If Bitcoin Ordinals endlessly spam the Bitcoin mempool to the brim, what next?

[logfiles]

Overview:

Bitcoin Ordinals is a new protocol that enables users to explore, transfer, and receive individual satoshis, which can include unique data.

The protocol uses “inscriptions,” which are arbitrary content like text or images that can be added to sequentially numbered satoshis to create unique “digital artefacts.” These artefacts, which are NFTs in effect, can be held and transferred across the Bitcoin network like any other sats.

Source

My general opinion about NFTs still remains the same, just another bullshit way of getting money from gullible noobs by "creators"

Now the issue is these NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain have started to spam the Bitcoin network. The mempool usage is moving towards 300 MB consequently spiking the transactions fees



What happens if the spam stays on for months or even a year plus (Well, we know what happened to Ethereum)?

Will there be a case where the community decides to improve the Bitcoin network to get rid of the spam?

[Charles-Tim]

Will there be a case where the community decides to improve the Bitcoin network to get rid of the spam?

No for now, maybe it would be possible with other accepted proposals in the future.

Make use if lightning network.
Wait for the weekends to see lower mempool congestion and lower fee most probably.

That is all I could think of right now.

[tbct_mt2]

What happens if the spam stays on for months or even a year plus (Well, we know what happened to Ethereum)?

Will there be a case where the community decides to improve the Bitcoin network to get rid of the spam?

Challenge is helpful for growth.

In 2017, the dust attack and spam on network helps us to have a better capacity of Bitcoin network to handle transactions today.
In 2023, the Ordinals attack can force Bitcoin developers and community to build new solution and reach to a new consensus to make a better capacity for it. It's good, not harmful in long term.

Waiting transactions in mempools are low transaction fee rates. People don't join fee race too much as I see. Fee rates are about 10 sat/vbyte are good enough and if you can wait for weekends, you can use lower fee rates like 3 to 5 sat/vbyte.

https://mempool.space/

It is different than 2 or 3 years ago with low Segwit adoption, people joined fee rate race and use very high rates like 50 sat/vbyte or 100 sat/vbyte.

[Artemis3]

Yeah, the powers that be are sabotaging Bitcoin to make you flee to a parallel blockchain or a more centralized "workaround", rather than genuine Bitcoin. Their plan seems to be going fine, they found a vulnerability and are exploiting it...

tbct_mt2 when you say "people join the fee rate", you seem to skip the fact that its the wallets doing it automatically. If some exchange wants to move coins around from a cold wallet or whatever, a domino effect spreads "automatically" thanks to this "guess the network fee" algorithm. Rarely people know to disable the guessing and go with a manually set tx fee, they will just blame it on Bitcoin being "expensive/useless".

So now that spam is pegging the mempool to the max, what will happen the next time such event occurs? What when the next Ordinals comes and joins the spamming because its more lucrative for them to sell spam than do Bitcoin transactions? Of course recommending "other" methods of payment, soon the Bitcoin blockchain will be dedicated to this since they are willing to pay more than mere transactions would.

No doubt to the benefit of altcoiners, etc; that want to bury Bitcoin.

[franky1]

Fee rates are about 10 sat/vbyte are good enough and if you can wait for weekends, you can use lower fee rates like 3 to 5 sat/vbyte.

It is different than 2 or 3 years ago with low Segwit adoption, people joined fee rate race and use very high rates like 50 sat/vbyte or 100 sat/vbyte.

"good enough" for whom.. since when?
you do know that a third of the worlds hourly minimum wage is below a tx fee currently.. right?

do you really think that paying an hour of labour to move money is "good enough"
im british. but even i can see outside of my local expectation and think about international concerns of an international currency

anyway. lets see if things really have got better or worse since segwit..


2016(pre segwit) the average btc was ~$450
meaning 0.00000100 was  $0.00045
so an average 2in 2out tx (374byte) at 100 sat/byte =$0.1683

2022(pre ordinal) the average btc was ~$17000
meaning 0.00000005 was  $0.00085
meaning 0.00000010 was  $0.0017
 the average transaction size was 650bytes
at 5sat/byte was $0.5525
at 10sat/byte was $1.105

the data/stats for 2022 show the average transaction cost for 2022 was more like $1.17
not 55c nor 17cents
..
as for saying
"just pay more join the fee war"
"just wait longer, upto a couple days for confirm"
"just wait for weekends to make a payment"

are all silly delay, excuses to not get the fee's sorted and the transactions per block sorted. by instead saying "yea dont use bitcoin as much or be prepared to wait or pay more"

those silly excuses are not good to tell people to do in a payment system

especially when its ethos is a payment system for the unbanked whereby the unbanked population see $1 as many hours of minimum wage

the solution is not "pay more".. "wait longer".. "use another network"

the solution is:
leaner transactions
fee mechanism that punishes the spammers not the lean/genuine spenders
remove the byte-miscounting cludge and open the 4mb for genuine payment data not dead 'weight'

result is more genuine transaction payments per block. meaning people pay less per tx but more get access per block

[Charles-Tim]

It is different than 2 or 3 years ago with low Segwit adoption, people joined fee rate race and use very high rates like 50 sat/vbyte or 100 sat/vbyte.

