Important reminders

[BlackHatCoiner]

I may be hated for saying this, but what's currently happening in the mempool is a feature, not a bug. The fact that we have a fixed-sized block limit means that the current clogged up state would inevitably happen sometime.

Another important reminder: Censorship won't prevent monkey jpegs. Let's leave asides if censoring monkeys would undermine one of the important properties: It just technically doesn't work. People who spend dozens of millions of dollars in monkeys everyday can bypass every censorship measure and save them straight to the UTXO set, which would be a lot worse for the rest of us.

Here's another: As long as the law of supply and demand defines the price of block bytes, we can never on-board billions or even millions of people on a layer-1 solution, unless we undermine another important property; being practical to verify the ledger.

Final reminder: The free market decides the ideal tradeoff. "Is it better to have a dynamical block size?", "Would it be worse if we traded 'being practical to verify' with 'being for the poor'?", "Would a tail emission save the situation?". These questions are not easy to answer. However, we have a lot of cryptocurrency options, each tailored to meet different needs. It's up to us to determine which option suits us best and to refrain from complaining about the shortcomings of a single solution.

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[LoyceV]

I may be hated for saying this, but what's currently happening in the mempool is a feature, not a bug. The fact that we have a fixed-sized block limit means that the current clogged up state would inevitably happen sometime.

I'm going to disagree with you. The fact that Bitcoin is currently useless for small transactions, and very expensive for large transactions is a serious problem. I'm now teaching my kids to use Monero, simply because Bitcoin fees take up an entire year of their allowance. Bitcoin has lost out on so many potential users and transactions over the years, just because it can't handle more. I don't like it.
LN isn't going to solve this if opening and closing a channel costs a week worth of food.

Another important reminder: Censorship won't prevent monkey jpegs. Let's leave asides if censoring monkeys would undermine one of the important properties: It just technically doesn't work. People who spend dozens of millions of dollars in monkeys everyday can bypass every censorship measure and save them straight to the UTXO set, which would be a lot worse for the rest of us.

Reinstating the "coin days destroyed" priority mechanism can help. Spammers can't destroy unlimited coin days, but this isn't in the interest of miners. And that's a fundamental problem: the ones who earn from high fees benefit from the flaws in the fee system.

Here's another: As long as the law of supply and demand defines the price of block bytes, we can never on-board billions or even millions of people on a layer-1 solution, unless we undermine another important property; being practical to verify the ledger.

Yep. It sucks. What's left: all Bitcoin users keeping their coins on large centralized exchanges and ETFs? That destroys the concept of "electronic cash".

Final reminder: The free market decides the ideal tradeoff. "Is it better to have a dynamical block size?", "Would it be worse if we traded 'being practical to verify' with 'being for the poor'?", "Would a tail emission save the situation?". These questions are not easy to answer. However, we have a lot of cryptocurrency options, each tailored to meet different needs. It's up to us to determine which option suits us best and to refrain from complaining about the shortcomings of a single solution.

Hey, I get to complain about transaction fees! At least let me have this
I just hate seeing Bitcoin lose market share to shitcoins, because Bitcoin can't handle the transaction volume that comes with it's popularity.

[SAHASAN]

However, we have a lot of cryptocurrency options, each tailored to meet different needs. It's up to us to determine which option suits us best and to refrain from complaining about the shortcomings of a single solution.

I divide crypto into two.
One part is Bitcoin which is store of value and another part is Altcoin
which I use for trading.

[nutildah]

Bitcoin continues to do exactly what its supposed to do, without fail. Although the debate goes back all the way to 2011 or so, and we're just rehashing a 13-year-old argument, any transaction that is valid and picked up by a miner is a legitimate bitcoin transaction. So stalwarts who stay mad have two choices:

1) Continue to cry about how jpeggers and/or devs have "broken bitcoin," or
2) Embrace the evolution of what bitcoin can be used for.

PS: staying mad isn't going to change anything.

[LoyceV]

2) Embrace the evolution of what bitcoin can be used for.

How? You mean like joining the madness of paying $400 for a dust transaction, and then selling that same transaction to a greater fool for $4000? That doesn't sound like something I'm willing to embrace.

[BlackHatCoiner]

I may be hated for saying this, but what's currently happening in the mempool is a feature, not a bug. The fact that we have a fixed-sized block limit means that the current clogged up state would inevitably happen sometime.

I'm going to disagree with you. The fact that Bitcoin is currently useless for small transactions, and very expensive for large transactions is a serious problem.

