(Ordinals) BRC-20 needs to be removed

[pooya87]

This is where you and I disagree. I say we should not allow bitcoin blockchain to be largely used for something other than a "peer to peer electronic cash" ledger, in this case for cloud storage.

Neither do I want that, but I want it less than I want to not turn Bitcoin into a censorship nightmare. I'm honestly curious if you've read my points. There's no way to prevent someone from using it as a cloud storage; yes, you can disincentivize financially, but we already do that. It's called block size limit. Anything beyond that introduces subjectivity into play. If there's real demand for these Ordinals, which I think it's questionable but say if, then it won't take long until they avoid your "measures" and turn into indistinguishable Bitcoin transactions.

You calling it censorship also doesn't make any sense because you never called version 0 censorship when it placed a limit on the witness size preventing exactly this attack. So why all of a sudden requiring to place similar limit on version 1 is considered censorship?!
BTW the incentive is the parallel market for gambling on these fake-tokens that provides the money they need to spam the chain with their arbitrary data. In other words the fees won't bother or disincentivize them.

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[TryNinja]

If such protocol need to create multiple transaction, it'd create big overhead (more vBytes used for things other than their arbitrary data) and extra implementation complexity. I'd say it would stop some people and there would be less software/website to interact with the protocol due to the complexity. Although for BRC-20, they can just use OP_RETURN.

I'm not sure if that's the case. People just want an excuse to launch ponzis and new NFT projects, which can make them money, and using the Bitcoin network just gives them this air of being "a new thing". You already need to jump a bunch of hops just to use Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens, and everything is very user unfriendly... even I thought it was way too complicated and full of issues i.e if you spend a "specific sat", you lose your Ordinal... like wtf...

Don't you think that the pandora box has been opened and people will keep finding new ways of using the Bitcoin protocol as a ponzi ecossystem? A new software won't stop people, so I feel like this is a lost battle. Also, some people say this makes attacking BTC easier, but this is plain false. 1 MB in Ordinal transactions = 1 MB in "normal" transactions (and any bad state can overpay to clog up the network, with or without Ordinals/BRC-20 tokens).

[stompix]

~

You either being sarcastic or you completely missed the point and misunderstood me!

How can I misunderstand this?

I was speaking on Bitcoin behalf, not on my singular behalf.

I was answering directly to this quote of yours.

It's not my quote and you couldn't have answered any of my posts since that one was my first post in the topic.  

With this line of thinking, there ends up being no spokesperson for Bitcoin at all, which is not necessarily a good thing. It means nobody is voicing any decisions of their own. Consensus depends on many people making their own decisions and picking a majority.

Worse than the Bitcoin Foundation fiasco? Doubt it!
Besides, there is a huge difference between one hundred people showing their proposals and 1 million voting for what they think is the best one and one guy telling others how things will be done. This is the thing with decentralization, there is no official spokesperson, and the community decides who the best spokesperson is by following him and agreeing with his choices. Any other "solution" is just reverting to a centralized dictatorial system.

Excellent point! Can you imagine how much this spam is hurting El Salvador? Their minimum wage averages around $300/month. The BRC-20 transaction fee was >10% of what they earned in a month. This bug that was introduced a few months ago must be strangling global adoption of Bitcoin. Even the current fee is prohibitive. Anyone who was using Bitcoin in El Salvador must be switching to alternatives now.

Sorry, but you missed the second point.
Banning monkeys or orcs 20 or borgs 40 or whatever won't help the people of Salvador if every of the 100 million Indians that supposedly own Bitcoin would decide to make a tx.  Even if 10% of the people in Salvador will make one onchain tx per day it will be enough just for them to clog the network. Bitcoin needs to scale, that's it! It doesn't get any more simple than this.

[OgNasty]

Bitcoin was designed as a method for peer-to-peer exchanges (see quote from Satoshi in sig). It was not originally intended to support tokens or smart contracts.

Bitcoin has essentially become digital gold. These changes are breaking the network and eroding the years of trust that Bitcoin has created. This is what gives it value.

Bitcoin will never offer the transactions per second to support these type of transactions. There are many altcoins that do a better job of providing this utility. Let them do that.

The change to allow BRC-20 in Taproot needs to be rolled back. This is a dangerous, fatal flaw to the network that could be used to bring an end to Bitcoin.

What are your thoughts? Should BRC-20 be removed? What is the best way to do this?

I don't see any difference between BRC-20's use of the blockchain and the Lightning network's use.  I also don't think taproot is what enabled the current issues as much as segwit, but what do I know? 

