(Ordinals) BRC-20 needs to be removed

[NotATether]

Crypto is also about art, and not only about storing numeric value.


If we want to achieve a higher adoption, Art, NFTs etc. should also become possible on the btc network.


And not just left for the world of alt coins.

Not art, because they have flaws that have been completely exposed by Ethereum NFTs (people will just abuse it to make what I call "lazy art", to make a quick buck, which screws over the buyers in the process, which gives the entire NFT system a sour taste in people's mouths.

Much better is for a layer on top of Bitcoin to be used for genuine seals/stamps of approval issued by private companies for their own products.

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[ABCbits]

--snip--
Crypto is also about art, and not only about storing numeric value.


If we want to achieve a higher adoption, Art, NFTs etc. should also become possible on the btc network.
--snip--

I think you're confused between Ordinals and BRC-20. BRC-20 (which is discussion of this topic) is only about token.

--snip--

BRC-20 is a useless parasitic existence which needs to definitely be removed. If that means rolling back Taproot, then I am all for it. Althought personally I doubt that the attacks will be a long term thing. Hopefully this is just a dumb fad which will calm down and even perhaps die out, over time.

--snip--

Rollback Taproot? That means invalidate/remove all blocks since Taproot activation which occur about 6 months ago. If that actually happens, Bitcoin might as well as die or abandoned. Furthermore, it's possible to re-create Ordinal/BRC-20 standard without Taproot.

[Kryptowerk]

What uprises me about this mess is the quetion, how long can it be "profitable" / sustainable to send bloated data-transactions to the bitcoin network?
I doubt there are actually too many players involved in creating these. When the hype (if there ever was much of one) is over and everyone sits on their BRC-20 shit-token-pseudo-art, there will not be much incentives left to create these bloating transactions. Slowly but surely I wold expect to see less transaction stuck in mempool over the next few weeks until fees and blocks are at a normal level again.

[Expressgint]

DEX (based on stacks) might be the solution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdq54yHDUq0

[joker_josue]

So it's up to the rest of us to make Layer 2 implementations that will mitigate it for end users.

But I don't think L2 is the solution, because at some point the money has to go to L1, and extremely high fees will drive people away rather than attracting more users.

The L2 should only be used for day-to-day transactions, with bitcoin having to be loaded and unloaded from there.

[DaCryptoRaccoon]

This is a insider attack on Bitcoin allowing this to happen.

If they won't remove it forks will come.

Many are working on it already to take us back to a simpler time no counterparty risk with LN which also had a flaw during the recent events by way of not being able to update the channel state without paying the on-chain fee. which was crazy.

[WillyAp]

I don't think they remove it, and who would do that.
It opens up a posibilty for other decentral coins which are more thought thru than Bitcoin
There are a few to choose from. Litecoin, Dash, BCH to name a few. 

[bitmover]

Rollback Taproot? That means invalidate/remove all blocks since Taproot activation which occur about 6 months ago. If that actually happens, Bitcoin might as well as die or abandoned. Furthermore, it's possible to re-create Ordinal/BRC-20 standard without Taproot.

I believe something will be done.

A few hundreds of people cannot flood the network like this with a malicious script (and the ordinals can be used like this).

Imagine if Faketoshi (or some other authority) wants to flood the network, making bitcoin unusable.

In my opinion, this is already a security problem. Similar to a DDOS attack.

[BlackHatCoiner]

The most important one of BTC use cases is to transfer funds peer to peer, and to do that one has to pay tx fees, if anything is bloating the network and restricting people from making transactions, maybe we can call that thing a problem.

Congestion can also happen by merely making "normal" transactions, so in accordance with your reasoning, making "normal" transactions is also a potential problem. Needless to say it's a false reasoning, because the network's security relies on the fact that it's congested.

What uprises me about this mess is the quetion, how long can it be "profitable" / sustainable to send bloated data-transactions to the bitcoin network?

Probably not for too long. This whole Ordinal and BRC-20 business is a hyped-up bubble, waiting to be burst. Hopefully, until that happens, I hope the community won't begin block size wars II.

