, users, Satoshi himself, did make usage of it, when there was surplus in block capacity. Nothing really has changed since then, except the surplus. People need to transact, but there appear some fellows who want to make usage of this cloud, and are more generous than you. The problem lies with you.

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?

Why can't we accept that a fool and his money are soon parted? Why do we want to part them ourselves, with the risk of parting the invaluable principles our network relies on?

[franky1]

and yet blackhat is happy if genuine bitcoin users wanting to transfer actual sats are rejected because a jpeg is taking up the room.

bitcoin had rules. those rules were REMOVED, softened, weakened. so to pretend that jpegs meet the rule is wrong
they get let into a block due to rules being removed to just "is valid" by not applying any verification checks of content of the witness

a lack of rule is not a rule. its an oversight. an exploit

EG imagine a castle that had a drawbridge and knights watching the path to only allowing in real horses made of meat. that are alive and breathing.
and some idiot decided to remove the rules and let the drawbridge stay open where the knights are no longer monitoring the path.

then a wooden trojan horse containing dead monkeys came rolling into the castle. bringing disease into the castle.
would you say well disease is allowed. thats the rule

and when people who want to trade between different villages are rejected from entering the castle.. due to the disease.  is that again a fair "rule". or an abuse causing traders to not be able to trade and instead letting the castle go into economic meltdown of dead monkeys filling up the castle as the main activity

a fair rule is that if the purpose of the drawbridge security was to ensure that traders can trade between villages. where there were rules of showing signed proof of their trade desire. showing proof they were not hauling bloated dead monkeys..  .. then that rule should be brought back in. to protect the castle and to keep the real economic activity alive


i know blackhat does not care about bitcoin or the economics of the community. he only cares about himself. he would rather see people move out the castle and move to a different village, one he can scam fees out of by being a middle man .. rather than care about the castle

[BlackHatCoiner]

I don't talk with people who don't agree with me on Bitcoin's most important principle being censorship resistance.

[jokers10]

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?

[DooMAD]

Generally speaking the arguments about decentralization, censorship resistance, fee market, etc. that some users like DooMAD keep bringing up are not wrong on their own, the problem is that they have nothing to do with this topic! Since we aren't arguing about normal usage of bitcoin, this Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System that led to all these troubles. We are arguing about a malicious usage of this system for something it is not designed to be (a cloud storage) that is causing problems.

I can see where you're coming from.  But, what I'm struggling with is that, when I first got into Bitcoin back in 2013, I watched a whole bunch of videos, listened to Andreas Antonopoulos and other such personalities, read loads of different articles and websites.  Even back then, people were saying things like "currency is just the first application".  That Bitcoin usage would eventually expand to include things like property rights, deeds and other financial instruments.  If I went looking, I could probably find dozens of examples.

It's certainly possible that people weren't pausing to consider the implications of promoting these ideas.  Perhaps it was just some starry-eyed fantasies about what might be possible with this exciting new technology.  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.  There wasn't any community backlash that I remember seeing when people discussed these ideas.  That only happened once people actually started doing it.  So, imagine my surprise when some people suddenly start saying this can't happen, when other people have been saying it absolutely would happen for the entire time I've been here.

Now, I fully concede that no one ever would have anticipated that the property rights in question would be a bunch of foolish speculators who want to own some inane pictures.  I genuinely do appreciate why some people feel like that's a step too far.  It's absurd.  Borderline insane.  You won't hear any arguments from me on that front.  I don't understand the appeal in the slightest.  I want no part of that.

However, if people have been moving in this direction for the better part of a decade, completely unchallenged, is it really justified to then move the goalposts on them and say it was never meant to be this way?  I get the sense we're trying to shut the gate after the horse has bolted.  If we really wanted to prevent this sort of thing, I'm fairly sure we're about 10 years too late.  