You say Bitcoin was designed as a method for peer-to-peer exchange, and then go on to say it has become digital gold.  Is evolution of the protocol a good thing or a bad thing?  Did you expect that the Lightning network would continue to have a blockspace advantage without thinking other projects wouldn't take advantage of it as well?  If anything, this BRC-20 stuff is long overdue.

[BlackHatCoiner]

You calling it censorship also doesn't make any sense because you never called version 0 censorship when it placed a limit on the witness size preventing exactly this attack.

I do understand the purpose of such limitations, but please acknowledge this isn't going to prevent people from using Bitcoin as a cloud storage. You can't prevent that, even if you completely break forwards-compatibility and invalidate every transaction that isn't standard. You're just going to make the rules stricter, making the Bitcoin network vulnerable to enforcing rules based on subjective criteria.

So why all of a sudden requiring to place similar limit on version 1 is considered censorship?!

Because now people make usage of it, and because I'm not so ignorant to tell what people are allowed to do in the most freedom-supporting network on the planet.

Note that I wasn't into Bitcoin when SegWit was activated, so I have to accept rules that you may had found me disagreeing with.

[darkv0rt3x]

How can I misunderstand this?

It's not my quote and you couldn't have answered any of my posts since that one was my first post in the topic.  

Indeed, I was confused by the avatars!
But still, it was not my intention to assume myself as any spokesman of Bitcoin or whatever. I just wanted to point out that "it was not me not needing" the ordinals and the other crap. I was saying that, as many others, I don't agree with this garbage in the blockchain!

[takuma sato]

This is what happens when Ethereumtards take over Bitcoin development. If Ethereum had a role that was to keep Bitcoin away from all the nonsense, since all the nonsense would be hosted on the so called Ethereum blockchain, now that isn't enough for them so they have to ruin Bitcoin by bringing the nonsense into the actual Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin Core should just block all this stuff, most nodes are Bitcoin Core nodes. Im not sure if Taproot was even needed. The more stuff you add the more window of opportunity for various blockchain spam use cases would show up, it's one of those things. Bitcoin already did what it had to do before any of that was implemented. As far as miners being happy because it raises fees, well, segwit lowered fees and it was rolled in.

[HmmMAA]

Yes, the "pandora box" has been opened. But i'd say spam prevention to reduce incentive or makes such attack more costly should be done regardless.

I really can't grasp the spam term . As long as they pay the fees their transactions are valid . As spam is considered a free/cheap method to achieve a goal , i would consider as spam the transactions that get into blocks with a low fee .  Those that transmit transactions with fees under the current low ( 20 sats/vB ) are the spammers in current situation .

[BlackHatCoiner]

I really can't grasp the spam term .

I come to realize that you're correct. There is no universal consensus on what's "spam", for the Bitcoin blockchain at least. We're free to enforce our views in our node, but when it comes to the end point, which what gets into the ledger, all transactions should be viewed equally.

As spam is considered a free/cheap method to achieve a goal , i would consider as spam the transactions that get into blocks with a low fee

Why is that spam? The miner is free to choose whichever transaction he wants. Why would it make a difference if it paid a fortune or if it paid nothing?

[HmmMAA]

Why is that spam? The miner is free to choose whichever transaction he wants. Why would it make a difference if it paid a fortune or if it paid nothing?

I agree , there's no spam . As long as fees are paid there can't be considered as such . But if you have have to define something as spam , you definitely can't name the transaction that pays more fees a spam .

Edit . But if a part of the community has a problem with the congested mempool i'd suggest to them to either raise fees for their transactions or stop transacting and let mempool decrease in size .

[BrianH]

If Ethereum had a role that was to keep Bitcoin away from all the nonsense, since all the nonsense would be hosted on the so called Ethereum blockchain, now that isn't enough for them so they have to ruin Bitcoin by bringing the nonsense into the actual Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin Core should just block all this stuff, most nodes are Bitcoin Core nodes. Im not sure if Taproot was even needed. The more stuff you add the more window of opportunity for various blockchain spam use cases would show up, it's one of those things. Bitcoin already did what it had to do before any of that was implemented. As far as miners being happy because it raises fees, well, segwit lowered fees and it was rolled in.

Great point. I think the people who want to change the original use for Bitcoin into every other cryptocurrency are short sighted. Bitcoin is currently losing marketshare to Ethereum as institutions are withdrawing their money from the network, due to this change. If people no longer use Bitcoin, the value of that monkey pic in the blockchain will also go to zero.