[joker_josue]

Probably not for too long. This whole Ordinal and BRC-20 business is a hyped-up bubble, waiting to be burst. Hopefully, until that happens, I hope the community won't begin block size wars II.

The problem is not the size of the block, but the organization of the block.

For example, always having 25% of the block reserved for transactions older than 72 hours, regardless of the fee, would make much more sense. This would allow all transactions to flow through the network, preventing them from being held on hold for weeks. At the same time, those who want to move to the front of the queue can pay more fees.

[pooya87]

That depends on people's definition about smart contract. Some people define smart contract as turing complete scripting/programming.

That is a subcategory of smart contracts and this definition was popularized after the introduction of Ethereum. Otherwise ever since 1990s a smart contract is technically a program or a protocol that can be executed automatically without human intervention, trusted third parties, etc.

The best and simplest example of a smart contract is the vending machines which is the oldest implementation of them too.

because the network's security relies on the fact that it's congested.

That is incorrect.
Having a block size cap which would create a fee market in case of a spam attack which discourages/prevents prolonged attacks is not exactly called "network security". Security of the network relies on many things including hashrate and its decentralization. Not to mention that bitcoin was secure when the blocks had barely any transactions in them (in early couple of years) and it was still secure when the blocks were full and it is still secure when the mempool is congested.

[lionheart78]

I find it great, that you have something like the BRC 20 standard,

that makes it possible to store & share inscriptions via the btc blockchain.

This is unique.

But destructive at the current level of Bitcoin development.  NFT and smart contracts need to have a proper blockchain application that can process its creation, transactions and transfers without affecting the entire blockchain network.  If it posses a problem to the network then obviously that said token isn't for that blockchain network.

Crypto is also about art, and not only about storing numeric value.

If we want to achieve a higher adoption, Art, NFTs etc. should also become possible on the btc network.

And not just left for the world of alt coins.

Regards

No, crypto itself is all about the implementation of security.  BTC does not need NFT for higher adoption, BTC adoption is doing fine without it.  I would not mind if the implementation of this NFT does not bring problems to the Bitcoin network but in the current state of Bitcoin technology, it does, which simply means, the Bitcoin network isn't ready to be spammed by NFTs.

[vjudeu]

For example, always having 25% of the block reserved for transactions older than 72 hours, regardless of the fee, would make much more sense.

In the past, there was a concept called "coinage": the older your coin was, the higher priority it got: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Miner_fees#Priority_transactions

Later, it was replaced with the simplest approach of "from highest to lowest satoshis per byte", and today we still have that system, counted in satoshis per virtual kilobyte.

Because I don't expect any soft-fork in the near future, all you can do is to use your own mempool inclusion rules. If you are a miner, you can enforce that. But to make it de-facto standard, other mining pools and solo miners would need to join (and be ready to earn less, so convincing them may not be that easy).

[satscraper]

 I think they should be removed.

Luke Dashjr for it. He has  urged other developers to end both BRC20 and ordinals shit.

[Who is John Galt?]

The problem is not the size of the block, but the organization of the block.

For example, always having 25% of the block reserved for transactions older than 72 hours, regardless of the fee, would make much more sense. This would allow all transactions to flow through the network, preventing them from being held on hold for weeks. At the same time, those who want to move to the front of the queue can pay more fees.

This will only work for the occasional temporary increase in mempool size, which of course is fine too. But if the mempool grows systematically, anyway, sooner or later the 25% quota for old transactions will overflow, and they will also have to be ranked somehow additionally, because some transactions will start to overdue.

But it looks good as a temporary solution, because it will reduce commissions for non-urgent payments.

[ABCbits]

Rollback Taproot? That means invalidate/remove all blocks since Taproot activation which occur about 6 months ago. If that actually happens, Bitcoin might as well as die or abandoned. Furthermore, it's possible to re-create Ordinal/BRC-20 standard without Taproot.

I believe something will be done.

Maybe, but rollback shouldn't be option any Bitcoiner (who value immutability property of Bitcoin) consider.

A few hundreds of people cannot flood the network like this with a malicious script (and the ordinals can be used like this).