I never said it isn't a serious problem. What I said is "it's a feature". Here's another feature: 21 million cap. "But this might not sustain the miners' income". I know. It might not. But, it's a feature nonetheless. Same applies to a fixed-sized block limit. It's inevitable that rich people will outweigh the poor sometimes, in terms of confirmation priority.

I'm now teaching my kids to use Monero

You're a father figure! I wish I had a father who taught me about Bitcoin and Monero. Congratulations.  

LN isn't going to solve this if opening and closing a channel costs a week worth of food.

Agreed.

Reinstating the "coin days destroyed" priority mechanism can help. Spammers can't destroy unlimited coin days, but this isn't in the interest of miners. And that's a fundamental problem: the ones who earn from high fees benefit from the flaws in the fee system.

Doesn't prevent the problem, perhaps discourages it by a little bit. What if they mint these tokens through centralized platforms with enormous amounts of UTXOs? I also don't like coins days destroyed, because it's anti-fungibility. A coin with value 100 days is more valuable than one that was just created.

I just hate seeing Bitcoin lose market share to shitcoins, because Bitcoin can't handle the transaction volume that comes with it's popularity.

The sooner we accept that Bitcoin cannot handle the entire populace on-chain, the better. Free markets are trial-and-error based. If Bitcoin has erred as electronic cash, then it's down to us to see which change in a crypto-protocol would make it look more like cash. Maybe there is none. Maybe it's dynamical block size. Maybe it's tail emission. Or even a compression method we haven't even thought of. In practice, we can see which is more recognized as cash.


A lot of Monero proponents on Twitter are bragging about Monero, and how it's better cash. Do they have any idea how bad the system works if the network was clogged up with gigabytes of monkeys every once in a while? I know, it'd still be cheap, but to finish syncing you'd have to verify like a million of monkey-ring signatures, which would slow down it by orders of magnitude.

[NeuroticFish]

Here's another: As long as the law of supply and demand defines the price of block bytes, we can never on-board billions or even millions of people on a layer-1 solution, unless we undermine another important property; being practical to verify the ledger.

Iirc last time we had this there were two directions for action:
1. get the community point their finger towards the services (wallets & exchanges) that were spamming the network
2. get bitcoin one step forward with SegWit

Imho telling that current situation is OK is not the best course of action.

I may be hated for saying this, but what's currently happening in the mempool is a feature, not a bug.
...
Another important reminder: Censorship won't prevent monkey jpegs.

True that. Still, not counting (nor restricting) at all those P2TR related bytes is imho a bug, not a feature.

A lot of Monero proponents on Twitter are bragging about Monero, and how it's better cash. Do they have any idea how bad the system works if the network was clogged up with gigabytes of monkeys every once in a while? I know, it'd still be cheap, but to finish syncing you'd have to verify like a million of monkey-ring signatures, which would slow down it by orders of magnitude.

Afaik Monero went - many, many years ago - for virtually no block limit. I may be wrong, because I didn't keep up with their news.
Of course, this can come with other kind of problems, but (sadly) they don't have this magnitude of being used by people (so we don't know).

[RickDeckard]

I may be hated for saying this, but what's currently happening in the mempool is a feature, not a bug. The fact that we have a fixed-sized block limit means that the current clogged up state would inevitably happen sometime.

I'm going to disagree with you. The fact that Bitcoin is currently useless for small transactions, and very expensive for large transactions is a serious problem.

I never said it isn't a serious problem. What I said is "it's a feature". Here's another feature: 21 million cap. "But this might not sustain the miners' income". I know. It might not. But, it's a feature nonetheless. Same applies to a fixed-sized block limit. It's inevitable that rich people will outweigh the poor sometimes, in terms of confirmation priority.

I think that in times like these, where we have multiple sides siding against different opinions, it is important to remember the very first words that stood the foundation of what Bitcoin is today:

A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. (...)

By simply existing the feature to implement such protocols doesn't actually mean that they should be created/implemented in the first place. Sure, adaptability and flexibility are great in the technological era but I believe that there has to be a core idea that would have to be followed in making sure that each ramification of the technology stood the ground against their foundations. Otherwise, what would it stand for?
I'm not against progress and improvements to the concept of Bitcoin, don't take me wrong, but I can't seem to find a reason to believe that adding NFT imprints in the blockchain is something that would allow the technology to remain faithfully to something it stood to reach (someday).

I'm now teaching my kids to use Monero

You're a father figure! I wish I had a father who taught me about Bitcoin and Monero. Congratulations.  

That is an astonishing feat, congratulations to you in introducing them to both concepts. I wonder if they realize the main differences between those and fiat and what were their first opinions about them?

I just hate seeing Bitcoin lose market share to shitcoins, because Bitcoin can't handle the transaction volume that comes with it's popularity.

