Time to roll-back Ordinals?

[alani123]

@d5000 have you considered why Tether users abandoned minting USDt on-chain on bitcoin via the Omni layer? Or perhaps why Counterparty failed?

The answer is simple. The costs didn't justify it. Even in Ethereum's full congestion, Omni layer token minting and transfer transactions were so expensive in comparison that nobody wanted to mint and transact tokens on bitcoin's blockchain with it. So riddle me this, if developers limited taproot functionality to a reasonable extent so as to prevent abuses like BRC-20 and Ordinals inscriptions, what would happen then?

Are we to assume that the demand for these types of transactions would remain the same if the cost to complete them went from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars? Because economically speaking, when prices go up, demands go down. This is ECON101.

Taproot was never meant to be a gateway to make bitcoin's ledger a dumping ground for trash like NFTs. Bitcoin runs on a different philosophy from day one. If things were different we could have been having 20 TB full nodes and hosting them all on AWS with transaction filtering to comply OFAC regulations. But that's ethereum, not bitcoin. The shit can stay there. Bitcoin should simply strive to keep on-chain transactions as immutable as possible, even if that means that on-chain tokenization must die.

[1714835200]

1714835200

[1714835200]

1714835200

[1714835200]

1714835200

[1714835200]

1714835200

[d5000]

Omni layer token minting and transfer transactions were so expensive in comparison that nobody wanted to mint and transact tokens on bitcoin's blockchain with it.

I don't get fully what you want to say - do you think that BRC-20 txes are cheaper to transact than Omni/Counterparty? AFAIK that's incorrect. While OP_RETURN outputs don't benefit from a witness discount, the OP_RETURN footprint of these token mechanisms is generally small. To transfer a BRC-20 token, you need two transactions, and the inscription done using OP_PUSH is inefficient as it uses JSON text and not a more efficient scheme (like protobuf, for example).

The reason why Omni and Counterparty are rarely used is that they never were able to generate such a buzz like BRC-20 generated now, not because the protocols are technologically inferior.

So riddle me this, if developers limited taproot functionality to a reasonable extent so as to prevent abuses like BRC-20 and Ordinals inscriptions, what would happen then?

How exactly would you restrict Taproot?

In this post I have detailed the two possibilities I know - some hard-coded "exception" (Luke-Jr's patch and similar methods - "everything that looks like an Ordinal inscription becomes non-standard/forbidden") or a kB restriction like in Peercoin. Please read this post first before we continue to discuss. If you know a method which doesn't have the disadvantages of both of these strategies, then I'm eager to hear about it and may even change my opinion

Are we to assume that the demand for these types of transactions would remain the same if the cost to complete them went from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars?

I don't know what's the reason for your assumption of such a large difference. Do you think Taproot makes Ordinals 10-100 times smaller (in weight) and thus cheaper than earlier methods, like the Doginals method I linked to, or those old 2015 methods mentioned by Peter Todd in the early discussion, where the data is encoded in pubkeys and amounts?

As far as I know, the difference in cost is of only about 15%, depending how large the data item is. And while Taproot provides a method to circumvent the hard-coded kB limit by script, large NFTs currently aren't the problem - BRC-20 would not violate that limit (if I'm not wrong that limit is MAX_SCRIPT_SIZE, which is 10 kB).

What I want to say with all these posts is simply that there is no easy way to "roll back" Ordinals. All possible strategies have tradeoffs. As I wrote in the last post, the most promising one is for me the approach to enable full nodes to download and store ZK proofs and not the transaction data itself - such things like Ordinals would then only be stored by archival nodes, and due to the costs and risks, they would probably charge money for that, making Ordinals completely inviable.

[alani123]

Let me show three transactions side by side:

https://blockstream.info/tx/00ebbd7afaa97e09b3aa345ea423221b949f883100c60a51d49d9948cac35e5e
CounterParty token issuance transaction
https://blockstream.info/tx/4765bfc3baa08b5a4c5e69324fb1316879941f8eb68355d1d8e99bfd45abbe00
Omni layer token transfer transaction (sorry but Omni seems so dead I could not find a recent issuance transaction)
https://blockstream.info/tx/c438e8167cfc350ad8874f15cb6464aa0c60f8efb98edd619996000e8dad8a93
BRC-20 inscription transaction

The difference I see is that BRC-20 tokens are able to get away with paying cheaper fees for the space they take due to Taproot. So the issue isn't that Omni and counterparty are technologically inferior (because they are). In theory they could upgrade to Taproot and SegWit to utilize discounts to their fuller extent too... But the issue here is that Taproot is indeed making it easier and cheaper to inject garbage on the Blockchain.