But we should know that low segwit adoption was not the casuse of mempool congestion at the time. The first mempool congestion at the time was after bitcoin halving, when more people started to buy bitcoin that resulted to mempool congestion. The second was when Chinese government banned bitcoin mining to the extent that mining hash rate reconded in china at the time went down to zero, over 60% of the bitcoin hash rates were from Chinese miners, this resulted in reduction of mining hash rates and increase in block mined time getting beyond 10 minutes most often and this resulted in mempool congestion until the mining difficulty was adjusted.

[Tytanowy Janusz]

My general opinion about NFTs still remains the same, just another bullshit way of getting money from gullible noobs by "creators"

What happens if the spam stays on for months or even a year plus (Well, we know what happened to Ethereum)?

Will there be a case where the community decides to improve the Bitcoin network to get rid of the spam?

in my opinion, the new utility made people just test what it is and how it works, and hence such interest and spam on the network. Sooner or later it will calm down, the volume of this type of transactions will drop by 99% and everything will return to normal, because as you yourself pointed out "just another bullshit"

High fees will also push such transactions to other chains (like BSC).

[AverageGlabella]

Wait for the weekends to see lower mempool congestion and lower fee most probably.

This is not a long term solution though and it would bring many inconveniences to people who want to make transactions daily. You cannot use a currency for every day use if you have to wait for the weekends to use it. I think something needs to be done about ordinals and maybe making lightening network mandatory is the best solution.

Can we make a new fork and stop ordinals from congesting the blockchain by not allowing the data to be posted?

[Husires]

Will there be a case where the community decides to improve the Bitcoin network to get rid of the spam?

If the fees rise, what will force the person to use the main network while the possibility of using the lightning network? Or any solutions for the second layer? Just like it happened with polygon.
The problem of fees is considered a problem by increasing the alert, which is the real transactions that must be conducted on the network, and therefore the more users increase, the more this problem appears, but its solution will be by developing more and more solutions. As for spam, it is temporary and linked to a specific trend such as NFT, and it is not sustainable growth.

[dzungmobile]

High fees will also push such transactions to other chains (like BSC).

Altcoins want to do this. Altcoin enthusiasts believe in promises of altcoin developers that they are building very potential chains.

After people pour into a new potential chain, it will be over loaded and congested, then become halted or dead like Solana  

Ethereum in 2017 tried to say it too but in 2018 bull run of Ethereum and in 2020, 2021 of Defi 2.0, GameFi, Metaverse, transaction fees on Ethereum chain are for the rich, not for normal crypto users like us.

[Artemis3]

So we have a collection of entities interested in spamming Bitcoin, that are now observing how its possible to do so in a sustainable way... Since there is a market willing to pay for the spam in detriment of genuine transactions...

[avikz]

My general opinion about NFTs still remains the same, just another bullshit way of getting money from gullible noobs by "creators"

My two satoshis! NFTs are just bullshit and makes no sense at all. Just a bunch of spammers in disguise of creators, trying to play games on digital contents.

Will there be a case where the community decides to improve the Bitcoin network to get rid of the spam?

I don't see any possibility for now. But if this becomes a madness, then it needs to be eliminated. But unfortunately that's not how the decentralised network works. A serious amount of efforts need to be taken before getting this done. I will still request to wait and watch for couple of days.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Will there be a case where the community decides to improve the Bitcoin network to get rid of the spam?

There is yet no known method for discouraging this spam without introducing censorship other than the transaction fee. So no improvements. You just have to accept that these are perfectly valid and currency-based transactions, unless you want Bitcoin to switch to a pro-censorship network.

fee mechanism that punishes the spammers not the lean/genuine spenders

How can you distinguish spam on a protocol level to punish it?

[mendace]

Will there be a case where the community decides to improve the Bitcoin network to get rid of the spam?