Imagine if Faketoshi (or some other authority) wants to flood the network, making bitcoin unusable.

In my opinion, this is already a security problem. Similar to a DDOS attack.

Flooding Bitcoin network always has been possible though, even without Taproot. The difference is Ordinals, BRC-20, ORC-20 and other thing give financial incentive to make people do such thing, without even thinking their action may flood BTC network.

That depends on people's definition about smart contract. Some people define smart contract as turing complete scripting/programming.

That is a subcategory of smart contracts and this definition was popularized after the introduction of Ethereum. Otherwise ever since 1990s a smart contract is technically a program or a protocol that can be executed automatically without human intervention, trusted third parties, etc.

The best and simplest example of a smart contract is the vending machines which is the oldest implementation of them too.

Thanks for reminder, it's piece of history i forget. But it doesn't change fact people these days is more familiar with definition introduced by ETH/ETH community.

[darkv0rt3x]

Maybe, but rollback shouldn't be option any Bitcoiner (who value immutability property of Bitcoin) consider.

Yeah, no rollback. We would fall into the same paradigma of other shit networks that have the "power" to travel back in time. Immutability is a key feature of Bitcoin blockchain. It needs to be kept that way!

Flooding Bitcoin network always has been possible though, even without Taproot. The difference is Ordinals, BRC-20, ORC-20 and other thing give financial incentive to make people do such thing, without even thinking their action may flood BTC network.

And on top of that, this exploit has been being used as a cloud storage. That is not the purpose of the Bitcoin Blockchain although some argue that any information in a blockchain is "cloud storage", that even the normal transactions in the blockchain can be considered cloud storage. But in this case, my argument is that blockchain was created for this purpose, not for storing monkeys and all kind of crap! As already was said smewhere, this might even remove trust from the blockchain, from some users perspective and make them leave for another blockchains!


And there is a question that is kind of messing with me. I don't have enough knowledge to answer it but these jsons that have been being included in transactions are somehow using some space, right? So, if there is this space available, why can't it be used to include even more transactions in a block? Isn't it viable? Why is there this space available and ready to be filled (now) with this spam jsons? Why can't this space be used to improve the efficiency of the blocks and blockchain in terms of number of transactions per block, at least?

[BrianH]

Bitcoin loses trust if the developers move away from Satoshi's vision and try to haphazardly bolt on every new shiny object.

Thanks for the link to the developers' thread. It looks like they are giving serious consideration to how to address this issue. The solution is not an easy one, because they have already introduced "security regression", as one developer put it, into the network.

It is naive to think this will go away. If we wait on this issue and the value of Bitcoin is reduced to where people no longer have trust/buy it, the system could collapse as mining becomes unprofitable. We could have a Terra/Luna feedback death cycle.

Also, at the current rate of transactions (600k / day), if a central government wanted to destroy trust in Bitcoin, spamming the mempool with a billion dollars in transactions could flood the system for about half a year - that's nothing to many governments.

At the mining concerns, the price of Bitcoin will continue to increase to support the miners - as long as their is value in the system. That value is destroyed if the peer-to-peer payment system no longer works. That is a short-sighted view. What will the miners have to mine if their ASIC hardware is no longer worth anything?

Rolling back Taproot is unlikely, but patching Bitcoin to remove the non peer-to-peer transactions needs to be deployed. The problem is so bad that I had a transaction stuck in unconfirmed status for over 4 hours yesterday, after paying the highest fee in my software.

[joker_josue]

Bitcoin loses trust if the developers move away from Satoshi's vision and try to haphazardly bolt on every new shiny object.

That's right!
One of Bitcoin's strengths was never deviating from Satoshi's initial plan. The fact that everything continues to work as it was done from the beginning, guarantees stability and continuity.

Therefore, I think that everything that deviates from the basic idea of Bitcoin must be rectified, so that everything remains as the initial plan.

One of the things that annoys me the most is when I'm starting to get involved in a project and suddenly the rules of the game change. I think this is very bad and discourages the project.