Please let me know if I'm getting this wrong.

[hd49728]

Ordinals is not part of the Bitcoin protocol to be "rolled back", it is garbage that people are injecting into the blockchain by exploiting the protocol which means the only way to "roll it back" is to reverse the blockchain which is not possible because it would effectively eliminate one of the basic principles of bitcoin: immutable blockchain.

Developers of Ordinals wisely exploit the Bitcoin blockchain to make their shit tokens look to be more valuable. Because it's harder to scam with altcoin blockchains  as many scam tokens on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and other chains. Since 2020 and GameFi, NFT trend last three years, many people learned hard lessons with Non-Fungible tokens. They are more careful with NFTs and Ordinals team used Bitcoin blockchain to make noise and make people greed.

I fully support any actions taken against this attack though, even if the mempool were empty. Because it is still abusing the protocol.

The Glassnode report shows big effects of Inscriptions on Bitcoin mempools since February 2023. Issues from Ordinals might become bigger in 2024 and 2025 bull run when people greed will be bigger in bull run. They will not care to waste $10 or $20 for transaction fee like they care about it in bear market.

[pooya87]

a) a blockchain where it's cheaper to transact, but all the users on that network believed themselves to be in a position where they could tell me what I could or couldn't do,   
or
b) a blockchain where it's a little more expensive, but all the users on that network had total respect for permissionless freedom,

Then sign me up for b)

Lucky for us there are more choices than your two. Like a third option:
c) A blockchain where we allow monetary transfers to be recorded on and reject malicious transactions trying to abuse it as cloud storage. Like when we reject any transaction containing more than 1 OP_RETURN output (for many years).

And up until the malicious Ordinals Attack everyone had signed up for option c and I don't see any indication of people having changed their minds.

[Kakmakr]

The thing is.... if you stop ORDI or any other Shitcoin ...then within a few days the developers just create another and it is the same story again. We should find some kind of side-chain solution for these ordinals to use or find a way to solve the block size limitations that are not based on some side-chain.

The Lightning Network was suppose to alleviate most of the congestion for smaller transactions, but now these Ordinals are spamming the network with worthless traffic.  

[sunsilk]

We can't do anything with that, only the miners can do such with that but this gives them more profit AFAIK. Like what the other members said on this thread, time will come that the demand from these ordinals or brc20 shits will eventually decrease and gone.

It was like 2-3 months ago when we've experienced the same thing IIRC? But it didn't came to this point that the highest priority would charge us $8+ per transaction. Ain't cool.

But that's what we can for now, let the storm be calm on its own and take the dust after wards. Honestly, I am just confusing my mind that this increase in fees is likely the sign that we're heading on the bull run just as circa 2017.

[d5000]

[...]

For BRC-20 inscriptions, you need to sum the weight units of the "commit transaction" and the "reveal transaction", because you create first a transaction with a hash of the Taproot script, and then you spend this script revealing it (with the data). Thus, for each BRC-20 mint, you need two transactions.

See the Ordinals handbook:

Ord will output two transactions IDs, one for the commit transaction, and one for the reveal transaction, and the inscription ID. Inscription IDs are of the form TXIDiN, where TXID is the transaction ID of the reveal transaction, and N is the index of the inscription in the reveal transaction.

The commit transaction commits to a tapscript containing the content of the inscription, and the reveal transaction spends from that tapscript, revealing the content on chain and inscribing it on the first sat of the input that contains the corresponding tapscript.

Even to transfer them to another address, you have to create another inscription before you can transfer them, this means that you need 2 tx also to transfer the tokens (I always want to cry when I read that ) And if you want to save space making several transfers to different addresses in one transaction: you can't, you need a single inscription for each of the addresses ...

That's actually why I consider the BRC-20 protocol such a mess. Do you still think this is technologically superior to Counterparty/Omni? (Of course, Taproot Assets/RGB are better than all three.)

You're actually right in that the inscription of larger content/NFTs can be cheaper with the Ordinals technique, but even in this case, the "two transactions per inscription" takes away some of the advantage. I don't know where I exactly read that the difference was about 15%, but I believe it was in the discussion with Peter Todd too.

Edit: I found a Counterparty issuance transaction with Segwit enabled and it has also only 512 vByte, i.e. it's close to the BRC-20 tx - with the difference that it doesn't need a second transaction. I've honestly no idea why so few Counterparty users seem to use Segwit - maybe they use old software/wallets.

