Why was Ordinal NFTs created?

[MeCsc]

The introduction of inscriptions on Bitcoin’s mainnet  made the creation of Ordinal NFTs on the bitcoin Blockchain. I have read lot of negative comments about the effects of Ordinal NFTs on Bitcoin Blockchain and so I would like to know why it was still created despite negative effects it can have,Although there are some positive comments, The negative comments are something that can cause stressing issues later on.

[philipma1957]

Think of the blockchain as a road.

When it was built it was designed to handle data traffic.

So someone has figured a way to put data on the chain and monetize it.

ie ordinals.

Arguing against ordinal traffic is pretty much like arguing against single occupied cars on highways.

They crowd the road bla bla bla.

Most people simply don’t understand the value of ordinals or nfts.

Simply small in the box thinking.

[d5000]

Short answer: Because you can ... 

Long answer: A mechanism to create "series numbers" of satoshis was discussed already several years ago in this forum. I don't remember the exact year (and also not the link to the thread) but I mean it was around 2013. So it was only a matter of time until someone might have read the thread and simply implemented it.

What's my problem with Ordinals is not the "ordinal system" itself, but the Inscription feature. And here I do have a question to Casey Rodarmor (the creator):

Why did you create the NFT system as a Taproot hack, and not with the established data storing mechanisms, i.e. OP_RETURN? I know "it's cheaper", but I think if he had implemented it in a system where large NFTs would have been stored in several OP_RETURN transactions (or even better: on a data sidechain, where only the hashes would have been stored on the Bitcoin blockchain), people wouldn't have that many problems with it.

[pooya87]

The simple fact that it is called "NFT" while it is not NFT and not even a token, should answer your question that this is a scam. This is basically an attack that is created to turn bitcoin blockchain into a cloud storage and effectively making it unusable as a "peer to peer digital cash".

Otherwise they could have created the same system on a side-chain that would have also been a lot cheaper than using bitcoin mainnet and abusing Taproot scripts. Which is another reason why Ordinals is malicious.

[thecodebear]

Well it was created because it could be created. Anything that can be created will be created. The creator of Ordinals realized there was a way to spam data into transactions, an unintended consequence that was left open in the Taproot upgrade. People don't like it because it spams data into transactions, therefore filling up blocks with arbitrary data in the form of NFTs rather than monetary transaction data.

It's an interesting use of bitcoin, but it in no way helps Bitcoin, while it does hurt Bitcoin's ability to perform monetary transactions on-chain, which as we all know was already at a premium. Unfortunately there is a market for lame collections of digital images to be sold for money and therefore the economics of NFTs is such that the transaction fees are worth sending them around on Bitcoin.

Imagine you have a four lane highway and then someone realizes that there is no rule against circuses marching along the highway. Suddenly you've got several lanes filled up with a circus act while the people actually trying to travel have to be stuffed into one or two lanes instead of four. And there is a small but sufficient amount of those people who are willing to pay to watch the circus in the other lanes so the circus act clogging up the road is economically viable. That's what NFTs does to Bitcoin.




An interesting idea to think about is if NFTs end up spamming Bitcoin so much that they take over the chain, will it end up being in the best interest of Bitcoin to hard fork away with an anti-Ordinals upgrade and leave the original blockchain as a dead-end NFT-focused s**tcoin. That would be a very drastic scenario but Ordinals is essentially a spam attack on Bitcoin that is unlikely to go away as it seems even though the NFT fad largely died off already there are still enough people interested in paying money for cheap collections of digital images on the blockchain that the economics of NFTs are still worth it. The general consensus of the Bitcoin is to keep the chain immutable and not hard fork, but in cases such as this where unintended consequences of upgrades end up attacking Bitcoin and making it less useful the community may at some point need to consider moving the chain on to an upgrade that isn't compatible with such an attack, unless a soft-fork to stop Ordinals is possible.


