The severity of the Ordinals Attack is increasing

[pooya87]

There has been a speculation that this attack is going to fade away slowly and there won't be any need for intervention to fix the protocol where it is being exploited by the Ordinals Attack. That seems like wishful thinking now.

As I've feared the market around this scam is growing hence creating the incentive to attack Bitcoin more and with more people. According to brc-20[dot]io website the trading volume of this scam has surpassed $10 million daily with a total of 14,079 scams at the moment.

We can see the effects of this attack on the mempool with the fees surpassing 300 satoshi/vbytes.
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight
https://mempool.space/

This will only get worse as the scam grows and the scammers and idiots trading this garbage don't care about paying $50, $100+ for a transaction if they are laundering money with a fake transaction they call a token that is worth $1100+ or have a chance of scamming an idiot who would pay them that much for this garbage.
Regular users on the other hand do care about being forced to pay such outrageous fees just because scammers are spamming the chain.



The full nodes will also start being put under pressure as the spam will increase cost of running a full node for many reasons. From the increased traffic putting high pressure on their mempool and transaction relays to their chainstate (UTXO database) growing with a lot of dust outputs that can not be spent but they have to load in their memory for transaction processing.



https://statoshi.info/d/000000009/unspent-transaction-output-set?orgId=1&from=1682080884686&to=1683521607397

Both of the above charts show a very fast slope of how this attack is growing in size and severity.

[be.open]

So, you are sure that in this section one more topic is needed to discuss the current situation. What are your constructive proposals for overcoming this crisis?

[Plaguedeath]

These people are really crazy for overpaying the Bitcoin fees in order to get their worthless NFT, due to decentralized Bitcoin network, there's no way to reject it and the miners obviously prefer to broadcast the transactions for people who willing to pay higher.

But I think this ordinals is just a hype, I guess a year later people will not really interested again and the transaction will be cheaper, but it can't back like when before ordinals attack started.

The current situation like forcing people to adopt lightning network.

[serveria.com]

There has been a speculation that this attack is going to fade away slowly and there won't be any need for intervention to fix the protocol where it is being exploited by the Ordinals Attack. That seems like wishful thinking now.

As I've feared the market around this scam is growing hence creating the incentive to attack Bitcoin more and with more people. According to brc-20[dot]io website the trading volume of this scam has surpassed $10 million daily with a total of 14,079 scams at the moment.

We can see the effects of this attack on the mempool with the fees surpassing 300 satoshi/vbytes.
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight
https://mempool.space/

This will only get worse as the scam grows and the scammers and idiots trading this garbage don't care about paying $50, $100+ for a transaction if they are laundering money with a fake transaction they call a token that is worth $1100+ or have a chance of scamming an idiot who would pay them that much for this garbage.
Regular users on the other hand do care about being forced to pay such outrageous fees just because scammers are spamming the chain.



The full nodes will also start being put under pressure as the spam will increase cost of running a full node for many reasons. From the increased traffic putting high pressure on their mempool and transaction relays to their chainstate (UTXO database) growing with a lot of dust outputs that can not be spent but they have to load in their memory for transaction processing.



https://statoshi.info/d/000000009/unspent-transaction-output-set?orgId=1&from=1682080884686&to=1683521607397

Both of the above charts show a very fast slope of how this attack is growing in size and severity.

I wonder how much more should we wait to stop this attack? The fees are ridiculous, 100sat/vbyte is a reality already now (if you want reasonable transaction times). I'm waiting for the core devs to respond to this hostile action against Bitcoin. Taproot bug must be fixed.

[pooya87]

So, you are sure that in this section one more topic is needed to discuss the current situation. What are your constructive proposals for overcoming this crisis?

The fact that you have to ask this question proves you haven't seen my proposals ergo we did need a new topic.

To summarize the way to prevent this attack should have been the same method we have been using forever to prevent similar attacks and exploits. It could have been introduction of standard rules that would have made such malicious transactions non-standard hence majority of full nodes would have refused to relay them and that would have successfully prevented this attack from growing.
Standard rules are easy to implement too since they don't need a fork, we just had to get full nodes to run a patch for their old clients or run the newest release to enforce the new rule.