Pro-BRC-20 bug people can argue all they want in favor of this change, but it will not change the fact that BTC is losing marketshare. You can see this decline in how much it has declined in the last week vs Ethereum. Altcoins nearly always decline faster than Bitcoin as people move their funds to Bitcoin, as a safe haven - no longer. I've pulled nearly all of my investment out of Bitcoin until this bug gets fixed.

No one is arguing that the primary use case for Bitcoin was a method of peer-to-peer exchange for the last 14 years. If you alter the original coin to devalue that primary use case, it becomes generic and it will fade away like thousands of cryptos that came after it. Changes to support its primary use case should always be encouraged. That's why Segwit was eventually adopted, because although it may have temporarily reduced miner's fees, it improved the primary use case, adoption and value of Bitcoin.

There is obviously a major schism in the community, which I have not seen since Bitcoin Cash. I see this eventually resulting in a soft or hard fork. If the pro-BRC-20 bug people want to create monkey pics on a forked chain, that's fine with me.

I do think the Devs read Bitcointalk and I think it's important to keep this thread alive. I hope they focus on their technical discussion, instead of disrupting it with spam.

[pooya87]

I also don't think taproot is what enabled the current issues as much as segwit, but what do I know? 

Considering how this attack has become possible by exploiting an oversight in the Taproot script validation rules, this is a Taproot related issue not a SegWit related one.

but please acknowledge this isn't going to prevent people from using Bitcoin as a cloud storage. You can't prevent that,

That's true but it depends on what we mean by "cloud storage". If it is the very small size we allow to be stored in an OP_RETURN output for example, then we can't prevent that and we aren't. But if it is the exploitation of protocol to store any size without limit (except the block size) then we can prevent it well. We've done that for the past 14 years.

even if you completely break forwards-compatibility and invalidate every transaction that isn't standard. You're just going to make the rules stricter, making the Bitcoin network vulnerable to enforcing rules based on subjective criteria.

It won't break anything and saying that a single transaction with 1 input/output must not be allowed to be ~4 MB in size to store garbage on chain to scam idiots who would pay for this garbage, is not called "subjective criteria".

Because now people make usage of it, and because I'm not so ignorant to tell what people are allowed to do in the most freedom-supporting network on the planet.

Well there is a big difference between usage and exploit.

[BlackHatCoiner]

That's true but it depends on what we mean by "cloud storage".

There aren't lots of definitions for the term. It simply means to allow storage of information. Besides OP_RETURN there are standard scripts, which you can't distinguish if they're used as cloud storage or for legitimate usage. (And at that point, you will have really screwed things up, because the UTXO set will be used as that storage)

If it is the very small size we allow to be stored in an OP_RETURN output for example

Comparably to what standardness allows, it's not. You can fit as much as an entire, 4 MB block in an OP_RETURN output, and it will be valid.

But if it is the exploitation of protocol to store any size without limit (except the block size) then we can prevent it well.

That's true for all transactions.

It won't break anything and saying that a single transaction with 1 input/output must not be allowed to be ~4 MB in size to store garbage on chain to scam idiots who would pay for this garbage, is not called "subjective criteria".

As if it was possible to add more inputs to bypassing that, right?  

If you think it's garbage, and all that are just greater fool theory schemes, then the best approach is to let it pass, as you're so sure it will!

[mikeywith]

If we wanted to pay attention to what the hooligans say, we would have never had SegWit back in 2017 to begin with.

Not a fair compression IMO,

I didn't compare the Ordinals Attack and its preventive measures with SegWit. I pointed out that in 2017 people were attacking core devs and anybody supporting SegWit trying to prevent it from happening and we didn't listen and pressed on.

What I mean by "compression" is in terms of both actions revolving around the same thing, which is a request to change the protocol, you compare that SegWit "change" to this "ban" change as if they are equally the same, which is why I said it's not a fair compression, back then, you had people who wanted to increase blocksize (Bcash folks with Bitmain siding them), basically just a small group of people who did not want that change to happen despite not having a major disagreement, they just thought their way of fixing things was better.

Banning ordinals now is a completely different story, it's not just Roger and his friends now, it's a large community of actual BTC users, a dozen YouTubers/influencers waiting for the core devs to take any "censorship" action so they can fill their social media content for the rest of the year.

My take on these ordinals and BRC-20 tokens will likely vanish or slow down close to nothing in a few months from now (I checked most top projects, telegram groups, and influencers and etc. The folks behind all this are too weak to sustain it, unlike how everything looks from the outside, the majority of those folks are just trying to get rich overnight and all of them will get rekt, move on with their lives and go back to living with their grandmother)

if we don't want to let the free market handle them, a ban of some sort shouldn't be carried out now while the hype is still high, just give them a few months, people will find a new "trend" and nobody will even notice that they were banned then.