The sooner we accept that Bitcoin cannot handle the entire populace on-chain, the better. Free markets are trial-and-error based. If Bitcoin has erred as electronic cash, then it's down to us to see which change in a crypto-protocol would make it look more like cash. Maybe there is none. Maybe it's dynamical block size. Maybe it's tail emission. Or even a compression method we haven't even thought of. In practice, we can see which is more recognized as cash.

This is an acceptable discussion and one that has been going on for some time and I easily see more this as acceptable regarding what can be made than Ordinals/Rune implementation and is totally understandable that Bitcoin simply cannot answer with efficiency when nothing could prepare us for these new NFT concepts when Bitcoin was first created. I wonder what more can/will be created that we  haven't imagined regarding Bitcoin - ~ 14 years to create "fungible NFT" on the blockchain, I wonder what it may come next. As an additional perspective, not one of my friends in real life, those who just want to hold bitcoin, is aware of what is going on regarding high fees, fungible tokens, Ordinals, Runes.

But then again, like BHC said, the free market is the concept that dictates this behaviour - if people didn't care about NFT, these implementations wouldn't have any kind of relevance. Problem is, I don't see NFT going away any time soon and with the amount of bridges being made for the Rune implementation, I fear that this may just be the beginning of a troubled period in Bitcoin existence. At least for a while.

[BlackBoss_]

I didn't know about developments of Bitcoin behind the scene but when I read documents, I feel that these attacks from Inscriptions, Ordinals, Runes can be kind of tools to create problems, and months later problems will be resolved. Bitcoin will escape from big technical problems to better technology even it will be only able to resolve problems temporarily.

You can consider it as my conspiracy theory, problems created, then problems resolved, and Bitcoin will make its a highest all time high for this bull run.

I am sorry but as I followed, there is no solution is developed to handle this problem except proposal from Luke to censor transactions from Ordinals. It was raised to the community months go. Did I miss anything technically?

[ABCbits]

Another important reminder: Censorship won't prevent monkey jpegs. Let's leave asides if censoring monkeys would undermine one of the important properties: It just technically doesn't work. People who spend dozens of millions of dollars in monkeys everyday can bypass every censorship measure and save them straight to the UTXO set, which would be a lot worse for the rest of us.

But don't forget there are ways to discourage those spammer. Even if it's limited to make Ordinals TX become non-standard, it would force them to use Runes instead where they only can store 80 bytes of arbitrary data on OP_RETURN on each TX.

Another important reminder: Censorship won't prevent monkey jpegs. Let's leave asides if censoring monkeys would undermine one of the important properties: It just technically doesn't work. People who spend dozens of millions of dollars in monkeys everyday can bypass every censorship measure and save them straight to the UTXO set, which would be a lot worse for the rest of us.

Reinstating the "coin days destroyed" priority mechanism can help. Spammers can't destroy unlimited coin days, but this isn't in the interest of miners. And that's a fundamental problem: the ones who earn from high fees benefit from the flaws in the fee system.

That mechanism was never part of Bitcoin protocol. It's just default behavior on Bitcoin Core (previously called "Bitcoin-Qt" and "Bitcoin") which used by miner until they prioritize profit.

[Kamasylvia]

I may be hated for saying this, but what's currently happening in the mempool is a feature, not a bug. The fact that we have a fixed-sized block limit means that the current clogged up state would inevitably happen sometime.

Another important reminder: Censorship won't prevent monkey jpegs. Let's leave asides if censoring monkeys would undermine one of the important properties: It just technically doesn't work. People who spend dozens of millions of dollars in monkeys everyday can bypass every censorship measure and save them straight to the UTXO set, which would be a lot worse for the rest of us.

Here's another: As long as the law of supply and demand defines the price of block bytes, we can never on-board billions or even millions of people on a layer-1 solution, unless we undermine another important property; being practical to verify the ledger.

Final reminder: The free market decides the ideal tradeoff. "Is it better to have a dynamical block size?", "Would it be worse if we traded 'being practical to verify' with 'being for the poor'?", "Would a tail emission save the situation?". These questions are not easy to answer. However, we have a lot of cryptocurrency options, each tailored to meet different needs. It's up to us to determine which option suits us best and to refrain from complaining about the shortcomings of a single solution.

I understand that you hold the view that the current clogged state of the mempool in blockchain networks is a feature rather than a bug. The fixed block size limit certainly contributes to the occurrence of congestion.  On the other hand, there are concerns that larger blocks could lead to centralization and decrease the number of people who can participate in the network as full nodes.