However, I don't see this method being effective anymore considering how the scam has grown big and the market size of it is considerable enough to encourage the scammers to run full nodes themselves without enforcing the said standard rule to relay their spam. There is also incentive for them to pay the miners behind the scene to mine their malicious transactions.

At this point I'm afraid we need a soft fork to make these transactions invalid/illegal as part of the consensus rules which is much more challenging since it requires implementation, locked-in period, getting miners to vote and accept this fork, etc.
But that effectively and easily prevent this attack whilst keeping the protocol flexible for future improvements. For example the rule can only limit the witness size for version 1 program (similar to version 0) and leave any bigger size for any future possible usages (if they arise) to future versions which are already non-standard and not relayed by any of the full nodes.

[be.open]

So, you are sure that in this section one more topic is needed to discuss the current situation. What are your constructive proposals for overcoming this crisis?

The fact that you have to ask this question proves you haven't seen my proposals ergo we did need a new topic.

To summarize the way to prevent this attack should have been the same method we have been using forever to prevent similar attacks and exploits. It could have been introduction of standard rules that would have made such malicious transactions non-standard hence majority of full nodes would have refused to relay them and that would have successfully prevented this attack from growing.
Standard rules are easy to implement too since they don't need a fork, we just had to get full nodes to run a patch for their old clients or run the newest release to enforce the new rule.

However, I don't see this method being effective anymore considering how the scam has grown big and the market size of it is considerable enough to encourage the scammers to run full nodes themselves without enforcing the said standard rule to relay their spam. There is also incentive for them to pay the miners behind the scene to mine their malicious transactions.

At this point I'm afraid we need a soft fork to make these transactions invalid/illegal as part of the consensus rules which is much more challenging since it requires implementation, locked-in period, getting miners to vote and accept this fork, etc.
But that effectively and easily prevent this attack whilst keeping the protocol flexible for future improvements. For example the rule can only limit the witness size for version 1 program (similar to version 0) and leave any bigger size for any future possible usages (if they arise) to future versions which are already non-standard and not relayed by any of the full nodes.

Let's be realistic, even if your initiative is implemented in the form of a new version of the bitcoin core, we will not be able to reach a consensus in voting for its implementation, given that the current situation is beneficial for miners. But you can always initiate a hard fork and create your own little improved lamp version of bitcoin with blackjack and whores, it just won’t be quite bitcoin anymore. And the real true bitcoin is exactly the same as it is now - with expensive and slow transactions and with a small block size filled to the brim with stupid pictures.

[slaman29]

Ok wow I had no idea it was going to be this bad.

Quite worrying right now because I have bitcoin in a few places and I remember very well the last time this type of fee war happened, I had btc stuck in many places.

Problem now is to plan ahead of what you need and to just leave btc alone unless you want to get things stuck.

252k transactions now waiting o god.

[cryptoaddictchie]

I wonder how much more should we wait to stop this attack? The fees are ridiculous, 100sat/vbyte is a reality already now (if you want reasonable transaction times). I'm waiting for the core devs to respond to this hostile action against Bitcoin. Taproot bug must be fixed.

I think we should only wait for the hype to die down. Degen peoples are increasing the trading of those so called ordinals. Its true this will affect regular business or merchants that use of bitcoin for transaction. But does this action by the creatoe who established this new tech of ordinals is illegal? I mean does core devs can somehow fix this? Since the creator choose to use a decentralized platform for this idea.

[paid2]

But does this action by the creatoe who established this new tech of ordinals is illegal? I mean does core devs can somehow fix this? Since the creator choose to use a decentralized platform for this idea.

What do you mean by illegal?

Bitcoin is open source, decentralised and clearly freewheeling as long as the basic operating protocol is not impacted. With Bitcoin, if something is doable, it can be done without any authority intervening. After that we all agree that what is feasible and can be done, is not necessarily good and should not necessarily be done...

I hate this Ordinals crap and the consequence it has on transaction costs and the congestion of the mempool.

But some people do have an interest in it: imagine you own a BTC mining pool, which does not pay transaction fees to its miners.
Imagine the profit you make when the fees are 1.5 BTC or more per block?!

I imagine that some industry players will fight to preserve this Ordinals crap at all costs.

[witcher_sense]

There has been a speculation that this attack is going to fade away slowly and there won't be any need for intervention to fix the protocol where it is being exploited by the Ordinals Attack. That seems like wishful thinking now.

