How Bitcoin Ordinal will waste block space?

[Little Mouse]

I have been reading about Bitcoin Ordinal but I couldn't spend a lot times so couldn't learn the whole thing yet. Anyway, I read one article where it says each sats will have a identifier number. This is crazy! How's it going to be done technically? Can someone explain?

Also, if Bitcoin Ordinal is used by a lot of people, will it create an issue for normal bitcoin transactions? Bitcoin block is too small in size. If sats inscription consume a lot of space in each block, won't it create a problem of shortage of space in block? The fee for a transaction will be increased significantly.
I don't know if my understanding is correct or not but I have read such few articles where it seems Bitcoin Ordinal isn't a great project we should appreciate. Rather, it's something which will create issue in the future?

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[JeromeTash]

These threads might be helpful to you

1. NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory
2. On Ordinals: Where do you stand?
3. ELI5: What is Ordinals and how they work?

They have already affected the network by bloating the bitcoin blockchain if you have been keen from the time this year started.

This tool by DdmrDdmr can help you observe how they have been spamming the Bitcoin Blockchain - https://dune.com/ddmrddmr/ordinals-data

[pooya87]

I read one article where it says each sats will have a identifier number. This is crazy!

That is not crazy, that is a lie. There is no correlations between the amount field of the output in a transaction and the data that is being injected into the witness script of the inputs of that transaction.

How's it going to be done technically? Can someone explain?

In simple terms, someone found an exploit in the most recent change to the protocol called Taproot. They are abusing the fact that the consensus rules are not strict about the size of the witness in Taproot scripts to inject arbitrary data into the blockchain (something that was previously done using OP_RETURNs with a limit). They falsely refer to that as "NFT" which is another lie.

Also, if Bitcoin Ordinal is used by a lot of people, will it create an issue for normal bitcoin transactions? Bitcoin block is too small in size. If sats inscription consume a lot of space in each block, won't it create a problem of shortage of space in block? The fee for a transaction will be increased significantly.

It does but the biggest problem is not about their size (although that is a big problem itself). The biggest problem is that the Ordinals Attack is creating an incentive to spam the blockchain by creating a possible parallel market where people scam each other by selling these transactions containing arbitrary data.
If the said market grows, the resulting spam could quickly fill the blocks with transactions that could even pay very high fees. Fees that are higher than what a normal user is willing to pay.

[Little Mouse]

It does but the biggest problem is not about their size (although that is a big problem itself). The biggest problem is that the Ordinals Attack is creating an incentive to spam the blockchain by creating a possible parallel market where people scam each other by selling these transactions containing arbitrary data.
If the said market grows, the resulting spam could quickly fill the blocks with transactions that could even pay very high fees. Fees that are higher than what a normal user is willing to pay.

That's what I have read too. So, basically, it's going to create a problem in the coming days if people started using this. Bitcoin on-chain transactions had a record high today. I don't know if that's because of Bitcoin Ordinal. Suddenly, there are a lot of people talking about this everywhere. I'm managing a Facebook group and in the last few days, a lot of people are looking for information on this and they seem very much interested to check it out.

[odolvlobo]

I read one article where it says each sats will have a identifier number. This is crazy!

That is not crazy, that is a lie. There is no correlations between the amount field of the output in a transaction and the data that is being injected into the witness script of the inputs of that transaction.

It may be crazy but it is not a lie.

Someone came up with an method of enumerating satoshis as well as a convention for maintaining the enumeration even while the satoshis are used in transactions. As a result, it is possible to give every satoshi an ID and to track it from transaction to transaction. Note that Ordinals is not the only way to do this, and it only works for those people using the Ordinals protocol.

Now, the lie that @pooya87 is describing (beyond the basic lie about NFTs indicating anything more than an association) is the fact that if you don't agree to and adhere to the Ordinals protocol, then it means nothing. And there is nothing preventing me from creating my own enumeration protocol that associates an inscription of my choice with a satoshi that I own.

My own opinion is that Ordinals is very clever and I applaud the creator, Casey Rodarmor. However, whether or not it becomes useful remains to be seen. I predict that future node software will allow pruning of inscription data as an option in order to reduce the size of the blockchain if inscriptions remain popular.

