(Ordinals) BRC-20 needs to be removed

[philipma1957]

the only alt algo with a good setup is scrypt.

they solved the ½ issue by merge mining LTC and Doge.

the reward to fee ratio issue that btc has. Has been reduced as doge rewards stay stable.

the meager blocks available to btc per day (144) has been solved by ltc 288 doge 1440

the 144 block limit mean great restrictions to scaling.

while 1728 a day for scrypt is 12x better.

Yeah BTC has first in the game edge and many times it is enough. But the LTC+Doge can do everything btc
can do and has more flexibility.

Now as a miner am I preaching  scrypt over btc no.

I have 200kwatts an hour burning as I type only 26kwatts are mining scrypt. The rest mine BTC.

As a guy that sees $ per watt is most miners code of business BTC needs to acknowledge that and find a way to deal with it.

Hey I saw vinyl die and come back
I saw eight track die not coming back
I saw cassettes die not coming back
I saw ipods die
we now stream music for the most part.

I watched tv with rabbit ears for antennas and only
2
4
5
7
9
11
13
68
were available.
cable did not exist.

I watch cable and stream now.

point is shit evolves and occasionally backtracks.

Do I see BTC evolving yeah.

taproot
segwit
LN

but scrypt can copy that and still has that 2+10=12 times the block per hour advantage.

by 2032 when blocks are 0.78 btc

Ltc will be 1.56 but doge will be 10,000

I dont see any BTC move to address that obviously better long term advantage scrypt has over btc.

I think what we are seeing with ordinals+brc-20+nfts is a backdoor effort for btc to catch up to scrypt’s better long term reward setup.

We are going to know a lot by 2032 if btc figures out what to do.

Honestly I'd much rather see BTC merge mining with doge+LTC than with any of this inefficient BRC20 crap. Maybe BIP301 is on to something. But then again our protocol development has basically stagnated because discussing anything has become more like US congress where everyone argues with each other and agrees on nothing.

At least DOGE and LTC are widely agreed on to have actual value. While the popularity of Ordinals and BRC20 is basically not guarrenteed to stay as it is because get-rich-quicker's will tire of it and move to the Next Big Thing(TM).

Not bad. I would support that.

[1714251703]

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[gmaxwell]

the only alt algo with a good setup is scrypt.

Well lets see, in a whole day right the entire LTC and DOGE networks bring in a total of $1.58 million dollars combined from fees and inflation (fees being utterly insignificant).

Bitcoin, from *fees alone* without any inflation brings in $1.72million dollars/day.

This means that even with inflation completely gone in Bitcoin, Bitcoin already brings in enough in fees pay for significantly more security than those two altcoins achieve essentially entirely from inflation.  (You could, for whatever it's worth substitute or even add other semi-popular altcoins to that and still be less than Bitcoin, I just used the two you suggest)

"Merged mining" is significantly undermined by the central game theory argument for mining:  The game theory argument for mining is that to mine you expend costly energy, and if your work won't end up in the longest chain (or you manage to blow up the thing you're mining) then that effort is wasted so it is in your best interest to mine honestly.  It gets some participation advantage because you can just add it on, but as we saw with namecoin the low income quickly causes parties to either no bother or not maintain their infrastructure.

In the case of merge mining if one asset has meaningful income (like dogecoin maybe has with its perpetual inflation) and the other asset does not-- like litecoin once is subsidy is depleted (unless something changes). Then only the income side has meaningful security, the non-income side does not because the attacker isn't losing much if his blocks don't end up on the longest chain or if he sets the whole thing on fire.

Maybe you can see why many Bitcoiners really dislike altcoiners.  It's usually not that they have any issue with the altcoin itself, it's because people with some kind of investment in the altcoin glibly spread misleading claims about Bitcoin in order to rationalize, justify, and promote their altcoins.  The points are seldom well justified or considered.  I'd say that a simple majority of altcoin centric arguments about Bitcoin are actually points against the altcoins if considered with a bit of care, like this one.

There may well be reasons that you could advocate ltc+doge,  but fudding Bitcoin about its ability to fund security with fees is not one of them.  If Bitcoin's *current* fee-only income isn't enough security income for your taste than you should conclude that these other coins are *currently* insecure and lack any kind of trajectory to allow them to achieve even their current level of security in the future (after all, even doges perpetual inflation effectively dilutes the mining income down to nothing over time too; just at the cost of also debasing everyone's holdings at the same time).

because discussing anything has become more like US congress where everyone argues

Argues? Where? AFAICT noise, toxicity, and attacks got so bad the discussion just *stopped*, except a bit of chatter among gadflies and navel gazers that won't ever do the work and can't manage the navigate the public politics.  Maybe you've seen some arguments among  those people, but they were only ever there to argue.  Or it's just unoriginal repetition of ideas that were thoroughly explored in 2012 (like "lets switch to scrypt and merge mine with litecoin!"), getting the responses that could have been copy and pasted from the last three times. If there was real activity you probably wouldn't notice those noise discussions arguing amongst themselves.