You raise a valid concern regarding the scalability limitations of layer-1 solutions, especially when considering the onboarding of billions or millions of users. As the number of participants and transactions increases, the demand for block space also grows, potentially leading to congestion and higher fees.

[stompix]

I may be hated for saying this, but what's currently happening in the mempool is a feature, not a bug. The fact that we have a fixed-sized block limit means that the current clogged up state would inevitably happen sometime.

I totally agree with this, people forget when they preach about how the decreasing supply will raise the price, how scarcity drives prices, how the space in the chain also acts the same, and you have too little, you need to pay more. Bitcoin was never a charity, was never a quick money scheme, it was made to obey only the law of economics and free trade, and here you have it!

Another important reminder: Censorship won't prevent monkey jpegs. Let's leave asides if censoring monkeys would undermine one of the important properties: It just technically doesn't work. People who spend dozens of millions of dollars in monkeys everyday can bypass every censorship measure and save them straight to the UTXO set, which would be a lot worse for the rest of us.

It can make them more expensive, not completely get rid of them but diminishing the quantity.
But, with "good" censorship you're opening Pandora's box.

Here's another: As long as the law of supply and demand defines the price of block bytes, we can never on-board billions or even millions of people on a layer-1 solution, unless we undermine another important property; being practical to verify the ledger.

But without enough space on the L1 you can't make a good transition to L2.
You can have the best innercity transport system working at 10% capacity and still have 2 million waiting on the outer ring for hours since they can't get in an use that transport.
The exchange between L1 and L2 must be cheap and easy, otherwise...well you can see the results.

It's up to us to determine which option suits us best and to refrain from complaining about the shortcomings of a single solution.

I heard that in '89, unfortunately, we didn't shoot our guy like the Romanians did.

I'm now teaching my kids to use Monero, simply because Bitcoin fees take up an entire year of their allowance.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1bak3to/monero_spam_recap/
"dynamic block size" 

[Despairo]

The sooner we accept that Bitcoin cannot handle the entire populace on-chain, the better. Free markets are trial-and-error based. If Bitcoin has erred as electronic cash, then it's down to us to see which change in a crypto-protocol would make it look more like cash. Maybe there is none. Maybe it's dynamical block size. Maybe it's tail emission. Or even a compression method we haven't even thought of. In practice, we can see which is more recognized as cash.

What are the disadvantages of dynamic block size and tail emission?

I also wonder what are developers reaction to the recent fees that spikes due to Runes, I didn't find any discussion about that in Bitcoin stack exchange, Github, or Linux foundation.

But, as the fees is keep declining, they might think it's not needed yet.

LN isn't going to solve this if opening and closing a channel costs a week worth of food.

LN isn't going to solve because it would end up like on-chain.

Lightning Compatible: Different from existing token standards, Runes can be sent and received on the Lightning network, for faster and less expensive transactions.

[Pmalek]

I may be hated for saying this, but what's currently happening in the mempool is a feature...

What's currently happening might be a feature, but it's a feature of spam that's abusing the network for its selfish reasons.

I heard a good comparison between Ordinals/Runes and telemarketing spam. Telemarketers are also using telecommunication networks the way they were intended. They pay their bills and purchase the needed hardware to make calls. But what happens then? They spam. You get a call to talk about Jesus, saving the planet, investing in this or that, or they inform you of a lottery you won or can participate in. Most people don't like them. You hang up the phone, you block their numbers.. you censor them. If this trend doesn't end, that's what needs to happen. You find a way to put them in the garbage bin. That's where garbage goes.

Why? Because Bitcoin's purpose is to be a

A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

If blocks are only filled by 10%, 20% or 30% with P2P online payments of digital cash, then something has seriously gone wrong. I have no problem with a free and competing fees market. That's how it's supposed to be. If you are willing to pay more than me to make an online P2P payment of electronic cash, then all the power to you my brother. I will have to wait my turn or reach deeper inside my own pockets to offer a competitive fee rate. What I don't believe anyone should have to do is to compete with spammers who are not making P2P online payments with electronic cash, and are taking away many of the features that normal people love. With those, I mean a cheap, fast, and borderless way of sending payments in any amounts you want.   

[Faisal2202]

Bitcoin continues to do exactly what its supposed to do, without fail. Although the debate goes back all the way to 2011 or so, and we're just rehashing a 13-year-old argument, any transaction that is valid and picked up by a miner is a legitimate bitcoin transaction. So stalwarts who stay mad have two choices:

1) Continue to cry about how jpeggers and/or devs have "broken bitcoin," or
2) Embrace the evolution of what bitcoin can be used for.

PS: staying mad isn't going to change anything.

