This is beyond craziness

[pooya87]

Even more of them if full nodes start rejecting the Ordinals Attack and the scammers are forced to use third party software to circumvent a lot of stuff...

I don't believe you can stop this without messing with consensus rules. Standardness isn't going to help. Binance essentially funds this, and Binance is literally mining. Newbies can buy and sell this nonsense using third parties, and maybe at this time it'll be worse, because we will have an inaccurate mempool.

Sadly I think you may be right because we let this scam grow too big to be easy to contain. I've been warning this would happen for almost a year and nobody listened. The standard rules could have prevented this whole mess in early days very easily.
Although that shouldn't be the reason for not implementing the preventive measures through standard rules right now either.

[Synchronice]

Businesses are made to profit, miners are no exception. If there is an opportunity to make more bitcoin or money, they will do it.

There is a difference between the ways you profit. They better profit by creating a miner that uses less energy and generates higher hashrate rather than profiting from regular bitcoin users by spamming the network. To be honest, I think that there might be a cartel between Bitcoin ordinals teams and miners. Otherwise, why would they pay such a high fees? I don't say this is true but it might be true. Can't find any other logical explanation to this nonsense. Are people really willing to pay so much money just for creating one ordinal? How will they profit if they pay $40 in a single one, does everyone expect to profit millions from each of them?

Your first point is valid. Your second point is confusing.

Based on your logic, we should do nothing to aware people of phishing and scams as "if that's what they want to do and it's in their budget, then we should let them".

I have not said that about phishing and scams. Are ordinals scams? No, you can't argue, no one steals money from you, you see and know exactly what you are willing to buy instead of saving a JPEG file. If people are willing to pay tons of money in a dumb ape art, why should I stop them? Maybe they think it's the real art and call bullshit to Leonardo Da Vinci's art? Taste is very individual and changes over time. Maybe they see something amazing in dumb ape that we can't see.

I feel high when I see someone paying millions of dollars in NFT garbage, I just can't stop laughing.

When we have newbies who don't understand how things work and still think the junk they're buying is a "token" and call it things like "BRC-20", it is not really surprising to see some of these newbies make giant mistakes such as paying a ridiculously high fee that makes no sense otherwise.

I don't know why this particular case happened but we know for sure that we are going to see a lot more dumb mistakes like this in the future. Even more of them if full nodes start rejecting the Ordinals Attack and the scammers are forced to use third party software to circumvent a lot of stuff...

Does it make sense to say that there is a cartel between bitcoin ordinals team and big mining corporations? Like ordinals say: I'll produce tons of bullshit bitcoin ordinals, will pay a fortune (but you pay me back), this will increase transaction fees, you'll benefit and also I'll benefit by selling these junks. These high fees are also a great marketing for bitcoin ordinals because many articles are written and there is a big discussion. A huge win for ordinals and miners. Doesn't my theory make sense?

[pooya87]

Does it make sense to say that there is a cartel between bitcoin ordinals team and big mining corporations?

No because at the end of the day it is still regular newbies who fall for this scam and start participating in the spam attack to acquire these junks.
The only possibility is that maybe some miners were behind "creation" of this attack at the very beginning.

These high fees are also a great marketing for bitcoin ordinals because many articles are written and there is a big discussion. A huge win for ordinals and miners. Doesn't my theory make sense?

And all that is terrible marketing for Bitcoin since the spam attack is making bitcoin more and more unusable every day.

[LoyceV]

Does it make sense to say that there is a cartel between bitcoin ordinals team and big mining corporations?

Maybe. We'll probably never know. But even if there is, any miner that isn't part of the cartel profits the most.

I can't even use ViaBTC anymore: they're instantly full every hour, and I don't even get to see a number larger than 0 anymore.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Sadly I think you may be right because we let this scam grow too big to be easy to contain.

If it was 2021, I'd right as well vote in favor of limiting what you can inject in a tapscript (in terms of standardness). But, right now, there's no way the miners install and run a Bitcoin client that ignores millions of dollars worth of fees.

Although that shouldn't be the reason for not implementing the preventive measures through standard rules right now either.

Eh, I'd argue it'd do more harm than good. I like running a piece of software that can accurately predict the low, medium and high priority fee. If my node completely ignored Ordinals, predicting the best fee would be completely inaccurate.

[stompix]

I can't even use ViaBTC anymore: they're instantly full every hour, and I don't even get to see a number larger than 0 anymore.

You have to skip hitting refresh at xx:00.
The moment your clock (assuming laptop or desktop here) shows 1 second you hit free submission.
That's the way I managed to accelerate like 4 tx Monday to Wednesday, 10 seconds later there was no free spot left!