When I looked recently the developer chat channel logs, they now regularly go days without any comments at all, yet back in 2013 they averaged 1866 messages per day-- a day without activity would have been a shock.  That isn't argument-- argument would mean activity.  The mailing lists have been widely unsubscribed, most posts are people who've never been extensively involved in development, and just haven't received the message about how dead things are in terms of meaningful change.

Of course, (reinvoking the prior offtopic diversion) bitcoin development "dead" is still significantly more activity than most altcoins get-- so altcoiners don't get any ideas from this comment.  Just about a year ago or so the entire doge network was completely unable to bring up a single new node for *weeks*  until a bitcoin developer friend had a friend that wanted to dump their doge (the outage actually drove up prices because it limited the supply of old coins).  He had to fix some gross incompetence that was preventing nodes from syncing  (such as completely re-validating the defectively expensive scrypt POW and the gigant MM proofs every time it read one off the disk to give it to a peer) then used his fixed node to fix the other nodes, and brought their essentially failed (but hardly noticed failure since pools and exchanges were still running) network back to life.  Maybe next time no family member of a real developer will have doge to dump and it will just stay dead?  who knows!

[larry_vw_1955]

What "use case" are you referring to?  A description of a use case should not mention Bitcoin-- it should mention a problem people have which Bitcoin might be a solution.

that's easy. i need a way to store encrypted data permanently and not have to worry about my data being deleted in 2 years like gmail might do due to inactivity. it's not a huge amount of data but maybe a few kilobytes. from time to time. i need it to have 100% uptime so that anytime i need it i can get it. 24/7/365. as long as i have an internet connection...

that data might consist of anything like login/passwords to important websites or bitcoin seed phrases or anything. i know some people think it's a bad idea to store that type of thing online but hopefully people have better things to do than sit around trying to crack some AES-256 encrypted ordinal.

[gmaxwell]

That isn't a use case for *Bitcoin* in that it's something Bitcoin doesn't actually accommodate on a fundamental basis: Bitcoin nodes don't need to store or provide access to historical blocks to operate.  They only do today (to the extent they do, many don't) to aid new nodes coming up securely, but in the future that will be accomplished via other means because transferring terabytes of blockchain to process and throw away whenever someone starts a new node won't be sufficiently viable.

So not only do you have to worry that it might become unavailable, it'll be inevitable, except in the sense that perhaps there may be some archive someplace or another that has the historical chain and might make it available to you at some cost.  But if that's good enough you could put your data on archive.org today or just put it anywhere on the internet and let the common crawl pick it up.  This file storage stuff will hasten the day when the historical chain becomes hard to access, because people will store illegal data in it and then node operators will be forced to shut down or face prosecution.  Already I'm being sued over accusations that I ran a node that distributed copyrighted data hidden inside transactions (by third parties without my knowledge or involvement). (so, please, preface any response that this is a speculative concern with a credible offer to cover my legal expenses and indemnify me should we lose)

To the limited extent Bitcoin accommodates it in practice today it's _exceedingly_ inefficient for it in the sense that the p2p network doesn't provide random access to the chain (and presumably won't be due to the abuse potential) so unless you don't mind downloading and processing a terabyte of data over the several days to retrieve your kilobyte of data it isn't available to you already from the network. It's also the case that other blockchains that care less about security or decentralization can do the same thing for radically lower cost (still a dumb idea to use a blockchain for this but if you must then almost anything else does it better).  Finally, not that anyone doing it cares, but it's also a abuse that was expressly argued against by Bitcoin's creator.

At the moment there is some webpages that provide access but those will be taken down after their operators give up wasting their money on them (or get tired of the issues with illegal content on them ... or when their collateral purpose is satisfied or abandoned)-- and in that case you're really counting on the websites to provide the service. No different that the *prior* sites that have done "files on the blockchain" in bitcoin (which has happened several times in the past, the files then are practically irretrievable now to anyone but an expert developer).