The growing adoption of Bitcoin, especially by nation states, may also lead to serious mempool congestions and unbearably high transaction fees. Would you also call it an attack on Bitcoin, or where should we draw the line? Who are to decide which use case of Bitcoin is acceptable? I think that the decentralization of Bitcoin should work in both ways: no one can prevent you from using Bitcoin, and you cannot prevent anyone from accessing it and using it in whatever way they see fit. Don't take me wrong, I also consider Ordinals a scam, nothing else, but a tricky way to siphon off money from naive investors, but I am totally against forking off every time we see red squares on the mempool.space website. Ordinals is a mere demonstration of how the Bitcoin protocol will look like once everyone is using it to make transactions. We shouldn't fight it because the adoption is inevitable, we should embrace it and adapt to its consequences.

[be.open]

There has been a speculation that this attack is going to fade away slowly and there won't be any need for intervention to fix the protocol where it is being exploited by the Ordinals Attack. That seems like wishful thinking now.

The growing adoption of Bitcoin, especially by nation states, may also lead to serious mempool congestions and unbearably high transaction fees. Would you also call it an attack on Bitcoin, or where should we draw the line? Who are to decide which use case of Bitcoin is acceptable? I think that the decentralization of Bitcoin should work in both ways: no one can prevent you from using Bitcoin, and you cannot prevent anyone from accessing it and using it in whatever way they see fit. Don't take me wrong, I also consider Ordinals a scam, nothing else, but a tricky way to siphon off money from naive investors, but I am totally against forking off every time we see red squares on the mempool.space website. Ordinals is a mere demonstration of how the Bitcoin protocol will look like once everyone is using it to make transactions. We shouldn't fight it because the adoption is inevitable, we should embrace it and adapt to its consequences.

That's how she already works. You can shake the air as much as you like that you do not like this way of using the network - it will not change anything. In the genesis block of bitcoin there is an encrypted text fragment of the headline from the newspaper, you can at the same time resent that this is also the misuse of a network intended only for the transfer of financial information. If some government wants to use the bitcoin network as a public distributed ledger, for example, to store all real estate transactions or educational diplomas in it - should we consider this a misuse of the network, while each transaction is properly paid and confirmed by miners? And if someone pays with bitcoin for the purchase of drugs, weapons or human organs - should we consider these confirmed transactions to be wrong, because we do not share the motives of the people who committed them for ethical reasons?

[NotATether]

So, you are sure that in this section one more topic is needed to discuss the current situation. What are your constructive proposals for overcoming this crisis?

I prefer people getting their shit together to stop the existential threat to the network if it means the entire Bitcoin Discussion becomes an Ordinals board temporarily.

I for one will support any soft fork for this.

That's how she already works. You can shake the air as much as you like that you do not like this way of using the network - it will not change anything. In the genesis block of bitcoin there is an encrypted text fragment of the headline from the newspaper, you can at the same time resent that this is also the misuse of a network intended only for the transfer of financial information. If some government wants to use the bitcoin network as a public distributed ledger, for example, to store all real estate transactions or educational diplomas in it - should we consider this a misuse of the network, while each transaction is properly paid and confirmed by miners? And if someone pays with bitcoin for the purchase of drugs, weapons or human organs - should we consider these confirmed transactions to be wrong, because we do not share the motives of the people who committed them for ethical reasons?

There's a difference between putting non-bitcoin data with a niche use case on the blockchain, and putting "worthless" (BRC20 creator's word!) BS on the blockchain in hopes that it will pay for your Lambo and 48 months of house mortgage that you're about to get evicted for.

[cryptoaddictchie]

What do you mean by illegal?

I mean something shouldnt have done at all. But we all know bitcoin is decentralized and if the protocol or thing he created (ordinals) have something wont put him in jail then theres nothing wrong though it really affect the whole network.

But some people do have an interest in it: imagine you own a BTC mining pool, which does not pay transaction fees to its miners.
Imagine the profit you make when the fees are 1.5 BTC or more per block?!

Exactly and we cant stop it right? Only we wait for this to die down or should we say if they already grabbed a lot of profits. Adoption can be good if many can use bitcoin but I doubt some are gonna use it when the fees are really high like this.

[be.open]

So, you are sure that in this section one more topic is needed to discuss the current situation. What are your constructive proposals for overcoming this crisis?