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.  Things that would have tangible benefits for adoption and utility, take up less space and not cause so much disruption.  But I'm not convinced that every single Bitcoin user has been left with the overwhelming impression that Bitcoin was always "just money".  And I'm far from convinced that taking a heavy-handed approach is a viable solution to this issue.  I know slippery-slope arguments aren't considered valid in most cases, but I do have serous concerns about Bitcoin remaining permissionless and open.

That's where I'm at right now.  Thoroughly dismayed by calls for a centrally-planned intervention over something that could have been averted if people had raised their concerns earlier.  Much like Bitcoin itself, I don't see how you put the genie back in the bottle.  This can't be un-invented.

[franky1]

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?

bitcoin for its first decade had rules that ensured efficiency by not allowing a TX to produce upto 4mb of bloat. where signature space had to contain signatures and methods to prove the spending of a utxo..

the rules have been removed, the checks have become unchecked and data is allowed NOW to be pased without rules or formats

dont pretend that whats happening now is that upto 4mb of bloat has always been the way and where you think that implementing rules is new.. its actually returning rules to how things should be. lean efficient spending of bitcoins

and dont pretend that fixing the removals will stop people transacting. it wont people will still be able to spend their utxos. they just want be able to add dead weight useless junk data to it to the extent that has been RECENTLY exploited

[franky1]

That's where I'm at right now.  Thoroughly dismayed by calls for a centrally-planned intervention over something that could have been averted if people had raised their concerns earlier.  Much like Bitcoin itself, I don't see how you put the genie back in the bottle.  This can't be un-invented.

doomad you are part of the idiot brigade. you dont want ordinals to be stopped.
you only NOW AND AGAIN pretend to be against it when you lose fans. and hope calling it junk between adorations of it think you can win fans back with ass kissery

secondly. when features that caused the exploit were promoted. their promotion lulled the majority to sleep with fake promises. and those thats didnt take the promises at face value pointed out the problems, you lot were screaming at those calling out the issues,. trying to get people to shut up about the abuses. saying "its not a flaw its a feature" trying to lull everyone into giving up pointing out flaws and hoping everyone just lets the flaws continue..
you also done things like tell people if you dont like to "f**k off to another network"
heck you even were shouting how devs should not take responsibility. where you wanted to blame it on user error or miner caused. heck you didnt even want people telling devs how to fix things. by saying your authoritarian gods should not be told what to do.. and calling anyone that wanted to get devs to fix THEIR flaws. the authoritarians.

if you think no one was mentioning stuff in the past. CHECK YOUR OWN ARGUMENTS OVER THE YEARS. READ YOUR OWN POST HISTORY

anyways lets use an example of broken promises..
take 2 promises of taproot for instance
1. taproot will look exactly like a segwit where no one can tell the difference between taproot or segwit
2. taproot scripts will only be the length of 1 signature length thus not bloat the witness.

so heres the issue
1. taproot is VERY easy to spot.. bc1p instead of bc1q
2. taproot allows upto 4mb of witness cludge in one transaction

many people have for years brought up the issues when things got softened. you want to pretend "just franky" and then with that ignorance say "because its just franky he must be wrong because no one back him up"

sorry but many have called it out. but its the ignorance of "trust a dev not the rules" that has been heard more.

[jokers10]

bitcoin for its first decade had rules that ensured efficiency by not allowing a TX to produce upto 4mb of bloat. where signature space had to contain signatures and methods to prove the spending of a utxo..

the rules have been removed, the checks have become unchecked and data is allowed NOW to be pased without rules or formats

dont pretend that whats happening now is that upto 4mb of bloat has always been the way and where you think that implementing rules is new.. its actually returning rules to how things should be. lean efficient spending of bitcoins

and dont pretend that fixing the removals will stop people transacting. it wont people will still be able to spend their utxos. they just want be able to add dead weight useless junk data to it to the extent that has been RECENTLY exploited

But it is done. It is what we have at the moment, not what was centuries ago, not what was yesterday, it is what we have now. And the choice is not between good and bad, the choice is between bad and even worse. And system rollback is what even worse. Of course we know that some other projects easily done that, and why not to use those projects if to agree with that? Because that is what making those projects not the bitcoin. If anything can be undone than everything can be undone.