As an aside the data you're talking about doesn't make a lot of sense to store this way:  E.g. "seed phrases" -- because the stored data is public the *only* security for it comes from the private key used to encrypt it.  You could instead skip the stored data and derive all the bitcoin keys and website passwords from the same key with no storage.  Presumably if your key is secure then you have to store it too-- most mediums that can store 256 bits can also store 2kb.  I'll guess your key is really a passphrase which means that the thing the attacker has to attack is just that and not aes-256. A human memorized passphrase usually has less than 70 bits of security, so even worse to make the data public in that case.

[As a bonus: surprise the same person financing that copyright litigation against me is financing several of the high profiles ordinals companies.  Though I think the pretty clear fact that ordinals are being used as an attack on Bitcoin to destroy its decentralization (by driving up resource costs, by increasing the legal risk in running a node, by being used to justify vexatious litigation against tech people) doesn't mean all its users or the people who originally created it intended it as an attack. But it's the effect that counts.]

[philipma1957]

the only alt algo with a good setup is scrypt.

Well lets see, in a whole day right the entire LTC and DOGE networks bring in a total of $1.58 million dollars combined from fees and inflation (fees being utterly insignificant).

Bitcoin, from *fees alone* without any inflation brings in $1.72million dollars/day.

This means that even with inflation completely gone in Bitcoin, Bitcoin already brings in enough in fees pay for significantly more security than those two altcoins achieve essentially entirely from inflation.  (You could, for whatever it's worth substitute or even add other semi-popular altcoins to that and still be less than Bitcoin, I just used the two you suggest)

"Merged mining" is significantly undermined by the central game theory argument for mining:  The game theory argument for mining is that to mine you expend costly energy, and if your work won't end up in the longest chain (or you manage to blow up the thing you're mining) then that effort is wasted so it is in your best interest to mine honestly.  It gets some participation advantage because you can just add it on, but as we saw with namecoin the low income quickly causes parties to either no bother or not maintain their infrastructure.

In the case of merge mining if one asset has meaningful income (like dogecoin maybe has with its perpetual inflation) and the other asset does not-- like litecoin once is subsidy is depleted (unless something changes). Then only the income side has meaningful security, the non-income side does not because the attacker isn't losing much if his blocks don't end up on the longest chain or if he sets the whole thing on fire.

Maybe you can see why many Bitcoiners really dislike altcoiners.  It's usually not that they have any issue with the altcoin itself, it's because people with some kind of investment in the altcoin glibly spread misleading claims about Bitcoin in order to rationalize, justify, and promote their altcoins.  The points are seldom well justified or considered.  I'd say that a simple majority of altcoin centric arguments about Bitcoin are actually points against the altcoins if considered with a bit of care, like this one.

There may well be reasons that you could advocate ltc+doge,  but fudding Bitcoin about its ability to fund security with fees is not one of them.  If Bitcoin's *current* fee-only income isn't enough security income for your taste than you should conclude that these other coins are *currently* insecure and lack any kind of trajectory to allow them to achieve even their current level of security in the future (after all, even doges perpetual inflation effectively dilutes the mining income down to nothing over time too; just at the cost of also debasing everyone's holdings at the same time).

because discussing anything has become more like US congress where everyone argues

Argues? Where? AFAICT noise, toxicity, and attacks got so bad the discussion just *stopped*, except a bit of chatter among gadflies and navel gazers that won't ever do the work and can't manage the navigate the public politics.  Maybe you've seen some arguments among  those people, but they were only ever there to argue.  Or it's just unoriginal repetition of ideas that were thoroughly explored in 2012 (like "lets switch to scrypt and merge mine with litecoin!"), getting the responses that could have been copy and pasted from the last three times. If there was real activity you probably wouldn't notice those noise discussions arguing amongst themselves.

When I looked recently the developer chat channel logs, they now regularly go days without any comments at all, yet back in 2013 they averaged 1866 messages per day-- a day without activity would have been a shock.  That isn't argument-- argument would mean activity.  The mailing lists have been widely unsubscribed, most posts are people who've never been extensively involved in development, and just haven't received the message about how dead things are in terms of meaningful change.

Of course, (reinvoking the prior offtopic diversion) bitcoin development "dead" is still significantly more activity than most altcoins get-- so altcoiners don't get any ideas from this comment.  Just about a year ago or so the entire doge network was completely unable to bring up a single new node for *weeks*  until a bitcoin developer friend had a friend that wanted to dump their doge (the outage actually drove up prices because it limited the supply of old coins).  He had to fix some gross incompetence that was preventing nodes from syncing  (such as completely re-validating the defectively expensive scrypt POW and the gigant MM proofs every time it read one off the disk to give it to a peer) then used his fixed node to fix the other nodes, and brought their essentially failed (but hardly noticed failure since pools and exchanges were still running) network back to life.  Maybe next time no family member of a real developer will have doge to dump and it will just stay dead?  who knows!

perhaps we see the future of electrical power turning into wealth differently.