What's really annoying is that Viabtc right now helps even with ordinals inscriptions, this guy is taking advantage of this and I assume he is using a bot for it, 30 confirms in one go is impossible for a human:
https://ordiscan.com/address/bc1q7357af8tkcttej0cqmqzvhfja9ey63pzpd74qr/activity

[LoyceV]

You have to skip hitting refresh at xx:00.
The moment your clock (assuming laptop or desktop here) shows 1 second you hit free submission.
That's the way I managed to accelerate like 4 tx Monday to Wednesday, 10 seconds later there was no free spot left!

Now, there's no spot left after only 1 second. I tried submitting the captcha at the exact moment, I tried starting at the exact moment. It's all futile.

What's really annoying is that Viabtc right now helps even with ordinals inscriptions, this guy is taking advantage of this and I assume he is using a bot for it, 30 confirms in one go is impossible for a human

That explains why it's impossible now. The captcha stops humans but not bots.

[hosseinimr93]

That explains why it's impossible now. The captcha stops humans but not bots.

The sad news is that those bots have been created by ordinal scammers.

I just checked one of the blocks mined by ViaBTC recently on blockchair.com and sorted the transactions by their fee rate. (Click here.)
In block number 822736, the required fee rate to get confirmation normally was 72 sat/vbyte. ViaBTC included 110 transactions with the fee rate of less than 70 sat/vbyte. 95 of them were 1 input - 1 output transactions sending 294, 330 or 546 satoshi paying 23 sat/vbyte.

I checked the 15 other transactions one by one. 11 of them were larger than 500 bytes in size and it's not possible that they have been submitted to ViaBTC free accelerator. 2 out of the 4 remaining transactions were confirmed with doing CPFP. In block 822,736 which was mined ViaBTC, there were only 2 normal transactions that may have been confirmed with the help of their free accelerator.

[LoyceV]

The sad news is that those bots have been created by ordinal scammers.

That's probably why ViaBTC recently changed the captcha. That made their accelerator available again for a couple of days. After that, the bots upgraded their game.
I guess they'll change it again, but probably not during the holidays. If they don't upgrade the captcha, they can just as well end their free accelerator.

[hosseinimr93]

I guess they'll change it again, but probably not during the holidays. If they don't upgrade the captcha, they can just as well end their free accelerator.

If they change the captcha, those spammers will probably find a way to bypass the captcha again.
They may add an extra requirement and not allow transactions that create output worth less than a certain amount to be submitted to their free accelerator.

[philipma1957]

Does it make sense to say that there is a cartel between bitcoin ordinals team and big mining corporations?

Maybe. We'll probably never know. But even if there is, any miner that isn't part of the cartel profits the most.

I can't even use ViaBTC anymore: they're instantly full every hour, and I don't even get to see a number larger than 0 anymore.

12 tries to get it to work. it is a timing issue.  not too soon and not too late. you are likely a fraction to slow when you click it.

[ABCbits]

Even more of them if full nodes start rejecting the Ordinals Attack and the scammers are forced to use third party software to circumvent a lot of stuff...

I don't believe you can stop this without messing with consensus rules. Standardness isn't going to help. Binance essentially funds this, and Binance is literally mining. Newbies can buy and sell this nonsense using third parties, and maybe at this time it'll be worse, because we will have an inaccurate mempool.

At very least, creating and trading Ordinals would be more difficult or annoying. Some people would either give up or pay more to miner/pool to see their TX included which should reduce total Ordinals transaction.

I guess they'll change it again, but probably not during the holidays. If they don't upgrade the captcha, they can just as well end their free accelerator.

If they change the captcha, those spammers will probably find a way to bypass the captcha again.
They may add an extra requirement and not allow transactions that create output worth less than a certain amount to be submitted to their free accelerator.

They really should switch to different captcha provider which let owner of the website set captcha difficulty to very high.

[LoyceV]

12 tries to get it to work. it is a timing issue.  not too soon and not too late. you are likely a fraction to slow when you click it.

What timing did you use that worked? I've tried starting at 0:00:00 (maybe 0.2 seconds after the whole hour), I've tried submitting clicking captcha at that point. None of it works, it takes about 10 seconds for the page to load, it's probably heavily overloaded by bots at that time.
I just tried again: at a fraction of a second I clicked "FREE Submission", I beat 88% of the users with the captcha, but I was too late.

At very least, creating and trading Ordinals would be more difficult or annoying.

I don't think it's many different people doing it, my guess is that a small group of people creates millions of them, with automated systems. And I have no idea how they make many from it.

[BenCodie]

Based on your logic, we should do nothing to aware people of phishing and scams as "if that's what they want to do and it's in their budget, then we should let them".

No. Based on their logic, we should absolutely warn them about scams, but if they nonetheless want to visit the phishing site, we shouldn't deprive their right.