But the answer to the questions is it was created because it could be. And yes it is an interesting use of Bitcoin, it's just not a good use of Bitcoin, due to Bitcoin being the digital currency for all of humanity and transaction space being at a premium. The last thing Bitcoin needs is arbitrary non-currency data lessening its ability to move money around.

[philipma1957]

Well it was created because it could be created. Anything that can be created will be created. The creator of Ordinals realized there was a way to spam data into transactions, an unintended consequence that was left open in the Taproot upgrade. People don't like it because it spams data into transactions, therefore filling up blocks with arbitrary data in the form of NFTs rather than monetary transaction data.

It's an interesting use of bitcoin, but it in no way helps Bitcoin, while it does hurt Bitcoin's ability to perform monetary transactions on-chain, which as we all know was already at a premium. Unfortunately there is a market for lame collections of digital images to be sold for money and therefore the economics of NFTs is such that the transaction fees are worth sending them around on Bitcoin.

Imagine you have a four lane highway and then someone realizes that there is no rule against circuses marching along the highway. Suddenly you've got several lanes filled up with a circus act while the people actually trying to travel have to be stuffed into one or two lanes instead of four. And there is a small but sufficient amount of those people who are willing to pay to watch the circus in the other lanes so the circus act clogging up the road is economically viable. That's what NFTs does to Bitcoin.




An interesting idea to think about is if NFTs end up spamming Bitcoin so much that they take over the chain, will it end up being in the best interest of Bitcoin to hard fork away with an anti-Ordinals upgrade and leave the original blockchain as a dead-end NFT-focused s**tcoin. That would be a very drastic scenario but Ordinals is essentially a spam attack on Bitcoin that is unlikely to go away as it seems even though the NFT fad largely died off already there are still enough people interested in paying money for cheap collections of digital images on the blockchain that the economics of NFTs are still worth it. The general consensus of the Bitcoin is to keep the chain immutable and not hard fork, but in cases such as this where unintended consequences of upgrades end up attacking Bitcoin and making it less useful the community may at some point need to consider moving the chain on to an upgrade that isn't compatible with such an attack, unless a soft-fork to stop Ordinals is possible.


But the answer to the questions is it was created because it could be. And yes it is an interesting use of Bitcoin, it's just not a good use of Bitcoin, due to Bitcoin being the digital currency for all of humanity and transaction space being at a premium. The last thing Bitcoin needs is arbitrary non-currency data lessening its ability to move money around.

Your opinion is it is spam. Others believe it to be art.

https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/_assets/www.moma.org/wp/moma_learning/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Warhol.-Soup-Cans-469x292.jpg


is the above art?  mom.org says it is.

so you may not like it but if blockchain art is deleted I smell lawsuits.

Best you can do is set a future date to stop new additions.

Which will make the ones on the chain  now more costly.

[NotATether]

First of all, the bitcoin developers did not "make" this. A random guy on Github invented the format and a program for it, and placed it on Github. It just so happens that the program interfaces with Bitcoin Core, so now people are saying this is a Bitcoin Core problem, despite Bitcoin Core devs having nothing to do with this.

[BlackHatCoiner]

I know "it's cheaper", but I think if he had implemented it in a system where large NFTs would have been stored in several OP_RETURN transactions

It's not just cheaper. It's non-standard. His project wouldn't have a good start, because the very first Ordinal transactions would be rejected by the network. If we make the current "Taproot hack" non-standard, he'll argue we're not being censorship resistant as we invade in his right to make transactions (and he will be right).

Unless you mean to make thousands of 80 bytes long transactions, which as meant by ETFbitcoin, is madness.

Otherwise they could have created the same system on a side-chain that would have also been a lot cheaper than using bitcoin mainnet and abusing Taproot scripts. Which is another reason why Ordinals is malicious.

The fact that they don't turn it to a side-chain gives me hopes it won't last long. It seems like NFTs, but instead of hashes, the entire thing; both of which are completely pointless, but anyway. I think it's just greater fool's theory.

