Expect the Orginals game to get even bigger - actual games

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Now there are plans in progress to archive vintage Nintendo console games in them.
One fun bit is that the code for playing them through a Web-3 based emulator is stored there as well.

TL;DR
    Bitcoin developers have unveiled a project that will allow them preserve Nintendo games with Ordinals.
    SNES emulator on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Thoughts?

[mikeywith]

What do you mean playing them? Please don't tell me they are turning Bitcoin to a distributed and decentralized play station 6 already?=

Yes, they've inscribed an entire Nintendo Entertainment System simulator on the blockchain, complete with the game code.

Then they should pay premium fees IM

Currently, you only pay for creating a new "ninja," which is only 1 KB. However, they claim some other features are in the pipeline. For instance, saving the game status on-chain. Imagine finishing level 5, instead of saving that locally, you inscribe that worthless piece of info on the blockchain. So, the next time you open the game, it picks up where you left off. And yes, your friends can witness your game status too.

It's incredible how people find ways to create value out of seemingly trivial things, and even worse how many people buy into this. Love them or hate them, those devs are as sharp as a tack.

[takuma sato]

I have mixed thoughts about it. On the one hand you have the issue of transactions becoming really expensive because the blockchain is being used for dumb stuff like this, but on the other hand, this fear of how in the long run Bitcoin would collapse upon itself in 100 years when mining rewards were too low, perhaps are now out of the question because all these weird usages people are willing to make out of the blockchain? at the end of the day as long as there is demand for the blockchain, there will be fees an thus there will be miners working on processing blocks. But one would also assume that fees would be high in the future due transactions alone. We will see how things develop, but removing ordinals doesn't seem realistic right now.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Ja, on the technical end of it, for 1, currently it is targeting the low data space vintage Nintendo games, specifically the SNES. From the article:

Recursive inscriptions enable users to extract data from existing inscriptions, facilitating the creation of new ones. Owens detailed the process of splitting files into eight chunks and combining them with recursion to make the SNES emulator project feasible.

What would be awesome would be porting Castle Wolfenstein and its later progeny such as Doom to a blockchain. Just not the BTC one...

A more detailed article about it is here

edit - it seems that they already did it with Doom!
Link to the preview version here.  

One huge concern I have is using recursive inscriptions to hold code that can be assembled into an executable - in this case the SNES emulator... What is to stop using the chain to distribute malware or C&C code for it?

[pooya87]

That's what happens when the community (users, devs, node operators, miners, etc.) is lazy and doesn't do anything to fix the exploit that is being abused for about a year now. The abuse keeps growing.
It's only a matter of time before illegal stuff is going to be pushed to the bitcoin blockchain in a way that would raise enough alarms for the authorities to start doing something to bitcoin like banning it for example. Shutting down mining pools, seizing ASICs, and other crazy stuff... We know they're desperate for an excuse already specially since dedollarisation is getting stronger...

[Amphenomenon]

These people, bitcoin purist needs to understand what likee let's be serious bitcoin has always been able to minimise its scalability problems, then Ordinals showed up and now these people are becoming innovative to creating games. I guess those dev say Ordinals will die down, will be sensible to do the right thing now.
Don't really know why they just don't want to create a separate Blockchain for Ordinals and everyone would be happy.

[mocacinno]

I personally think that those ordinals guys are abusing the blockchain... Sure, there's no central authority and the current protocol allows them to do what they're doing, it still doesn't mean that they're not abusing the blockchain.
The miners make some nice profit from the fact "real" users have to outbid those ordinal folks, but i've heared new users actually giving up on bitcoin due to the large fees and the unpredictability those ordinal guys are bringing in the average confirmation time. I think nobody realises this abuse might have negative results in the end.

Now they're thinking about using the blockchain to store this kind of data? I think that's preposterous...  Why would thousands of nodes want to use their disk capacity to store this kind of crap?

I personally hope the devs and the miners start to show at least a little bit of concern and close this "attack vector" (yes, i see this ordinal crap as an attack on the community)

[stompix]

We know they're desperate for an excuse already specially since dedollarisation is getting stronger...