[pooya87]

My own opinion is that Ordinals are very clever

To be honest I don't see anything clever in this attack. The creator doesn't even have a full understanding of the script evaluation rules, they just got lucky and found a possible exploit which they later abused to build this attack around.
As a matter of fact this attack could have been implemented in a more efficient way by exploiting other "loose rules" introduced by Taproot. But of course efficiency was not at all the creator's goal, only to scam and spam!

[odolvlobo]

My own opinion is that Ordinals is very clever

To be honest I don't see anything clever in this attack. The creator doesn't even have a full understanding of the script evaluation rules, they just got lucky and found a possible exploit which they later abused to build this attack around.
As a matter of fact this attack could have been implemented in a more efficient way by exploiting other "loose rules" introduced by Taproot. But of course efficiency was not at all the creator's goal, only to scam and spam!

"Ordinals" is the enumeration scheme and "inscriptions" is an application of Ordinals, but I guess people may refer to inscriptions as ordinals because that is its main use.

I don't disagree with your assessment of inscriptions, but I wouldn't go as far as to call it an "attack". That's like saying that Bitcoin is an environmental problem because it uses too much electricity.

[hatshepsut93]

The problem is not that they use block space, but that there are people willing to pay for this hype. Bitcoin is protected from spam with its fee market which makes spam expensive. But if people are willing to pay for wasting blocks space, this is a case of partially hijacking Bitcoin network and in a decentralized way. Perhaps a soft-fork will be needed to tighten the protocol rules so that such activities will be rendered impossible.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

In simple terms, someone found an exploit in the most recent change to the protocol called Taproot. They are abusing the fact that the consensus rules are not strict about the size of the witness in Taproot scripts to inject arbitrary data into the blockchain (something that was previously done using OP_RETURNs with a limit). They falsely refer to that as "NFT" which is another lie.

My question is, can't they put back that limit on in the near future?

I know there is all this argument of Bitcoin network being decentralized and therefore people should not be censored from doing whatever they want with the network, but I don't think Satoshi had anything like NFTs in mind when creating the Bitcoin network.

What I am seeing happening if this thing continues is it will deter common people from using Bitcoin as an alternative p2p electronic payment system because of the obscene transaction fees they have to pay (A good example is Ethereum, I haven't used it in a very long time because of the fees and all the trouble started with the cryptokitties)

[OcTradism]

My question is, can't they put back that limit on in the near future?

I know there is all this argument of Bitcoin network being decentralized and therefore people should not be censored from doing whatever they want with the network, but I don't think Satoshi had anything like NFTs in mind when creating the Bitcoin network.

I don't think Bitcoin will be the same as what it was designed by Satoshi Nakamoto.

With time, with demands, with developments and upgrades, Bitcoin must serve more people, more use cases. Ordinal NFTs are one of use cases and like it or not, it is your personal choice but other people have their freedom to like it. Like people are freely to use Bitcoin for many use cases and as people who support freedom, we don't like censorship.

Hence censor or restrict Bitcoin transactions for Ordinal NFTs or future new use cases, will break the initial purpose of Bitcoin.

I believe the best solution is to increase the block limit. The Bitcoin community did it in 2017 and can do it in future.

Ordinal NFTs can bring more new people to Bitcoin network like some of them can come from Ethereum network and I see it is a good thing.

[NotATether]

My own opinion is that Ordinals is very clever and I applaud the creator, Casey Rodarmor. However, whether or not it becomes useful remains to be seen. I predict that future node software will allow pruning of inscription data as an option in order to reduce the size of the blockchain if inscriptions remain popular.

This is 100% the most reasonable option to go after.

Then we'll only have the problem with how to deal with Ordinals congestion in the mempool. Increasing the block size has been ruled out long ago, so maybe another kind of Merkle tree hashing could be invented where N blocks have a hash that is one of N separate pieces of a larger "group hash" which can be decomposed into such pieces using some bitwise operations and cryptography.

This would allow multiple 1MB blocks to be mined simultaneously and included in the blockchain, in batches (most likely a factor of 2016, so 2x, 4x ... up to 32x), instead of solo.

[DeathAngel]

It is getting quite irritating that they seem to be spamming the blockchain just for fun. It’s basically trolling as its making fees so much more expensive. I can’t think of any reason that is attractive for somebody to desire to spam blocks with dumb ordinals.