So I understand what you say. I understand that we've got a problem we haven't escaped. If there was a way to return to the past and not to do so, I 'd prefer that way. But it is impossible. And, as I see it, a discussed rollback is much worse than the problem we face with.

[franky1]

But it is done. It is what we have at the moment, not what was centuries ago, not what was yesterday, it is what we have now. And the choice is not between good and bad, the choice is between bad and even worse. And system rollback is what even worse. Of course we know that some other projects easily done that, and why not to use those projects if to agree with that? Because that is what making those projects not the bitcoin. If anything can be undone than everything can be undone.

So I understand what you say. I understand that we've got a problem we haven't escaped. If there was a way to return to the past and not to do so, I 'd prefer that way. But it is impossible. And, as I see it, a discussed rollback is much worse than the problem we face with.

its not a system roll back..
its reinforcing/re-enabling rules and format expectations..
EG its not a scenario of reject all blocks of 2023(rollback) to go back to a clean blockchain without jpegs

its a case of a after block 7xx,xxx rules are reinforced to the set formats of actual bitcoin utility. requiring transactions to have efficient byte utility 
thus the current jpegs stay . but no new jpegs and junk can continue being added to the blockchain after block 7xx,xxx

and yes it can be done. without making things worse. and yes people can still spend their UTXO's just without added junk dead weight crap

[TechW87]

Bitcoin purpose is to provide an alternative to Fiat money system. It wasnt made to be an alternative for a image hosting site.

Heck, even turing complete chains like ETH dont store actual jpegs on their nodes.


With all  "Saying NO to Ordinals means NO decentralization" talk, we are making bitcoin look like a bad alternative to fiat.



These ordinal freaks keep saying they help increase miner revenue. What will miners do with higher fees paid, while bitcoin's value proposition to being an alternative to fiat and its USD price keep trending towards zero.

[jokers10]

But it is done. It is what we have at the moment, not what was centuries ago, not what was yesterday, it is what we have now. And the choice is not between good and bad, the choice is between bad and even worse. And system rollback is what even worse. Of course we know that some other projects easily done that, and why not to use those projects if to agree with that? Because that is what making those projects not the bitcoin. If anything can be undone than everything can be undone.

So I understand what you say. I understand that we've got a problem we haven't escaped. If there was a way to return to the past and not to do so, I 'd prefer that way. But it is impossible. And, as I see it, a discussed rollback is much worse than the problem we face with.

its not a system roll back..
its reinforcing/re-enabling rules and format expectations..
EG its not a scenario of reject all blocks of 2023(rollback) to go back to a clean blockchain without jpegs

its a case of a after block 7xx,xxx rules are reinforced to the set formats of actual bitcoin utility. requiring transactions to have efficient byte utility 
thus the current jpegs stay . but no new jpegs and junk can continue being added to the blockchain after block 7xx,xxx

and yes it can be done. without making things worse. and yes people can still spend their UTXO's just without added junk dead weight crap

So you want to say that it is possible to let those ones who already have "tokens" to operate them freely, to buy them and to sell them as long as they want, but not to let to create new "tokens", right? And how can be it done if to talk from the technical side? What will prevent from creating new "tokens" but let to operate the same old "tokens"?

As i understand, it is impossible. You can or let to operate "tokens" which makes possible to create new "tokens" also, or ban creating new ones, but old ones become useless, so it is an expropriation.

[nutildah]

Heck, even turing complete chains like ETH dont store actual jpegs on their nodes.

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

[larry_vw_1955]

I can see where you're coming from.  But, what I'm struggling with is that, when I first got into Bitcoin back in 2013, I watched a whole bunch of videos, listened to Andreas Antonopoulos and other such personalities, read loads of different articles and websites.

What does Andreas have to say about all of this? he's a pretty smart guy and he's a huge proponent of bitcoin. we need to find out what he has to say about it.

[serveria.com]

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.