[Learn Bitcoin]

We can't do anything with that, only the miners can do such with that

I can give you a guarantee that miners are not going to do that. They are not making much when there is no congestion. This is an opportunity for them to make some profits; I doubt they will miss that. I can already imagine the smile on phillipma1957's face. The developers are no interested in fixing these things. So the only way for Bitcoiners is to pay high fees if you want to do a transaction or wait until these stupids stop doing shit. Another way is to switch to the lightning network. But the problem is it's not widely used yet.

[NotATether]

Edit: PLEASE READ I need to clarify this. By roll-back ordinals I didn't mean to actually roll back the bitcoin blockchain. Just to prevent the ability for them to be created from now on.

Well, I have already suggested that a few months ago, and actually the answers I got were that it's not really possible to do that because it is a feature embedded in Taproot and it is even possible to make ordinal-like tokens without Taproot (e.g. using OP_RETURN). However, you can patch your node's source code with the Ordisrespector patch to reject all Ordinals transactions.

[HmmMAA]

We can't do anything with that, only the miners can do such with that

I can give you a guarantee that miners are not going to do that. They are not making much when there is no congestion. This is an opportunity for them to make some profits; I doubt they will miss that. I can already imagine the smile on phillipma1957's face. The developers are no interested in fixing these things. So the only way for Bitcoiners is to pay high fees if you want to do a transaction or wait until these stupids stop doing shit. Another way is to switch to the lightning network. But the problem is it's not widely used yet.

There is a another option , activate UASF , it worked in the past . These evil greedy miners should learn that their behavior to expect profit from their investment is hurting stacking sats mentality . Really , why no one mentions UASF ? Or it is too early yet ?  That way , core and miners would be forced to change their minds . Win win situation ?

[Wind_FURY]

Plus we may not like it, but they're NOT actually breaking the rules of the network, and they're paying for the fees. Network congestion can always happen with or without Ordinals because block space is limited and demand increases sometimes. It's not sustainable, they will either run out of money first, or they will also need to wait for fees to go down.

you think the answer is to just clog up the blockchain.. where did your hard drive space preservation mindset go, oh wait you are just copying your forum families mindset even if its contradictory to your previous stories

And how much size do those blocks actually get with Ordinals? As big as the block sizes of what your Roger Ver and BCash big blockers propose?

you think the answer is to just clog up the blockchain and wait for them to run out of funds.
if they can scam one moron out of $1k for one meme that cost them $2 to make, they can then spam another 500x and scam more.. have you ever heard of exponential growth.. yep they wont run out of money as long as they keep scamming. its a self perpetuating scam

The point is they're not breaking the rules of the network, but what do you propose to fix it? Start being a drama queen again? Gaslight? Misinform the public? Why don't you bring back Jonald_Fyookball too and you be in tandem in spreading disinformation and lies.

Everyone only needs to check your negative trust-ratings, and actually look who gave them to you.

Watch frankandbeans try to move the blame to the Core Developers for "not trying to fix the problem".

 

litecoins ordinals of junks meme data was not always available. it used a fork which enabled a opcode that bypassed checks to allow any junk in.
stop thinking that ordinals is something that always existed since btc2009 ltc 2011.. the development that enabled these things happened more recently then that. and when you see which upgrades enabled it you soon see..
btc taproot.. ltc mimblewimble

Mimblewimble has nothing to do with ordinals either.  Stop making shit up.

He's merely a troll, a liar, and a drama queen. Look at his trust-rating.

Why can't the devs just figure out how to make the transactions smaller so that they don't clog the chain up?

there are many ways,
they know how. but it involves closing the trojan horse open door that allows them to upgrade unhindered. meaning they have to relinquish power to fix their error.. yes it should be done but they dont want to

OH MY GOD. Hahahaha. I believe trust-ratings should be visible ANYWHERE in the forum.

[NotATether]

There is a another option , activate UASF , it worked in the past . These evil greedy miners should learn that their behavior to expect profit from their investment is hurting stacking sats mentality . Really , why no one mentions UASF ? Or it is too early yet ?  That way , core and miners would be forced to change their minds . Win win situation ?

UASF is very disruptive and could split the bitcoin network in half if the community is not in clear consensus to patch out this functionality (and it isn't, as you can see on [X]Twitter).


Currently the monetary gains the miners on PPS (and variants) pools get from this is marginal, almost equivalent to a boom where there are even more real transactions processed. But it's the pools themselves who gain the most out of these fees.