I suppose that is the best way to put it, I agree.

You can logically deduce what is happening...

All I can see is people playing around with another greater fool theory financial instrument. The fact that miners get paid along the way doesn't mean they invented it in secret.

Most of us are long past using "conspiracy" to discredit logical opinions rather than providing valid reasoning to rationalize the opposing opinion.

All I'm saying is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I didn't claim that miners did this in secret, you did. So, it is you who needs to back this up.

In terms of their influence over creation, that is a broader topic that may not be able to be discovered or ever known for sure, I can't argue with that. However, in terms of who is profiting and if it is linked to mining pools, this is something that one could discover if they dug deep enough.

Successfully giving proof on top of the logic flow, would take days of not just blockchain analysis but investigative work too...It would require tying bitcoin movements, finding mistakes that link mining pools/miners to large ordinal transactions, gathering intel from influencers who are a part of this scene, and more...

Though what would be the motivation to dig this information up and prove it? Let's say hypothetically this were to be proven, what change would it cause? What would be the flow-on effect? The end of ordinals? Would that be a possible outcome upon proof?

[alecfisker]

fees experienced an extraordinary raise of almost 1400%, by increased demand for Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions, creation of NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain

[stompix]

12 tries to get it to work. it is a timing issue.  not too soon and not too late. you are likely a fraction to slow when you click it.

What timing did you use that worked? I've tried starting at 0:00:00 (maybe 0.2 seconds after the whole hour), I've tried submitting clicking captcha at that point. None of it works, it takes about 10 seconds for the page to load, it's probably heavily overloaded by bots at that time.
I just tried again: at a fraction of a second I clicked "FREE Submission", I beat 88% of the users with the captcha, but I was too late.

You're right on the situation now, probably between my last tries and yours the bot activated, maybe also Philip managed to getting an interval where the bot wasn't active or so. After failing 4 times I just gave up and put my browser on recording with a refresh rate, I'm on fiber, with an extremely low latency, the page loads in 1 second, so I only managed with it refreshing at 59:59, 00:00:01, 00:00:02 to catch a glimpse at 5 free once.

What's even more interesting is that the number of so called accelerate tractions increased by 11 in the meantime, really weird since a long time ago they were only moving this when the block was mined,  I really need to wait for a few more hours and check it again to see what's really happening but I'm starting to think Viabtc is no longer truly offering 100 tx per hour

[hosseinimr93]

but I'm starting to think Viabtc is no longer truly offering 100 tx per hour

I think they do.

Here are the latest two blocks mined by ViaBTC. Transactions are sorted by their fee rate in ascending order.
(Times are in UTC.)

• 823055 (19:31)
• 823066 (22:01)

Just visit the above links and see how many low fee transactions they have included.


According to above times, ViaBTC should have accelerated 300 transactions freely in block number 823066.
Let's check if they did so.


The minimum required fee rate for getting confirmation in block number 823066 was around 100 satoshi. ViaBTC included 312 transactions with the fee rate of less than 90 sat/vbyte. Click here to see all those transactions.
10 out of those 312 transactions were confirmed with CPFP and that means that 302 transactions were accelerated by ViaBTC. All those 302 transactions meet ViaBTC free accelerator requirements.

The problem is how ViaBTC free accelerator is being abused by bots. 294 out of 302 transactions are related to ordinals. They are all 1 input - 1 output transactions paying 23 sat/vbyte.

[LoyceV]

The problem is how ViaBTC free accelerator is being abused by bots. 294 out of 302 transactions are related to ordinals.

I can only hope they're realize that now, and didn't take a 2 week Christmas vacation.

[stompix]

I can only hope they're realize that now, and didn't take a 2 week Christmas vacation.

It's working again, or at least it was working yesterday I managed to push 2 tx and to my surprise there were still empty spaces minutes after the hours, enough time for me being lazy to grab my phone and do screenshots on it rather than printscreens



I still think it's a mix of situations
- viabtc blocking maybe free transactions if they haven't mined a block in x hours
- somebody clearly abusing the free feature

This is the block viabtc mined after me failing two times in a row to even see the free counter:
https://mempool.space/block/00000000000000000000a7f3dd29bb0c0259a2b6cdbe4d400a1960d829018127
It has 300kvb of 5sat/b tx , ironically, that contained viabtc payments, so I can't really be angry while getting paid and denied a cheaper fee but those ordinals...

[LoyceV]

yesterday I managed to push 2 tx and to my surprise there were still empty spaces minutes after the hours

I guess I'll check every hour. If the bots aren't taking it, humans get a chance.

Update: At the moment, it shows "19 remaining FREE". But when I try, I get "Submissions are beyond limit. Please try later." And when I reload the page, it still shows 19. So it doesn't work anymore.