And here comes the no pills taken in the last month paranoia
So some gamers are saving Nintendo games in the Bitcoin blockchain to stop the dollar from bring replaced by the russian ruble and Iranian rial  

I personally think that those ordinals guys are abusing the blockchain... Sure, there's no central authority and the current protocol allows them to do what they're doing, it still doesn't mean that they're not abusing the blockchain.
The miners make some nice profit from the fact "real" users have to outbid those ordinal folks, ~

And suddenly a permisionless blockchain is not that good anymore as we need some rules, somebody to enforce those rules, but...nobody in charge!  
Never gets old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_-w_T-t8aM
As for the fees, yeah, some farmers in India make a ton of cash by selling rice at 2 euros per bag in Europe where a shitload of it goes wrong in storehouse, rather than selling it for 10 cents in Central Africa where people are at risk of starvation.  Welcome to a free economy in the real world, where the ones that have money can outbid the ones that don't have!

Currently, you only pay for creating a new "ninja," which is only 1 KB. However, they claim some other features are in the pipeline. For instance, saving the game status on-chain. Imagine finishing level 5, instead of saving that locally, you inscribe that worthless piece of info on the blockchain. So, the next time you open the game, it picks up where you left off. And yes, your friends can witness your game status too.

I'm gonna wait till they put the whole Ark game with all the expansions there, I had a nearly perfect bred Trex I spent days on getting only to have him lost in a battle by some really damn stupid bug The size of the game might be a problem since it seems it's 230GB on my drive but...you never know!
But till I get that, just witnessing this is pretty entertaining enough!  

[mocacinno]

Well there ARE rules, there is a protocol... It has been there since the start and it has changed in the past due to vulnerability's... I'm not saying it would be easy to change the protocol, but, IMHO with what's happening now it would be ok if the developers proposed a protocol change and see if there's a majority that would agree on this.

It would be tough to convince miners to give up part of their short term profits for the long term goal of keeping bitcoin attractive to new users tough... There probably would be (a lot of) drama... Short term it wouldn't do us any good... But for me, it's clear the blockchain's usecase wasn't to host nintento sourcecode or keep those ordinal guys happy... It was designed as an immutable ledger to store transaction data.

[ABCbits]

Thoughts?

They should store it on Internet Archive, other archival service or Bitcoin sidechain. But at least it's less spammy compared with most data inserted to Bitcoin blockchain through Ordinal.

One huge concern I have is using recursive inscriptions to hold code that can be assembled into an executable - in this case the SNES emulator... What is to stop using the chain to distribute malware or C&C code for it?

Nothing can stop people from doing that. But as long as software you use (e.g. wallet) doesn't execute binary or code by itself, in practice there's no security risk.

[stompix]

IMHO with what's happening now it would be ok if the developers proposed a protocol change and see if there's a majority that would agree on this.

I really want to see how is this majority defined and who gets to vote.

It would be tough to convince miners to give up part of their short term profits for the long term goal of keeping bitcoin attractive to new users tough...

Yeah, I'm stating to get some kulaks purge vibes here 
Nobody cared when miners went out of business, nobody cared when sky high tariffs change made them losing money, but when some feel like they are getting too much profits, chop their heads, ungrateful bastards how dare they invest and risk their money in a business and not do what we tell them to!
It's pretty easy to get rid of those miners, the community just have to buy a few millions 5KW Asics, set them up and mine over at Luke's Censorship Church..of wait,  Ocean Pool.

But for me, it's clear the blockchain's usecase wasn't to host nintento sourcecode or keep those ordinal guys happy... It was designed as an immutable ledger to store transaction data.

Bitcoin and the blockchain are tools, users define how they are used and what they are, that's the beauty of it!
If 4 billions want to play games on the blockchain and 100 want to use it to buy coffee, how do you define what the blockchain is about?

[mocacinno]

Who says there are 4 billion people that want to play games and 100 that want to buy coffee? As it stands now, it's possible there are 100 that want to play games and outbid 4 billion people that want to buy coffee, making the blockchain an ideal playground for those 100 whilst driving 4 billion people away causing long term damage to the ecosystem... What i'm saying is that IF a change was proposed, at least you'd know what the people want... Maybe a proposition would gain majority support, maybe it wouldn't... Maybe it would be dropped, maybe a fork would occur... Maybe 2 forks would live next to eachother, maybe one of the forks would dissapear. As it stands right now, nobody knows the ratio, we only know the "game players" have more money than the "coffee drinkers".