As I had already said in another thread, the issue of NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain will be short-lived but above all I don't understand why people have begun to notice only now that these images can be recorded, if you analyze the past blocks you will realize that in the blockchain it was saved a little bit of everything including the images.

[stompix]

What happens if the spam stays on for months or even a year plus (Well, we know what happened to Ethereum)?

Nothing, we just pay more and I might start mining again with all those juicy fees! 
If the fees stay high it means there is still usage, so people keep paying, just as how it happens with ETH, it will be bad for the ones doing transactions on the chain but at the same time it will have a positive effect on pushing more LN adoption. One more positive fact is that it is driving franky1 mad, as seen above!

Will there be a case where the community decides to improve the Bitcoin network to get rid of the spam?

Highly unlikely to see any change, after the block size war nobody will try to open that can of worms again, especially since it would mean actually acknowledging a bit of what big blockers were saying is true. The only other thing is to ban ordinals, but that opens another box, this time it's Pandora's turn. So, the users will have to adapt or at least wait till the hype will die, which I assume will be faster than most expect.

[hatshepsut93]

Will there be a case where the community decides to improve the Bitcoin network to get rid of the spam?

You can't get rid of the spam, Bitcoin network can't distinguish spam from non-spam, the mechanism to combat that is the fee market. If people are willing to pay high fees for some stupid NFT use case, there's nothing we can do. If the community decided to make a hard fork and remove the unintentional NFT feature, that would create more problems than it solves, because it doesn't fundamentally address the fee market, and spam can return in other forms.

[panganib999]

Overview:

Bitcoin Ordinals is a new protocol that enables users to explore, transfer, and receive individual satoshis, which can include unique data.

The protocol uses “inscriptions,” which are arbitrary content like text or images that can be added to sequentially numbered satoshis to create unique “digital artefacts.” These artefacts, which are NFTs in effect, can be held and transferred across the Bitcoin network like any other sats.

Source

My general opinion about NFTs still remains the same, just another bullshit way of getting money from gullible noobs by "creators"

Now the issue is these NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain have started to spam the Bitcoin network. The mempool usage is moving towards 300 MB consequently spiking the transactions fees



What happens if the spam stays on for months or even a year plus (Well, we know what happened to Ethereum)?

Will there be a case where the community decides to improve the Bitcoin network to get rid of the spam?

Everyone's warranted to their own say, in any case I see this issue with Bitcoin Ordinals as having both good and bad sides to it.

For instance, since this spams the mempool and jacks the transaction price high, at least in the future coz the effects aren't that much apparent nowadays, this will cause huge problems for the growth of the network and the industry itself, might even cause a huge collapse as more and more people switch to a different network that is not as congested as bitcoin could be in the future.

There's also the story of the past where a certain challenge (which I forgot the details of really) urged the whole network to improve upon itself and better cater to the general public, I can see this being the more apparent outcome in this situation but the former could still pose some truth, especially nowadays.

[franky1]

idiots say people and protocols cant identify spam. and a fee mechanism of 'punish everyone' by making every pay more is the only option
.. they are wrong

spam is identifiable,
repeatedly spending value every block = spam
adding in memes into a financial network = spam
having a crap tonne of outputs with sat-dust amounts = spam

its those types of transactions that should have fee multipliers in them. not everyone in general
and yes if they can make legacy end up costing 4x more.. then yes they can punish certain transactions more than others

[logfiles]

Just an update

The mempool is now getting towards 500 MBs of unconfirmed transactions, and it isn't even one of those times when the market is crazy and people are in panic moving BTC back and forth.



This is crazy already! I have never seen the mempool at 500 MB, Maybe I wasn't just observant in the past. Imagine what will happen during a serious bull run or dump!

And those who said that transaction fees will keep low because people will not join the fee race, Just look at the fee rate right now, and it's just getting started @tbct_mt2 @ 

[stompix]

This is crazy already!
And those who said that transaction fees will keep low because people will not join the fee race, Just look at the fee rate right now, and it's just getting started @tbct_mt2 @  

Neah, it's not crazy! Or better saying it, not yet!
And the fees are not that bad either, the last block that was mined, 779946, confirmed 15sat/b transactions, that's way cheaper than what we had in 2018 when you couldn't get in the next block even at 10 times that

Just look at this:
https://mempool.space/block/0000000000000000000e9fbc462c2e196f19da54eec678e701a0648cce63d29b

Fee span   478 - 2,010 sat/vB
Median fee   ~480 sat/vB $10.04

The difference here is that ordinals can't afford to pay those fees, not when you're inscribing crap that will not get you more than 10$, so there won't be any fee race that will drive the prices to such levels.