I prefer people getting their shit together to stop the existential threat to the network if it means the entire Bitcoin Discussion becomes an Ordinals board temporarily.

I for one will support any soft fork for this.

The only existential threat to the network is its split into two competing branches with an inevitable hashrate war between them, which you are now calling for.

There's a difference between putting non-bitcoin data with a niche use case on the blockchain, and putting "worthless" (BRC20 creator's word!) BS on the blockchain in hopes that it will pay for your Lambo and 48 months of house mortgage that you're about to get evicted for.

It is deeply erroneous and selfish to attempt to judge the validity of a transaction by the usefulness of its contents. Before the first bitcoin sold for fiat money, the entire bitcoin network was absolutely useless from the point of view of the layman, although by that time it had already functioned quite stably. The key to Bitcoin's anti-fragility is its architectural simplicity. The miners are not trying to evaluate the usefulness of the contents of the transaction, but for some reason you are trying to get them to start doing it.

[NotATether]

So, you are sure that in this section one more topic is needed to discuss the current situation. What are your constructive proposals for overcoming this crisis?

I prefer people getting their shit together to stop the existential threat to the network if it means the entire Bitcoin Discussion becomes an Ordinals board temporarily.

I for one will support any soft fork for this.

The only existential threat to the network is its split into two competing branches with an inevitable hashrate war between them, which you are now calling for.

That's what a hard fork does, a soft fork adds rules of the protocol which does not make a second chain. If you go through my post history you will see that my opinion about hard forks is that they are not practical.

Enforcing strict Taproot validation script size is something that does not need a hard fork because there is no rule for validation size currently.

There's a difference between putting non-bitcoin data with a niche use case on the blockchain, and putting "worthless" (BRC20 creator's word!) BS on the blockchain in hopes that it will pay for your Lambo and 48 months of house mortgage that you're about to get evicted for.

It is deeply erroneous and selfish to attempt to judge the validity of a transaction by the usefulness of its contents. Before the first bitcoin sold for fiat money, the entire bitcoin network was absolutely useless from the point of view of the layman, although by that time it had already functioned quite stably. The key to Bitcoin's anti-fragility is its architectural simplicity. The miners are not trying to evaluate the usefulness of the contents of the transaction, but for some reason you are trying to get them to start doing it.

Selfish? We are talking about the entire bitcoin community having to pay large fees just to do their day-to-day business.

This solution which I have just proposed does not depend on miners doing anything different, it is protocol developers that do all the fixing.

Now please explain to me what kind of use cases BRC20 tokens provide for end users (and trading does not count). Go on, I'm waiting


And about the miners: Nobody has actually commented on whether or not they endorse this token craze, so nobody should assume the role of conspiracy theorist and consider the miners to be "the world elite George Soros powerful people" until they actually say something about this.

That means, for all that we know, they could be against it, or they could be for it. We don't know for sure.

But some people do have an interest in it: imagine you own a BTC mining pool, which does not pay transaction fees to its miners.
Imagine the profit you make when the fees are 1.5 BTC or more per block?!

Exactly and we cant stop it right? Only we wait for this to die down or should we say if they already grabbed a lot of profits. Adoption can be good if many can use bitcoin but I doubt some are gonna use it when the fees are really high like this.

Most people who jump in to BRC20 are not adopting Bitcoin, they are just using it indirectly for the sake of the tokens and will gladly abandon all of it once they are done with the tokens. In other words, they are like the current crop of altcoin traders.

[franky1]

the latest attack is not ordinals. its idiots injecting transactions into blocks to spend value to the max to create dust utxo and majority of previous utxo go to fee's

edit: for instance in the latest block

there is this
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/bc1pxdgz3gh9lygk2uhhekrg4wnxm3pk6y0767rzp78w28ggmvkuprzslvmaqr

the value being spent is the near same as the fee
where its stupidly leaving silly dust amounts as left over amounts
(having $28.23 and putting a fee of $28.03 to leave just $0.15 as left over.. has no rational purpose of real world utility)


if you take the taint back a bit you see the spender also makes large tx fee
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/672b92b29a5c70bb71f5429e5f6313e2cded071d8fa5aafa484fec4fe76e7350
$216 fee for just a tx of 1345 bytes.. which sat/byte=575sat/byte to set up the crap stream of utxo spending 99% of themselves

these transactions have no real purpose of function of spending you buy products/services. they are just spam transactions to cause fee mania

[pooya87]

Let's be realistic, even if your initiative is implemented in the form of a new version of the bitcoin core, we will not be able to reach a consensus in voting for its implementation, given that the current situation is beneficial for miners.