I see scaling issues not solved for BTC
I see reward to fee ratio becoming a problem for BTC

I see Ltc+ Doge with 12x the blocks each minute as a better way to scale
I see Doge’s perpetually shrinking inflational rate as pure brilliance.
year 1 100%
year 2   50%
year 11 10%
year 21   5%
year 26  4%
year 51.  2%

So does btc simply do nothing but watch the brc-20 issue. They should do exactly that.

At least in my opinion. As I think it will self regulate.

I think cutting it out is heavy handed and will lead pools into setting minimum fees as early as 2032.

Hoping to reach 2032 as I would be 75 by then I think I can do that much.

Also hoping to see 100-150k by then for btc.

[vjudeu]

"Merged mining" is significantly undermined by the central game theory argument for mining:  The game theory argument for mining is that to mine you expend costly energy, and if your work won't end up in the longest chain (or you manage to blow up the thing you're mining) then that effort is wasted so it is in your best interest to mine honestly.

The solution to that is to always end up in the heaviest chain. There are altcoins based on double SHA-256, that are here and now completely unsafe, and can be reorged at any moment. What they should do, is to trace the heaviest existing proof of work, and burn (or lock to the future) their coinbase rewards, proportionally to their hashrate (so if some ALT has 1% of the total double SHA-256 chainwork, then miners should receive 1% of the coinbase). Mining 1 ALT should be as hard as mining 1 BTC, then people will have reasons to mine both (ideally, they should be pegged in 1:1, then there would be no additional coins, optionally they could use lower denominations, like millisatoshis in LN, if some altcoin does not have enough hashrate to create single satoshis; it is even possible to use merged mining for test coins, if someone wants to test new features, but does not want to "waste" computing power).

It gets some participation advantage because you can just add it on, but as we saw with namecoin the low income quickly causes parties to either no bother or not maintain their infrastructure.

When it comes to NameCoin, that altcoin made many mistakes, and for that reason they are where they are. For example, there are some sidechains like RSK, where merged mining was successful, also because they have 1:1 peg. For domains, there is even no need to create any new monetary base in the first place, they should create domains directly in a vanity-like way. In that case, even limited supply is not needed, because then one miner can own "name123", and another miner can later mine "name456". There could be two parts: vanity part, and hash part. The network can easily guarantee that if you mined "name123", then when users will type "name", they will reach your entry. Later, when your "name" will expire, another user can mine "name456".

Instead of that system, they introduced new monetary base for no reason, and they decided to burn 0.01 NMC for every domain (that is also pointless, because then if that project would be more successful, that would mean it will halt at some point, when all coins will be burned in domain-buying transactions). Instead of commitments, they used explicit on-chain hashes (it is possible to create a system, where any user can prepare some name upfront, and where people will never know that any new name was created, until it will be revealed later, such transactions would be indistinguishable from a regular ones).

[d5000]

Bitcoin nodes don't need to store or provide access to historical blocks to operate.  They only do today (to the extent they do, many don't) to aid new nodes coming up securely, but in the future that will be accomplished via other means because transferring terabytes of blockchain to process and throw away whenever someone starts a new node won't be sufficiently viable.

Very interesting. Is there some technology under consideration to replace the traditional "initial blockchain download", or some concrete research on one?

There was, of course, the "Mini-Blockchain scheme" [1] (Bruce, 2014) but it had been described as "flawed" (in a discussion I don't remember); I believe due to some attack vectors [2]. Another scheme is Rollerchain [3]. Maybe also [4] (Matzutt et al., 2020) and [5] (Sforzin, Maso et al.) are relevant.

It's an extremely interesting topic as it would also probably solve the problem with the "right to be forgotten".


[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Mini-Blockchain-Scheme-Bruce/2b52355f76fca0ac23c5730f4e1a6a7e653f0237
[2] http://cryptonite.info/wiki/index.php?title=Weaknesses_and_attack_vectors
[3] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Prunable-Blockchain-Consensus-Protocol-Based-on-Chepurnoy-Larangeira/48f1b027c7ec96fa8a4ca4f53e2be6b95643e3f4
[4] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/How-to-Securely-Prune-Bitcoin%E2%80%99s-Blockchain-Matzutt-Kalde/d855ac1c3fe47a5b47d808bf763ba95b993ce8da
[5] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/On-the-Storage-Overhead-of-Proof-of-Work-Sforzin-Maso/21a1bdb3d54e1ab02ca23c1cf8d7c1b88aab4258

[larry_vw_1955]

That isn't a use case for *Bitcoin* in that it's something Bitcoin doesn't actually accommodate on a fundamental basis: Bitcoin nodes don't need to store or provide access to historical blocks to operate.  