[sunsilk]

We can't do anything with that, only the miners can do such with that

I can give you a guarantee that miners are not going to do that. They are not making much when there is no congestion. This is an opportunity for them to make some profits; I doubt they will miss that.

Yup, like what's not included on that snipper is that I've said that they're making more money from this congestion.

I can already imagine the smile on phillipma1957's face. The developers are no interested in fixing these things.

Hehehe, he said that he's making more this time unlike the typical days without congestion. They're just enjoying it while it's there because it's not going to last for a long time. Maybe after a few days or a week, these high fees will drop down for sure..

So the only way for Bitcoiners is to pay high fees if you want to do a transaction or wait until these stupids stop doing shit. Another way is to switch to the lightning network. But the problem is it's not widely used yet.

As for me, I can't take that much to pay for such fee with small amount of transaction.

[franky1]

Watch frankandbeans try to move the blame to the Core Developers for "not trying to fix the problem".

He's merely a troll, a liar, and a drama queen. Look at his trust-rating.

OH MY GOD. Hahahaha. I believe trust-ratings should be visible ANYWHERE in the forum.

i am talking about bitcoin issues caused by bugs opened up by core devs (bitcoin is not self writing AI, devs write it) certain and economically invested corporation(sponsors) and social drama groups have aligned to make core the official reference authority within the last decade, causing many changes since that have not benefited the mass community of bitcoiners, but a small niche group

however its you that want to avoid problem solving discussion and instead just have personality drama queen discussions to hope the topic dies and no one talks about wanting code changes to fix the bug
...
it is your troll forum mommy and daddy drama queening whilst ass kissing core devs(who are forum moderators (no coincidence)).. thus troll family caused rating comments.. then your troll family pretend people need to read it pretending its independent of their actions.. ..
troll circling its own trolling does not mean the troll is correct, it just means he circles his own misery thinking its his success story

if you want to have an actual discussion about bitcoin issues.. LEARN bitcoin, learn to read code and learn what the community are complaining about. learn when the bug got abused, learn how and who coded in the trojan back door that allows 4mb of junk memes and other nonsense crap
learn how bitcoin has changed over the years

learn that it can be fixed and learn who has to fix it. then learn(well you do know this part) why they dont want to

again bitcoin is not self coding AI.. devs are and were involved in all code..
non core devs could fix it IF it wasnt for the central point of failure authority core gained in the last decade. and their REKT games and NYA mandates
roling back ordinals doesnt just mean rolling back the blockchain to pre ordinals inception
it means rolling back the additions of opcodes which ordinals abuse.. to instead create a new structured utility of opcodes that allow bitcoin functionality without the trojan backdoor of letting any junkdata be treated as valid, whilst unchecked..

and again the particular opcodes that allow 4mb of junk to be valid is not a opcode that existed in bitcoin since 2009. its a not so well thought out opcode added much later.. meaning its a flaw, a bug

and no not all bugs are features.. bugs can be bugs that need fixing

[alani123]

Currently the monetary gains the miners on PPS (and variants) pools get from this is marginal, almost equivalent to a boom where there are even more real transactions processed. But it's the pools themselves who gain the most out of these fees.

Small detail but it's an important distinction to make that there's a lot at stake for miners.
Current block reward is 6.25 and even set to halve in a few months.
That means that there's currently ONLY around 900 BTC mined every 24 hours (1440 minutes / block time of 10* block reward of 6.25.

So let's compare miner revenue to fees.

Miners based on current prices earned 37.14M USD worth of BTC on the 8th of November 2023:
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_miners_revenue_per_day

Miners also earned 4.180M USD worth of BTC from fees on that same day:
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_total_transaction_fees_per_day

Also look at the above chart and observe that the ongoing BRC-20 boom caused total fees to skyrocket 10x!

So with BRC-20 only currently being supported by SOME of the exchanges, and a single wallet, already ~10% of miner revenue comes from the fees it has created.
This is bound to get worse unless somehow addressed.

[d5000]

At current stage, those direction won't be looked by most people though. For example,

• RGB protocol and Taproot Assets for LN is far from ready to be used.
• RSK and Liquid (Bitcoin sidechain) are federated which is less decentralized compared with Bitcoin. Although RSK is somewhat better.

Other direction such as Drivechain is mostly unknown and i've no idea whether it's ready to use or not.

You're correct that most approaches are still in beta or testing stages. However, there have been some interesting developments relatively recently.