FYI they were saying the same thing back in 2017 that the spam attack is benefiting miners and they will never accept the soft fork and they will continue spamming to keep the fees up. We know what happened after that...

The growing adoption of Bitcoin, especially by nation states, may also lead to serious mempool congestions and unbearably high transaction fees. Would you also call it an attack on Bitcoin, or where should we draw the line? Who are to decide which use case of Bitcoin is acceptable? I think that the decentralization of Bitcoin should work in both ways: no one can prevent you from using Bitcoin, and you cannot prevent anyone from accessing it and using it in whatever way they see fit.

By that logic we should not have hard forked after the 2010 value overflow exploit and called it "legitimate usage of the protocol" and allowed the miner to keep the massive amount of coins they received as reward after exploiting the system!

As I've said many times, bitcoin use case is very clear. It is NOT a cloud storage so anything like Ordinals that exploit the protocol to use bitcoin blockchain as a cloud storage must be prevented. If you want to compare this exploit with legitimate adoption by people and countries then I don't really know how to answer your first question

[witcher_sense]

By that logic we should not have hard forked after the 2010 value overflow exploit and called it "legitimate usage of the protocol" and allowed the miner to keep the massive amount of coins they received as reward after exploiting the system!

As I've said many times, bitcoin use case is very clear. It is NOT a cloud storage so anything like Ordinals that exploit the protocol to use bitcoin blockchain as a cloud storage must be prevented. If you want to compare this exploit with legitimate adoption by people and countries then I don't really know how to answer your first question

Bitcoin is clearly a peer-to-peer system of digital cash as perceived by its creator; however, any improvements like Taproot makes it less and less of what it was supposed to be. If Taproot made it a cloud storage, then we should blame ourselves, not those expoiting this "bug", for accepting this change. SegWit has so far been benefiital for Bitcoin, but the last one was clearly a short-sighted misstep that made this stupid attack possible.

[Poker Player]

Bitcoin is clearly a peer-to-peer system of digital cash as perceived by its creator;

No, it's not. It was conceived this way by its creator, but the number of people buying Bitcoin in centralized exchanges, even leaving them there, and the number of people using custodial wallets is far from the initial idea. I don't think Satoshi had in his mind people paying massive capital gains tax on their Bitcoin sales either, since you don't pay taxes for using cash.

Often an invention ends up being different to a greater or lesser extent from what its creator conceived.

Moreover, Bitcoin has become so valuable that it is almost contradictory that it can be a cash, because what is valuable you don't spend it, you tend to keep it, something that Gresham was able to perceive.

On the other hand, I agree with witcher_sense. As Bitcoin becomes adopted, and we reach those dream prices of $1M per bitcoin and more, as halvings progress it will be normal for fees to be higher, so paying a few dollars for a coffee or similar using the main chain will be impossible. Right now it's going through a crazy bubble of people thinking they are going to change their shitty lives by becoming rich overnight spamming images on the blockchain, and I understand why people are upset.

But I would leave things as they are: whoever is stupid enough to pay those fees to store shit should pay them. The rest of us will have to adapt to the fact that we can't make small payments using the main chain until the bubble bursts, but as I say, bubbles aside, in the long term I think fees are going to go up.

[NotATether]

Both of us know Bitcoin community won't agree to such fork, especially considering some Bitcoiner heavily favor freedom or think Ordinals have acceptable usage (such as storing information about banned history on certain country).

Ordinals are not IPFS or a Tor hidden service and they should not have the responsibility to circumvent censors such as the Great Firewall.

Bitcoin is not designed to be a file storage service, else we'd be hosting our own bitcointalk images there and would not need Imgur or Talkimg.

@franky:

I'm sure that these miners that are just paying themselves with fees are taking advantage of the high fees situation caused by BRC20.

So, BRC20 usage needs to die down so that the miners (the ones with half a brain, at least) have no justification to make 600+ sats/bytes transactions.