[BrianH]

This article summarizes the current situation nicely and introduces an additional regulatory concerns caused by BRC-20, which are little more than storing trash variables in the blockchain:

The More Bitcoin Acts Like Ethereum, the Less Investors Should Like It

Are new NFTs and meme tokens good for Bitcoin?

When the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published the original Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) white paper back in 2008, he envisioned the cryptocurrency as a peer-to-peer digital payments system and the ultimate form of "sound money." Some even imagined that one day, Bitcoin might replace the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency.

Flash-forward to 2023, and we're starting to see some unexpected innovations coming to Bitcoin's ecosystem that seem to contradict this original premise -- among them, highly speculative meme tokens and new non-fungible tokens (NFTs). What's concerning it that these innovations are leading to higher transaction fees, network congestion, and complaints about market disruptions. What's going on here, and what impact should it have on your decision to buy Bitcoin?

The "new" Bitcoin

Perhaps the easiest way to describe what's going on here is that it is a battle between the "old" Bitcoin and the "new" Bitcoin. The old Bitcoin is the cryptocurrency originally proposed by Nakamoto. The core purpose of its blockchain is to handle digital currency transactions. From this perspective, blocks on its blockchain should only contain transaction data -- nothing more. Proponents of the new Bitcoin, though, believe that the core Bitcoin blockchain should be used for more than just digital currency transactions. Why not the creation of NFTs or even meme tokens, such as those found on the Ethereum (CRYPTO:ETH) blockchain?

...

Real-world impact

According to one blockchain analytics service, 65% of all Bitcoin transactions on May 7 were related to BRC-20 tokens. Put another way, 65% of the traffic on the Bitcoin blockchain this past Sunday involved people swapping in and out of meme tokens. Things got so out of hand, in fact, that Binance (CRYPTO: BNB) -- the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world --- had to put a temporary halt on Bitcoin withdrawals.

The important point here is that we are starting to see disruptions in the way Bitcoin is used, and these are causing higher fees and network congestion. In El Salvador, where Bitcoin is legal tender and used for everyday purchases, the transaction fees for withdrawing $100 in Bitcoin are now reportedly as high as $20. Think about that: If your bank charged you $20 every time you took $100 out of the ATM, you might start looking for a different bank.

Of course, the innovators who brought us Ordinals and the new BRC-20 tokens will describe how much functionality and utility they are bringing to Bitcoin. Perhaps they will tell you how they are helping Bitcoin reach wider mainstream adoption. And they will claim that they helped to create a billion-dollar market opportunity literally overnight. Fair enough.

But I can't help thinking about that 65% figure. Are two-thirds of Bitcoin transactions now just related to speculating in meme tokens? Please, nobody tell Gary Gensler this. As soon as the Securities and Exchange Commission chairman finds out that crypto enthusiasts have turned Bitcoin into a speculative meme-token playground, it's game over. And that's a primary concern of mine. How can anyone reasonably describe Bitcoin as "sound money" when people are playing with meme tokens in the background and inscribing funny pictures into its blockchain?

Should you invest in Bitcoin?

At one point, I thought the new NFTs might be a good thing for Bitcoin's future valuation. However, with the arrival of BRC-20 meme tokens, I've started to change my mind. Many of the most popular Bitcoin BRC-20 tokens are clearly designed to be meme tokens. The top tokens in this category by market cap now include a pizza-themed token, a frog-themed token, and a token that calls itself, yes, "meme." Now that larger, more mainstream cryptocurrency exchanges are starting to list these tokens for trading, this problem could get bigger as more people get in on the meme-token mania.

For now, I remain bullish on Bitcoin long term. But, in the short term, I'm taking a close look at what's happening with NFTs and meme tokens. If the primary purpose of Bitcoin -- to act as a peer-to-peer digital cash system -- is being hindered by high fees, congestion, and other forms of market friction, then it might be time to pump the brakes. If Bitcoin is trying so hard to become Ethereum, why not just invest in Ethereum?

I was nearly 100% into Bitcoin. I am divesting myself of my Bitcoin holdings, until this matter gets settled. I am sure I am not the only one.