Then just use something that stores the data in utxo set such as Bitcoin Stamps: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-stamps-nfts-gaining-ordinals-225153058.html

As an aside the data you're talking about doesn't make a lot of sense to store this way:  E.g. "seed phrases" -- because the stored data is public the *only* security for it comes from the private key used to encrypt it.  You could instead skip the stored data and derive all the bitcoin keys and website passwords from the same key with no storage.  Presumably if your key is secure then you have to store it too-- most mediums that can store 256 bits can also store 2kb.  I'll guess your key is really a passphrase which means that the thing the attacker has to attack is just that and not aes-256. A human memorized passphrase usually has less than 70 bits of security, so even worse to make the data public in that case.

it could be literally anything. say i came up with this fantastic recipe for spaghetti and meatballs.

[As a bonus: surprise the same person financing that copyright litigation against me is financing several of the high profiles ordinals companies.  Though I think the pretty clear fact that ordinals are being used as an attack on Bitcoin to destroy its decentralization (by driving up resource costs, by increasing the legal risk in running a node, by being used to justify vexatious litigation against tech people) doesn't mean all its users or the people who originally created it intended it as an attack. But it's the effect that counts.]

sorry you're being sued that's really surprising but what would even be MORE suprising is if the plaintiff won.

now you presented a bunch of use cases for bitcoin and they are all fine to some degree or another but i think my proposed use case isn't like the bottom of the list.

Each of these cases Bitcoin can help with because it removes trusted third parties from the process of either transacting or storing your wealth, trusted third parties which fail to deliver a stable system, can capriciously interfere with your right to associate with others, or otherwise act against your best interest.  These are examples of the use cases Bitcoin set out to solve, which its fundamental properties are designed to satisfy and are mostly difficult to impossible for other systems to solve (except to the extent that they imitate Bitcoin's design).

that's all a nice theory and we like to think that's how it works in practice but the way it usually works goes something like this: i have some cash in my bank account. I transfer some of it to coinbase. The bank allows that transaction to go through. Then I have to start trusting coinbase to let me buy bitcoin. Once I buy it on their platform and pay them any fees which I don't like paying fees but that's non-negotiable, I have to trust them to let me send that bitcoin to my external wallet. If i ever sell some of my bitcoin or pay for something with it, I need to tell the IRS about it. I guess though the IRS issue is outside of the scope of what use cases you are saying bitcoin solves.

So what? USA isn't the whole world.

you know what's funny? people in the USA been getting a big $50 discount off their internet service for quite a while now. Thanks to uncle sam. Not sure how long that will last though. But some of them are getting it for FREE. That's right they don't even pay a penny.

In addition, ISP around the world would advertise their service with words such as "up to X Mbps". So if you get less than X, they couldn't be sued without very serious effort since they use term "up to" which is annoying.

well if you were an ISP you would do the exact same thing. You can't promise perfection. Another annoying thing these companies do is advertise their promo rates. They never want you to know what the price goes up to after that first 12 months is up. You have to probably call them and threaten to take them to court just to find out what their normal rate is...

[ABCbits]

Bitcoin nodes don't need to store or provide access to historical blocks to operate.  They only do today (to the extent they do, many don't) to aid new nodes coming up securely, but in the future that will be accomplished via other means because transferring terabytes of blockchain to process and throw away whenever someone starts a new node won't be sufficiently viable.

Very interesting. Is there some technology under consideration to replace the traditional "initial blockchain download", or some concrete research on one?

--snip--

I skimmed page you mentioned, but none of them mentioned UTXO commitment. I remember BCH community attempt to do that, but i never check whether they actually implement and use it. Although with new ~15 million UTXO due to BRC-20 hype, i wonder how well UTXO commitment works.

Although people who don't care about verify whole blockchain or can trust certain person could just use download snapshot of pruned node from website such as https://prunednode.today/.

In addition, ISP around the world would advertise their service with words such as "up to X Mbps". So if you get less than X, they couldn't be sued without very serious effort since they use term "up to" which is annoying.

well if you were an ISP you would do the exact same thing. You can't promise perfection. Another annoying thing these companies do is advertise their promo rates. They never want you to know what the price goes up to after that first 12 months is up. You have to probably call them and threaten to take them to court just to find out what their normal rate is...