[d5000]

Can you even imagine how many TX needed to store 100KB on-chain if people were to use OP_RETURN?

That's exactly the point: the incentives would have worked favouring small inscriptions, or NFT systems where mainly hashes of the content would be stored on-chain. NFTers would have to had become creative, for example you could imagine a system where the "possession" of a low-resolution image via Ordinals could also determine ownership of a high-resolution one stored on a sidechain.

(to try to answer my own question: I believe that it's a mix of "wanting to boost the fee market" and just liking the idea of large inscriptions.)

[pooya87]

What I sees from it, NFTs was just a new Ideas calve from bitcoin to support more threads on basses of what bitcoin can do.

Bitcoin doesn't need to add more features to be useful, it is already useful enough. Besides the token creation nonsense is not a new thing. The discussions started many years ago possibly in 2012-2013 and in fact scammers like Butterin were also part of that argument and failed to convince anybody that Bitcoin needs to expand its smart contracts to allow token creation so he created the scam project called ethereum. To this day things haven't changed, Bitcoin does not have the token/NFT creation capabilities and it doesn't need them.

[MeCsc]

Still more negative comments about Bitcoin Ordinal NFTs. Bitcoin core has a community, don't the community accept an update first before it is added to Bitcoin Blockchain?

[thecodebear]

Still more negative comments about Bitcoin Ordinal NFTs. Bitcoin core has a community, don't the community accept an update first before it is added to Bitcoin Blockchain?

I'm not an expert, but from what I understand Ordinals resulted from an unintended consequence. It's not like Taproot allowed NFTs by design and everyone accepted it. Taproot got ride of a size limit, see ETFBitcoin's comment above:

"While i agree most Ordinals TX can be considered as spam, the problem isn't Taproot itself but rather removal of several soft limitation (mainly 10K script size limit) for Taproot address/script."

The guy who created Ordinals realized Taproot left open a hack in which he could cram unintended arbitrary data into transactions. It's basically a spam attack vector that the devs/community didn't think about when Taproot was implemented.

So no, the community did not accept the ability to make Ordinal NFTs because it was an unintended consequence of changes made in the Taproot upgrade.

[Sha256explorer]

I think miners love ordinals, because then there is more consumption of space on the blockchain, therefore more scarcity, therefore higher fees for them.
 on the other hand, I believe that if ordinals were made no longer possible, the price of bitcoin would rise, with a mechanism similar to the halving. 

so maybe it would be a good idea to create a soft fork that makes it impossible on the chain for new blocks: in this software maybe new blocks with ordinals shouldn't be accepted as valid anymore

[garlonicon]

so maybe it would be a good idea to create a soft fork that makes it impossible on the chain for new blocks: in this software maybe new blocks with ordinals shouldn't be accepted as valid anymore

Then people will use another way to achieve the same thing. Note that even if Taproot transactions will be restricted on consensus level, then still, Segwit v2, v3, and later versions will be wide open for pools that will include non-standard transactions, because currently there are no rules to that kind of witness data.

And note that even with Segwit v0, you can still create P2WSH address, that will push a lot of data to the stack. Even with standard rules, it means 10k bytes per input, so by using 40 Segwit v0 inputs, you can still push around 400 kB transaction. Make 10 of them, and you will fill 4 MB block. If you assume using OP_DROP or OP_2DROP, then "push and drop" construction means "4d0802<520bytes>75" (524 bytes) or "4d0802<520bytes>4d0802<520bytes>6d" (1047 bytes). That means the whole overhead of 4 bytes per 520 or 7 bytes per 1040 is below 1% of the message size. And the consequence of that is if you want to fill the whole 4 MB block with Segwit v0, you can use just a few kilobytes of transaction data. By adding transaction structure to that, I guess you will end up for example with a model that will fill the whole 4 MB with 50 kB or 100 kB of additional bytes, so you will get 3.9 MB data per block or something around that in practice, with just plain old Segwit v0.