The most advanced project seems to be Nomic (see design document), a 2-way-peg with a kind of dynamic federation, but it has still centralized elements. It uses Tendermint as consensus mechanism (Cosmos platform) and their own token is premined. AFAIK this is already better than RSK (which has improved recently), it has to be further decentralized to really become an alternative for Bitcoiners (and not only "yet another Bitcoin bridge"). I believe with the current premined Nomic platform this wouldn't be possible, but what about a Nomic fork without premine (of course, this would probably need a PoW phase or similar "fair launch")?

Drivechain seems to depend on Bitcoin Script changes. The same is true for all rollup-style mechanisms which need covenants.

So my message to the developers would be: put these changes on the roadmap please! I understand that there may be risks and some devs may have other priorities, but I feel that there could be more research on these topics, and they are probably very important for Bitcoin's further adoption.

[Lida93]

The thing is.... if you stop ORDI or any other Shitcoin ...then within a few days the developers just create another and it is the same story again. We should find some kind of side-chain solution for these ordinals to use or find a way to solve the block size limitations that are not based on some side-chain.

The fucking side about this is that those scraping their profits thru this token are on a deaf ears about the complaints flying around.

It doesn't seem like any body can put a stop on the Ordinals issue on Blockchain as there are sets of investors that are taking succor from it not just the developers and talking about stopping is like stopping their benefits. There's a fast profits with Ordinals that's why people are buying and sending rapidly on the blockchain more than bitcoin not minding he congestion that it will cause leading to transaction fee hike as their quick profit from the token will cover for the fee hike

The Lightning Network was suppose to alleviate most of the congestion for smaller transactions, but now these Ordinals are spamming the network with worthless traffic.  

My hunch tells me  LN didn't see this one coming fast.

[franky1]

The thing is.... if you stop ORDI or any other Shitcoin ...then within a few days the developers just create another and it is the same story again. We should find some kind of side-chain solution for these ordinals to use or find a way to solve the block size limitations that are not based on some side-chain.

The fucking side about this is that those scraping their profits thru this token are on a deaf ears about the complaints flying around.

It doesn't seem like any body can put a stop on the Ordinals issue on Blockchain as there are sets of investors that are taking succor from it not just the developers and talking about stopping is like stopping their benefits. There's a fast profits with Ordinals that's why people are buying and sending rapidly on the blockchain more than bitcoin not minding he congestion that it will cause leading to transaction fee hike as their quick profit from the token will cover for the fee hike

The Lightning Network was suppose to alleviate most of the congestion for smaller transactions, but now these Ordinals are spamming the network with worthless traffic.  

My hunch tells me  LN didn't see this one coming fast.

LN doesnt see many things coming

channels LOCK value into a tx.. the value does not move to new channels. its a case of arranging that A borrows B value if B borrows C value if C borrows D value to pay E.. the coin in A stays in A but E gets paid by its channel with D where by they finally settle up month later where the coin locked to A finally goes to B. so you cant actually move sats or move memes on the LN network practically. and all this routing and borrowing and issues with bad states and broadcasting wrong states is why LN wont solve many things.

in short NFT dont work on LN. moving junk dont work on LN. they lack many things like network auditing to protect uniqueness and so many other things

devs need to forget their corporate contracts of sponsorship and get back to caring about bitcoin and/or making new subnetworks that actually meet the promises dev made to the community

[DooMAD]

a) a blockchain where it's cheaper to transact, but all the users on that network believed themselves to be in a position where they could tell me what I could or couldn't do,  
or
b) a blockchain where it's a little more expensive, but all the users on that network had total respect for permissionless freedom,

Then sign me up for b)

Lucky for us there are more choices than your two. Like a third option:
c) A blockchain where we allow monetary transfers to be recorded on and reject malicious transactions trying to abuse it as cloud storage. Like when we reject any transaction containing more than 1 OP_RETURN output (for many years).

And up until the malicious Ordinals Attack everyone had signed up for option c and I don't see any indication of people having changed their minds.

That was mainly just an example to explain my stance and the way in which I'm approaching this issue.  Obviously the situation is more nuanced than that in practice.  

I submit that the best way to deter this inscription/ordinal stuff is to call it out for what it is.  Unscrupulous hucksters selling crap to unwitting fools.  The fewer people buy this junk, the faster the sellers run out of money.  Make their business economically non-viable and they'll soon stop.


I'm doing my absolute best to disregard the absolute drivel franky1 is spouting in this topic, but his latest offering is too egregiously dishonest to tolerate any further:

in short NFT dont work on LN.

Except that issuance of assets and tokens is the primary focus of 'Taproot Assets', which utilises LN.  So you're clearly lying.  Again. 

Are you even capable of telling the truth?