I get your point. But it's annoying when a customer only get less half or less of what ISP advertised most of the time.

[larry_vw_1955]

I get your point. But it's annoying when a customer only get less half or less of what ISP advertised most of the time.

well if you're supposed to get say 30 Mbps down and you're not even getting 15 most of the time then I'd say that's a bigger problem than if you are supposed to get 100 and only get 50. But that's just an opinion...if someone has 50Mbps then life should be ok. at least they can do basic things. They won't be downloading games all day long but I think alot of ISPs have limits on abusive subscribers that download like crazy anyway.

[philipma1957]

I get your point. But it's annoying when a customer only get less half or less of what ISP advertised most of the time.

well if you're supposed to get say 30 Mbps down and you're not even getting 15 most of the time then I'd say that's a bigger problem than if you are supposed to get 100 and only get 50. But that's just an opinion...if someone has 50Mbps then life should be ok. at least they can do basic things. They won't be downloading games all day long but I think alot of ISPs have limits on abusive subscribers that download like crazy anyway.

I have 200 down and 30 up

when I do a full blockchain they slow me to about 90 down.

[larry_vw_1955]

That isn't a use case for *Bitcoin* in that it's something Bitcoin doesn't actually accommodate on a fundamental basis: Bitcoin nodes don't need to store or provide access to historical blocks to operate.  They only do today (to the extent they do, many don't) to aid new nodes coming up securely, but in the future that will be accomplished via other means because transferring terabytes of blockchain to process and throw away whenever someone starts a new node won't be sufficiently viable.

there's only one way to fully validate the current utxo set and that is by downloading the entire blockchain from the genesis block. if someone wants to trust some third party then  i guess that's up to them but internet speeds and storage space seem like they will able to support blockchain growth perhaps indefinitely since technology is always improving and we already have 20+TB drives. That's about a 40:1 ratio of unused to used space. You can bet that's going to get bigger in the future. people can already have a 1Gbps internet speed. That should be sufficient far into the future for downloading the blockchain. Blockchain grows at 0.1TB per year max, it takes how many years to fill up a 20TB HDD? In 100 years the blockchain will be at most about 10TB. On a 1Gbps connection you can download that in just over 1 day. In 100 years, 1Gbps probably will be something everyone has. No one is still on dialup.

The day when you can't download and fully validate the blockchain from the genesys block if you so desire is the day that bitcoin becomes meaningless. Because you won't know if it goes all the way back to satoshi or not.

So not only do you have to worry that it might become unavailable, it'll be inevitable, except in the sense that perhaps there may be some archive someplace or another that has the historical chain and might make it available to you at some cost.  

I don't share that point of view. Not with regards to ordinals and not in the next 100 years.

[philipma1957]

That isn't a use case for *Bitcoin* in that it's something Bitcoin doesn't actually accommodate on a fundamental basis: Bitcoin nodes don't need to store or provide access to historical blocks to operate.  They only do today (to the extent they do, many don't) to aid new nodes coming up securely, but in the future that will be accomplished via other means because transferring terabytes of blockchain to process and throw away whenever someone starts a new node won't be sufficiently viable.

there's only one way to fully validate the current utxo set and that is by downloading the entire blockchain from the genesis block. if someone wants to trust some third party then  i guess that's up to them but internet speeds and storage space seem like they will able to support blockchain growth perhaps indefinitely since technology is always improving and we already have 20+TB drives. That's about a 40:1 ratio of unused to used space. You can bet that's going to get bigger in the future. people can already have a 1Gbps internet speed. That should be sufficient far into the future for downloading the blockchain. Blockchain grows at 0.1TB per year max, it takes how many years to fill up a 20TB HDD? In 100 years the blockchain will be at most about 10TB. On a 1Gbps connection you can download that in just over 1 day. In 100 years, 1Gbps probably will be something everyone has. No one is still on dialup.

The day when you can't download and fully validate the blockchain from the genesys block if you so desire is the day that bitcoin becomes meaningless. Because you won't know if it goes all the way back to satoshi or not.

So not only do you have to worry that it might become unavailable, it'll be inevitable, except in the sense that perhaps there may be some archive someplace or another that has the historical chain and might make it available to you at some cost.  

I don't share that point of view. Not with regards to ordinals and not in the next 100 years.

well a lot depends on block size.  If developers panic and go to 32mb blocks fast vs 2mb blocks now the downloads would be terrible.