[paid2]

The introduction of inscriptions on Bitcoin’s mainnet  made the creation of Ordinal NFTs on the bitcoin Blockchain. I have read lot of negative comments about the effects of Ordinal NFTs on Bitcoin Blockchain and so I would like to know why it was still created despite negative effects it can have,Although there are some positive comments, The negative comments are something that can cause stressing issues later on.

For me Ordinals exists so that the big mining pools that mine several blocks a day increase their profits. I will always be convinced that this is something initiated by pool operators.

When you look at the mempool, Ordinals has really blown up the fees, we are almost continuous like at some points in 2018 in terms of fees. Mempool is almost always suffering of congestion now.

Other than them, at this point, I don't see who the real winners are. Especially not the people who have a full node that will become extraordinarily heavy with all this, let alone those who use the Bitcoin network for their daily transactions.

Ordinals might as well be an invention whose purpose is to push people to use the Lightning Network, you flood the BTC blockchain, the fees go up, people start using LN to escape those fees.

In any case, the blockchain is not centralized, and if it is possible to do something, there will always be someone to do it, especially if there are potential gains to make at the end.

[Wind_FURY]

Think of the blockchain as a road.

When it was built it was designed to handle data traffic.

So someone has figured a way to put data on the chain and monetize it.

ie ordinals.

Arguing against ordinal traffic is pretty much like arguing against single occupied cars on highways.

They crowd the road bla bla bla.

It's all opinions that's pushed as fact, even by the smartest Bitcoiners in the forum. I hope the newbies could discern the difference.

Most people simply don’t understand the value of ordinals or nfts.

Simply small in the box thinking.

I believe you are talking about financial value? Financial Value is what the buyer thinks is the current fair market price for an item that a seller is will to accept. That's why, like Bitcoin, when someone says it has "no value", we should ask "what's the highest price in U.S. Dollar can we sell 1 Bitcoin"? That's the current value. The same context for NFTs.

[pooya87]

Then people will use another way to achieve the same thing. Note that even if Taproot transactions will be restricted on consensus level, then still, Segwit v2, v3, and later versions will be wide open for pools that will include non-standard transactions, because currently there are no rules to that kind of witness data.

True but remember that before Taproot it was also possible but never happened. You see, in these attacks the attackers want regular people to be able to easily participate in it otherwise if they have to go through some centralized service, it would become harder and could even become impossible if the community puts pressure on that service to stop accepting the malicious attack.

And note that even with Segwit v0, you can still create P2WSH address, that will push a lot of data to the stack.

Actually unlike Taproot, the consensus rules for P2WSH has a line to check the data size that is being pushed to the stack and also the witness items data sizes that are already the stack itself.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/84f4ac39fda7ffa5dc84e92d92dd1eeeb5e20f8c/src/script/interpreter.cpp#L1815

[Cricktor]

Can you even imagine how many TX needed to store 100KB on-chain if people were to use OP_RETURN?

Is there a rule that prevents multiple OP_RETURN outputs in one transaction?

While I wish Bitcoin's blockchain shouldn't be abused for arbitrary data storage, I would be OK that those who want to abuse it, should pay a hefty price in transaction fees.

[d5000]

Is there a rule that prevents multiple OP_RETURN outputs in one transaction?

Yes, such transactions are non-standard. The line in the Bitcoin core code is here in policy/policy.cpp. Miners can change this policy (like they did with the 3,9 MB Ordinals inscription) but most will abide it.

[serveria.com]

The introduction of inscriptions on Bitcoin’s mainnet  made the creation of Ordinal NFTs on the bitcoin Blockchain. I have read lot of negative comments about the effects of Ordinal NFTs on Bitcoin Blockchain and so I would like to know why it was still created despite negative effects it can have,Although there are some positive comments, The negative comments are something that can cause stressing issues later on.

In short: greed. Some people got carried away with a possibility to sell monkey pics to gullible peeps, that's all. Miners got excited too as they're earning extra buck for processing spam transactions. Again, it's greed.