Hopefully it’s just a bit of a fad & it passes soon because the amount of unconfirmed transactions on the blockchain is at an ATH.

[tranthidung]

It is getting quite irritating that they seem to be spamming the blockchain just for fun. It’s basically trolling as its making fees so much more expensive. I can’t think of any reason that is attractive for somebody to desire to spam blocks with dumb ordinals.

I don't think they are doing it for fun. They are only participating in a game of greed and they chase for profit without any knowledge about Bitcoin blockchain and I am sure many of them don't know about fee rate, mempools.

I also really believe that they still feel comfortable with Bitcoin blockchain and transaction fee on it after familiar with hilarious expensive fee on Ethereum blockchain. Despite of recent rise, fee on Bitcoin blockchain is still cheaper than on ERC-20 chain.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth.html#3m


We, as Bitcoiners on this blockchain, care about it but they don't care about that and still enjoy discount transaction fee on Bitcoin blockchain.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

With time, with demands, with developments and upgrades, Bitcoin must serve more people, more use cases.

The only demands I would love to see are its use as a peer to peer electronic cash system and maybe store of value. Anything more than that like some stupid scam NFTs or Memes kills the purpose completely.

Ordinal NFTs are one of use cases and like it or not, it is your personal choice but other people have their freedom to like it. Like people are freely to use Bitcoin for many use cases and as people who support freedom, we don't like censorship.

With current high fee rate, how do you convince someone down in El Salvador to pay for a cup of coffee worth $2 using Bitcoin with a transaction fee of $30  

Let all agree that the ordinals or BRC20 have no use case, they are just scams.

Bitcoin was for the ordinary person, not a dozen of scammers willing to spam the network at a higher fee rate by creating shitcoins on it so that they can rip off newbies.

Ordinal NFTs can bring more new people to Bitcoin network like some of them can come from Ethereum network and I see it is a good thing.

Sure! Because paying $30 per transaction makes people abandon traditional financial instructions for a BRC20 laden Bitcoin. Great Vision!  

[Doan9269]

I have been reading about Bitcoin Ordinal but I couldn't spend a lot times so couldn't learn the whole thing yet. Anyway, I read one article where it says each sats will have a identifier number. This is crazy! How's it going to be done technically? Can someone explain?

If they really mean am sure they can achieve it, but the question here is that, is it necessary? to me i see no reason why that should be implemented when we have all it takes to erase the whole challenge from existing by going back to where we started from.

Also, if Bitcoin Ordinal is used by a lot of people, will it create an issue for normal bitcoin transactions?

It obviously that we are likely to continue to have a higher transaction fee like this we are experiencing currently, the high the use of the Ordinals inscription the higher the bitcoin transaction fee may go.

Bitcoin block is too small in size. If sats inscription consume a lot of space in each block, won't it create a problem of shortage of space in block?

It not even about creating a shortage in blockspace now that's the challenge, but we are afraid of hackers not using that as a means to launch attack on bitcoin nodes through this NFTs memes on blockchain network.

[Z390]

I have been reading about Bitcoin Ordinal but I couldn't spend a lot times so couldn't learn the whole thing yet. Anyway, I read one article where it says each sats will have a identifier number. This is crazy! How's it going to be done technically? Can someone explain?

Also, if Bitcoin Ordinal is used by a lot of people, will it create an issue for normal bitcoin transactions? Bitcoin block is too small in size. If sats inscription consume a lot of space in each block, won't it create a problem of shortage of space in block? The fee for a transaction will be increased significantly.
I don't know if my understanding is correct or not but I have read such few articles where it seems Bitcoin Ordinal isn't a great project we should appreciate. Rather, it's something which will create issue in the future?

You are right about your opinion Little Mouse, this will have a negative impact on Bitcoin in the next bull market, even starting from now on, some people are already suggesting Bitcoin Lightening as the solution but it's still not that simple, I will have to swap my Btc to lightning first and that's where the problem will be.

Bitcoin will probably face the biggest spamming challenge since its launch date this time around, there are already too many new projects using ordinals on Bitcoin right now, I don't awe how this won't create a problem, if we are to be spending 100$ on Ethereum gas fee in a bull market we will be doing the same with Bitcoin too. How sucks is that?