Which is one good argument to no allow ordinals or any block spam at all.

I can do a 500gb download pretty fast.

Even a 1tb download is not bad.

I have been lazy and should do a new core download.

[garlonicon]

I can do a 500gb download pretty fast.

The problem is: downloading blockchain data is not all what you have to do, to be a full node. You also have to verify that data. Verification time is much bigger bottleneck than blockchain size.

Some time ago, I saw that in practice in some altcoin. It was CPU-based, and had only 2 GB chain, or something around that. However, downloading 500 GB of Bitcoin was faster than downloading 2 GB of this altcoin, just because they switched from SHA-256 to some ASIC-resistant, CPU-mineable hash function. Even worse, they did it not only in block headers, but just everywhere, in every single place, which means they also replaced it in Merkle Tree, in Script opcodes like OP_SHA256, and in all other places. Then, I learned why using lightweight hash function like SHA-256 is important. I saw their chainwork, when mining a single block header, and getting 50 coins, required computing around 1000 hashes. I saw how validating a Merkle Tree with depth of ten levels was as hard as mining the next block.

And then, coming back to Bitcoin, you can read about possible attacks, that can slow down verification. Plugging a lot of OP_CHECKSIG opcodes, executing hash functions multiple times, sending strange P2P messages with complex data, etc. If the whole problem would be only about downloading speed, then we could go further than from 1 MB to 4 MB. However, if bootstrapping a new node from a server running 24/7, with static IP, and good connections to other nodes, can take a week, then I know the problem is not only about bandwidth, because I can see that in practice, when I read logs from my server, and compare network usage with CPU and disk usage.

[ABCbits]

--snip--

They won't be downloading games all day long but I think alot of ISPs have limits on abusive subscribers that download like crazy anyway.

And depending on the limitation, i would classify it as predatory behavior. For example, there are few ISP which advertise their internet with claim unlimited usage but also do one of these,
1. Very strict data caps/FUP[1] before your speed is slowed down significantly. In my country, i've seen few ISP which offer 50 Mbps with only 300GB monthly FUP. Even comcast (one of ISP in USA) has 1.2TB limit and then offer actual unlimited plan[2].
2. Threaten to terminate their service for customer who use lots of data[3].
3. Attempt to throttle VPN and Torrent[5] connection.

I can do a 500gb download pretty fast.

The problem is: downloading blockchain data is not all what you have to do, to be a full node. You also have to verify that data. Verification time is much bigger bottleneck than blockchain size.

--snip--

Exactly. Based on one of LoyceV testing[6], you need fairly decent setup (4 core CPU, NVMe SSD and 16GB RAM, even though Bitcoin Core only configured to use ~6GB RAM) to fully sync pruned node in 22 hours.

[1] https://selectra.in/guides/fup
[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/comcasts-data-cap-finally-goes-nationwide-in-expansion-to-12-more-states/
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/payvpu/new_isp_threatened_to_cut_off_my_connection/
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/VPN/comments/5jmgv8/can_an_isp_detect_a_vpn_and_throttle_your/
[5] https://www.zdnet.com/article/is-your-internet-provider-throttling-bittorrent-traffic-find-out/
[6] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5434679.msg61714795#msg61714795

[larry_vw_1955]

And depending on the limitation, i would classify it as predatory behavior. For example, there are few ISP which advertise their internet with claim unlimited usage but also do one of these,
1. Very strict data caps/FUP[1] before your speed is slowed down significantly. In my country, i've seen few ISP which offer 50 Mbps with only 300GB monthly FUP. Even comcast (one of ISP in USA) has 1.2TB limit and then offer actual unlimited plan[2].

1.2 terabyte is alot for a single day. a DVD-R disc is about 5GB right? that's like downloading over 200 DVD movies or something in a single day. i'd say 99% of people don't have that type of need. shouldn't have that type of need and if they do then they're on the wrong plan. but if they do offer a truely unlimited plan as you say then that's what that is for i guess.

2. Threaten to terminate their service for customer who use lots of data[3].

Homeboy downloaded about 18TB of data in one month and wonders why they threatened to cut him off. One mnth. 18 terabytes. you do the math. equals other people can't use their internet service because homeboy is downloading Linux ISO images like crazy. probably trying to sell them.

3. Attempt to throttle VPN and Torrent[5] connection.

personal internet service is not really meant to do things like share torrents. lets say Joe tries to run bittorrent 24/7, then people all over the globe are going to be hitting him up for pieces of files. so what just happened is all those people became non-paying customers of Joe's ISP. they don't like that.

unlimited is only unlimited to the extent that you don't cause a problem with other paying customers or the ISP thinks you might be. then you're not on unlimited anymore. 

