New page just dropped:
https://wtfhappenedinfeb2023.github.io/ (Disclaimer - I did not make this page).
It's a long read, so for people who don't want to waste their time, here's the executive summary.
This is what the mempool looked like since Februrary 2023:
Basically, everyone knows at this point that using Bitcoin's blockchain as your personal cloud storage (or even worse, as a landfill or garbage dump) is a waste of space and nuisance.
Here is what the page has to say about it:
1.
Wastefulness of the shared network resources2.
Obvious misuse of Bitcoin’s functions for a malicious purposeIn addition, these transactions are also often sent in
large volumes.
Transactions with
no practical value or purpose, such as those submitted by supporters of big blocks during the Blocksize wars for example, are characterized by wastefulness as their output was too small to spend. Other examples of wastefulness are transactions that are sent back and forth repeatedly to the same addresses, transactions which carry no state information, transactions purposelessly split into hundreds of tiny outputs that are then recombined in the next transaction, …
These transactions are malicious partly because they are wasteful, creating a backlog in the mempool that
drives up transaction costs unnecessarily. The 2023 wave of spam is especially egregious because it involves
storing obscenely large and unoptimized state data using methods that abuse several of Bitcoin’s functions, such as the segregated witness script discount,
OP_IF OP_FALSE codes, and bare multi-signatures.
These transactions can be classified as spam due to their ignorance or malice, they could also occur off-chain relatively easily through
NFTs with reference hashes or
BRC-20 tokens with reference hashes much more efficiently and this was already proposed several times. Functionally, the result would be the same as it would allow users of this “
standard” to verify the data
without overwhelming the chain.
BRC-20 tokens are
not optimized at all for example and use clear
JSON (!) instead of
HEX or
base64 encoding, demonstrating a
complete disregard for the shared resource of the timechain. This failure is particularly concerning since they account for more than 50% of the average block’s size,
as shown in the BTC spam analysis blocksize graph despite being avoidable with a more responsible usage.
The two characteristics presented here are a simple way to recognize spam that most likely violates the purpose of the network and the desired behavior, and Bitcoin actually supports other protocols that submit non-payment transactions which are not considered as spam by most participants. A good example is the
OpentimeStamps protocol (there are also many bad examples), which uses Bitcoin for blockchain timestamping and is not considered as spam by most participants in the network as it generally does not present the two characteristics presented above: it uses shared resources efficiently and does not misuse Bitcoin’s functions.
The site then goes on to suggest running Bitcoin Knots 25.1 as a solution to stop the spam.
A better solution if the Ordinals spam does not stop even after many months is to filter it out in the next major version of Bitcoin Core.