As for the miners: you do have a point... Nobody did care when they went out of business but when they're making a lot of money suddenly there's drama... Truth be told, i don't care either way (i don't care if they get rich or if they are forced to close their business), i just want to be able to be part of the ecosystem, and that includes not having to spend $30 to make a $100 purchase. I would be fine with paying more than i used to pay in the past in order to keep a reasonable amount of miners "in the green" so the blockchain remains safe, i would also think it would be ok if some miners decided to leave the ecosystem because they could not add 3000 transactions with an average fee of $30 to their blocks aswell.

The thing is that i've used bitcoin mostly as a form of payment, and not a store of value (i'm not saying i don't hold a little bit and hope the price rises). At the moment, it is completely impossible for me (and with me a lot of users) to use the main chain as a payment method for anything under the value of ~$250, since the fiat value of the average fee has been between $10 and $30 the last couple of weeks.

When you talk about a free market, i personally think this market would also need an alternative... Even if this means a fork... If you agree with the fact ordinals are abusing a vulnerabilty, use the "bitcoin" fork, mine on the bitcoin fork, have bitcoin fork wallet,... If you want to keep on pushing ordinal crap and nintendo games, by all means, switch to the bitcoin-ordinal fork, mine on said fork, have a bitcoin-ordinal wallet... I'm pretty sure the fork with the majority of the community behind it would be the fork that would make it big. It's all about freedom and choice.

[hopenotlate]

This mess is getting bigger and bigger with each passing day without any action being taken to prevent it. The natural consequence is that for the quick profit of a few, the masses are moved away from the adoption of bitcoin considering how expensive the fees have been for some months.
Back to OP topic : is the transaction mentioned in this tweetrelated to Nintendo thing or is it just another nuisance goin on there ?

[BlackHatCoiner]

In the last year, I have noticed the following situation repeatedly in the Bitcoin community:

- Ordinal users broadcast their transactions.
- Suddenly, users panic and deem Bitcoin as non-usable (which is partly true).
- Users propose solutions, most of which include the censorship of Ordinals.
- Nobody does a thing in response.
- A new wave of Ordinals is broadcasted.

Somehow, people believe that complaining on Internet boards about this will magically fix it. If you cannot propose a viable solution, or implement it, then chances are, it won't fix itself. Censoring Ordinals, at least at this point, is not a solution. Maybe you disagree with me, but I don't find it appropriate for a censorship resistant network to censor transactions that don't pass the "monetary transaction" check of some.

When you talk about a free market, i personally think this market would also need an alternative... Even if this means a fork... If you agree with the fact ordinals are abusing a vulnerabilty, use the "bitcoin" fork, mine on the bitcoin fork, have bitcoin fork wallet,...

Here you go. That is absolutely acceptable. The thing is: will it find support? Financially and in terms of development. Because as far as history is concerned, Bitcoin forks don't go well.

A better suggestion would be to opt out to a reputable altcoin, like Monero. At least for small amount of transactions. It already has support and a dynamical block size limit.

[Synchronice]

That's what happens when the community (users, devs, node operators, miners, etc.) is lazy and doesn't do anything to fix the exploit that is being abused for about a year now. The abuse keeps growing.
It's only a matter of time before illegal stuff is going to be pushed to the bitcoin blockchain in a way that would raise enough alarms for the authorities to start doing something to bitcoin like banning it for example. Shutting down mining pools, seizing ASICs, and other crazy stuff... We know they're desperate for an excuse already specially since dedollarisation is getting stronger...

Miners earn tons of money, thanks to that exploit. People make millions of dollars by selling simple trash, so, who wants to get rid of that exploit? Governments will hugely benefit if illegal stuff will be pushed to Bitcoin Blockchain because it will give them a fair reason to centralize it even more. No one is going to ban Bitcoin, they are taking it over.

Think about it:

• Centralized Exchanges
• Bitcoin ETF
• Centralized miners
• Centralized mining pools
• Blockchain Analysis firms
• Soon there will be censored blockchain, i.e. unwanted transactions won't get confirmed.

Why should you ban it when you can take it over?

By the way, what's the plan or solution if we stop ordinals but miners create many dust transactions to artificially increase transaction fees? How will we be able to stop them?

[mocacinno]

--snip--
By the way, what's the plan or solution if we stop ordinals but miners create many dust transactions to artificially increase transaction fees? How will we be able to stop them?

I've heared this idear many times before... IIRC, previous times the mempool was completely full and a fee bidding "war" was plaguing the community, fingers were also pointed towards the miners... I guess they might try to do this, but it also comes at a risk (and a cost) to them...