[buwaytress]

Does anyone feel like the problem is actually already self-correcting even quicker than some (or say, myself) predicted? The market cap for these junk coins should be growing, with the amount of new junk entering, yet it's more or less stable (if not shrinking from first week May when it exploded).

That already means the ponzi has peaked. Or that people have moved on to alternatives. Or that the group of sheep is drying up. Or a combination of all of them.

As we, and they, roundly expected, no?

[NotATether]

Does anyone feel like the problem is actually already self-correcting even quicker than some (or say, myself) predicted? The market cap for these junk coins should be growing, with the amount of new junk entering, yet it's more or less stable (if not shrinking from first week May when it exploded).

That already means the ponzi has peaked. Or that people have moved on to alternatives. Or that the group of sheep is drying up. Or a combination of all of them.

As we, and they, roundly expected, no?

Eh, I actually saw this coming. It happens during every "sheep hype".

Once the sheep hype reaches its peak in that all the sheep are rounded together, the wolves are let in and devour them all (well, almost all of them - some sheep are actually smart enough to escape with their lives).

I'm not expecting these sheep to have learned anything from this experiment, but if next time they unleash a shitcoin wave on a Layer 2 network, then at least that shows that the crypto community is collectively becoming a bit competent.

[PawGo]

I'm not expecting these sheep to have learned anything from this experiment, but if next time they unleash a shitcoin wave on a Layer 2 network, then at least that shows that the crypto community is collectively becoming a bit competent.

Or just a bad timing.
Or maybe not enough twitter/youtube/tiktok experts were talking about that and as an effect it did not bring expected amount of $.

If it was a bad timing, sooner or later it will come back.

[mendace]

Does anyone feel like the problem is actually already self-correcting even quicker than some (or say, myself) predicted? The market cap for these junk coins should be growing, with the amount of new junk entering, yet it's more or less stable (if not shrinking from first week May when it exploded).

That already means the ponzi has peaked. Or that people have moved on to alternatives. Or that the group of sheep is drying up. Or a combination of all of them.

As we, and they, roundly expected, no?

Eh, I actually saw this coming. It happens during every "sheep hype".

Once the sheep hype reaches its peak in that all the sheep are rounded together, the wolves are let in and devour them all (well, almost all of them - some sheep are actually smart enough to escape with their lives).

I'm not expecting these sheep to have learned anything from this experiment, but if next time they unleash a shitcoin wave on a Layer 2 network, then at least that shows that the crypto community is collectively becoming a bit competent.

You say there are competent users among the sheep?  mmh I've always doubted this because whoever buys this rubbish does it with the intention that it can enrich their pockets and therefore foolishly makes the mistake and a sheep, as you rightly said, is eaten by the wolf while those few users who know well wolves will never invest a cent.  because they are not sheep but foxes.  I still see too much shit around and too many sheep.

[buwaytress]

Once the sheep hype reaches its peak in that all the sheep are rounded together, the wolves are let in and devour them all (well, almost all of them - some sheep are actually smart enough to escape with their lives).

I'm not expecting these sheep to have learned anything from this experiment, but if next time they unleash a shitcoin wave on a Layer 2 network, then at least that shows that the crypto community is collectively becoming a bit competent.

You say there are competent users among the sheep?  mmh I've always doubted this because whoever buys this rubbish does it with the intention that it can enrich their pockets and therefore foolishly makes the mistake and a sheep, as you rightly said, is eaten by the wolf while those few users who know well wolves will never invest a cent.  because they are not sheep but foxes.  I still see too much shit around and too many sheep.

Some sheep get away, believe they became wolves, and return for the next feeding trough, only to fall the second time. That's usually how greed works. Some do live on, believing they were geniuses, though to be fair, I might have met in my life one or two who understand it was pure luck, and retire happily as regulars.

I suppose we need all kinds to keep this wheel spinning. Bitcoin was the latest to brush shoulders with it, but that really is the beauty of it, all are free to use it as they please, and to move on when they realise it no longer suits them.

Meanwhile, haven't seen 100 sat/byte recommended fee despite mempool still towering high.

[NotATether]

You say there are competent users among the sheep?

After huge pumps and dumps / crashes / scams and other fails, a tiny amount of shitcoiners become enlightened and see the errors of these coins, and become Bitcoiners. But most don't learn, that part is true.