[z0x0fily]

It's not only about BRC-20 which is usually under 1kb, people are inscribing much bigger files (https://www.ord.io/?contentType=video) at the moment for no apparent reason. I've almost never seen someone storing their NFT's collection files on Ethereum, but ORD community seems to encourage doing that on bitcoin and consider it innovative. I've seen one of the communities celebrate inscribing some of their used node_module packages on bitcoin a few hours ago.

[ABCbits]

And depending on the limitation, i would classify it as predatory behavior. For example, there are few ISP which advertise their internet with claim unlimited usage but also do one of these,
1. Very strict data caps/FUP[1] before your speed is slowed down significantly. In my country, i've seen few ISP which offer 50 Mbps with only 300GB monthly FUP. Even comcast (one of ISP in USA) has 1.2TB limit and then offer actual unlimited plan[2].

1.2 terabyte is alot for a single day. a DVD-R disc is about 5GB right? that's like downloading over 200 DVD movies or something in a single day. i'd say 99% of people don't have that type of need. shouldn't have that type of need and if they do then they're on the wrong plan. but if they do offer a truely unlimited plan as you say then that's what that is for i guess.

As stated on news source i mentioned, it's 1.2TB per month. While it's still sufficient for many people or contribute to Bitcoin network by running full node while allowing incoming connection, it's definitely not true unlimited. And 1.2TB isn't a lot when it's used by family for zoom meeting and video streaming on almost daily basis with HD or higher resolution. For reference, since 2021 (when COVID happen and people work/study from home) there are 14% customer who use more than 1TB/month[1].

2. Threaten to terminate their service for customer who use lots of data[3].

Homeboy downloaded about 18TB of data in one month and wonders why they threatened to cut him off. One mnth. 18 terabytes. you do the math. equals other people can't use their internet service because homeboy is downloading Linux ISO images like crazy. probably trying to sell them.

Example i mentioned is definitely extreme case. But since we're talking about 18TB, i would speculate he just collect every Linux ISO which is exist on internet. And i've seen few people claim they receive similar threat when they exceed 2TB of internet usage.

3. Attempt to throttle VPN and Torrent[5] connection.

personal internet service is not really meant to do things like share torrents. lets say Joe tries to run bittorrent 24/7, then people all over the globe are going to be hitting him up for pieces of files. so what just happened is all those people became non-paying customers of Joe's ISP. they don't like that.

I agree running bittorent 24/7 is a somehow extreme for home user. But those throttle also apply when you download files with bittorrent protocol. And as reminder, there's etiquette to have at least 1.0 or 1:1 ratio (e.g. if you download 1GB, you should also upload 1GB)[2], although some people say 0.5 ratio is acceptable.

unlimited is only unlimited to the extent that you don't cause a problem with other paying customers or the ISP thinks you might be. then you're not on unlimited anymore.  

Which IMO isn't true unlimited or isn't what customer expect when they see term "unlimited" on their advertising.

It's not only about BRC-20 which is usually under 1kb, people are inscribing much bigger files (https://www.ord.io/?contentType=video) at the moment for no apparent reason. I've almost never seen someone storing their NFT's collection files on Ethereum, but ORD community seems to encourage doing that on bitcoin and consider it innovative.

Both of them could be stored elsewhere. But i'd say BRC-20 is worse since it create many TX and UTXO.

I've seen one of the communities celebrate inscribing some of their used node_module packages on bitcoin a few hours ago.

Do you mind sharing the link?


[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/02/internet-use-soared-throughout-2020-helping-isps-cash-in-on-data-caps/
[2] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-use-bittorrent

[z0x0fily]

Do you mind sharing the link?

Sure, this is an NFT collection that inscribed a couple of packages that are commonly used, https://twitter.com/OnChainMonkey/status/1668059991327248384. This came as a follow up on Recursive Inscriptions proposal, basically splitting the data over multiple inscriptions and reusing them, removing some of the limitation that they had. A flood of JS packages in transactions is probably about to happen so that they can use it in their HTML inscriptions.

[larry_vw_1955]

Which IMO isn't true unlimited or isn't what customer expect when they see term "unlimited" on their advertising.

true unlimited is only a theoretical thing. in practice it means whatever the company offering the service wants it to mean. we all know that. same with "unlimited lifetime cloud storage" snake oil for one time payment...maybe some newbies don't understand that but that's how it is.