What if a big miner decides to drop 1 Gb of transaction data (excluding witness data) into the mempool... They want to start a bidding war and profit big time, so they add 50 sat/byte tx data to these unconfirmed transactions... That's 1.073.741.824 bytes * 50 sat/byte =~ 537 bitcoin (at a current preev rate of $45k/btc, that's little over $24 million).

Offcourse, we (the users) have to outbid the transactions in the mempool, and we have to use a fee of >50 sat/byte to get our transaction into a block... Great profit for the miners... However, if on average we (the community) create less than 1 Mb of transaction data (excluding witness data) per 10 minutes over a prolonged amount of time, OTHER miners will start to add the transactions broadcasted by the miner that dropped the 1 Gb of transactions on the mempool... OTHER miners will start to confirm those transactions and claim the fee. In the end, the miner dropping the 1 Gb of unconfirmed spam transactions will be out of a big chunk of his $24.000.000. He'll only be able to recuperate the fees of the transactions he himself puts into a block which he succesfully solves.

Bottom line is that it would be a big risk for him (at least, that's my point of view). IF the community keeps on broadcasting more than 1 Mb of transaction data (excluding witness data) per 10 minutes for a very long time, he'll be able to push all our fees upwards and he might be able to make a nice profit... If we broadcast less that 1 Mb of tx data per 10 minutes, he might be at a (big) loss.

[NotATether]

What do you mean playing them? Please don't tell me they are turning Bitcoin to a distributed and decentralized play station 6 already?=

Yes, they've inscribed an entire Nintendo Entertainment System simulator on the blockchain, complete with the game code.

Nintendo is even more hawkish at copyrights than federal governments themselves, they got countless ROMsites shut down for copyright infringement, so the last thing Bitcoin needs is for this sort of thing to take off and then suddenly there is legitimate (ie. not from Craig Wrong) legal action taken against it.

[n0nce]

What do you mean playing them? Please don't tell me they are turning Bitcoin to a distributed and decentralized play station 6 already?=

Yes, they've inscribed an entire Nintendo Entertainment System simulator on the blockchain, complete with the game code.

Inscribing the code and binary of an emulator is not the same as 'turning Bitcoin to a distributed and decentralized play station'.

The former means that you can 'download' a piece of software from the blockchain and run it locally, meanwhile the latter describes running code on the blockchain, i.e. every interaction with it would need an individual transaction to be mined; that's the way people used to play chess on Ethereum, for instance.

As for the miners: you do have a point... Nobody did care when they went out of business but when they're making a lot of money suddenly there's drama...

My stance on this (as a home miner) is that the drama is not about the miners making a lot of money, it's about the blockchain becoming less usable; if we extrapolate to a worst-case scenario, where a potential majority of users might stop using it and selling their BTC due to lowered usability, everyone else (i.e. the people who love inscribing data on the blockchain) suffers, too.

Therefore, I think it's in the best interest of everybody to keep Bitcoin usable and appealing.

[mikeywith]

every interaction with it would need an individual transaction to be mined

That is exactly what they are doing, I looked into their roadmap and they talk about things like saving the game status on the blockchain, next would likely be saving how many zombies you killed (or whatever the Ninja hero does in the game) on the blockchain, those transactions would be tiny in size, combined with other similiar transactions it would be pretty damn cheap, a single on-chain transaction would be enough for a dozen players data.

@stompy, lol, it may look like something that would never work, but given that probably over a hundrred billion dollars are spent on video games every year, i won't be too confident that we won't see many games make it to the blockchain.

[n0nce]

every interaction with it would need an individual transaction to be mined

That is exactly what they are doing, I looked into their roadmap and they talk about things like saving the game status on the blockchain, next would likely be saving how many zombies you killed (or whatever the Ninja hero does in the game) on the blockchain, those transactions would be tiny in size, combined with other similiar transactions it would be pretty damn cheap, a single on-chain transaction would be enough for a dozen players data.

Not for Nintendo games though, right? That would be way too slow on Bitcoin (or almost any other blockchain), when a game sometimes requires pixel-perfect inputs.

I didn't know about that roadmap though; pushing not only binaries but also game state to the blockchain is a whole different beast. I still don't understand why they can't use RGB or Taro. These would suit the use case so much better.