You are right staying mad is not going to change anything, that's why many will move away from BTC and find other benefit options, for different financial activities, we don't have other option but to accept the evolution of BTC which is what? in your POV. But yeah we should not cry about inscriptions, but we should cry if we are not taking benefit from this feature.

My words are same as before that, those who are making $$ via Ordinals are prasing it, and embracing the new evolution and who are not and paying high fee they are not embracing and crying. But don't you think if the people from crying category enters the embracing category the hype will increase more and thus the tx fee will also.

[Hamza2424]

I've participated in such threads many times before last year but at the end of the day where the solution, haha it's quite funny that we cant solve it, many people offer the L2s as a solution but people don't want to move on, many of them support this solution and many oppose on the same time.

Now the closing wordic on the high tx fee on the Bitcoin network is really a concern for the day-to-day Bitcoin network users, if you can't afford it just stop using the Bitcoin network and move on to other solutions which are much cheaper obviously you won't be able to enjoy that reliability. Now you won't be able to use the Bitcoin network if you cant afford its a bitter reality.

[Amphenomenon]

Why? Because Bitcoin's purpose is to be a

A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

If blocks are only filled by 10%, 20% or 30% with P2P online payments of digital cash, then something has seriously gone wrong. I have no problem with a free and competing fees market. That's how it's supposed to be. If you are willing to pay more than me to make an online P2P payment of electronic cash, then all the power to you my brother. I will have to wait my turn or reach deeper inside my own pockets to offer a competitive fee rate. What I don't believe anyone should have to do is to compete with spammers who are not making P2P online payments with electronic cash, and are taking away many of the features that normal people love. With those, I mean a cheap, fast, and borderless way of sending payments in any amounts you want.   

The Ordinals is something that I didn't expect to be on the Bitcoin Network till but now Rune as been added, while others may claim everyone has freedom on how they choose to spend their Bitcoin/Sat and when you try to remind them that this was not what is written on the Bitcoin whitepaper they respond with Bitcoin is now bigger than Satoshi but I wonder how they justify this when others suffer from this fate, bitcoiners are depending on Altcoins for making payments.

Anyway if the dev still decides to let the spam continues, it doesn't matter after all we have been on this issue since last year and nothing have really be done. Though I don't really know much but one thing I can say is that these should be scrap out of the Bitcoin Network.

Bitcoin being only use as a means of payment and been great for years while if anyone think Bitcoin needs to expand then, why don't they, make Bitcoin usable for everything Ethereum and other altcoins are being used for since they fail to see how it is feasible on the Bitcoin Network.

[franky1]

ignoring all of blackhatcoiners BS


bitcoin is code, code can make rules for whats expected. and yes we can denounce the core roadmap and fight against/prevent new exploits and clean up the code and create rules via code which dont just allow junk..

we can close off majority of opcodes that have no conditions(no validation requirements thus anyjunk is allowed)
we can close off the miscounting and the 'assume valid' and 'is-valid' exceptions that just let junk through

code can clean up the network.  idiots and bullsh!tters just dont know it or dont want to admit its possible

we actually can get back to a system where every byte is accounted for, has purpose and conditions which nodes have set rules for.. we can harden consensus again and add new validity checks for any active opcode.

the issue is not a physics problem... its a social/political problem of dev control..

instead of being sheep to one master reference client(core) we can have multiple brands of different teams making reference clients where they all are allowed to propose new features whereby the best feature gets adopted by all brands and then the feature activates..
this hardened consensus then ensures proposers actually think more about their feature, develop its idea better, display the benefit better and actually unite the community around good beneficial features to then get activated via true network consensus of network readiness.
.. instead of the last few years of softened consensus of centralised trojans rolling in bad crap unchecked because the gate keeper wants a blind/softened system of lax gatekeeping

and dont pretend its "censorship"
there are many buzz words used by core themselves
'depreciate','evict','orphan','reject','ban','prune','strip' (list goes on)
where by bitcoin always HAD and HAS decided on which transactions are relevant
but the softening of the rules has now allowed more irrelevant unchecked junk.. and that junk can be cleaned up..

[nutildah]

How? You mean like joining the madness of paying $400 for a dust transaction, and then selling that same transaction to a greater fool for $4000? That doesn't sound like something I'm willing to embrace.

[Pmalek]

You are right staying mad is not going to change anything, that's why many will move away from BTC

One genuine user abandoning Bitcoin is greater damage than 100 shitcoiners going away because they can no longer upload their bananas to Bitcoin's blockchain. 

But yeah we should not cry about inscriptions, but we should cry if we are not taking benefit from this feature.

So your suggestion is joining the shitwagon? There are no benefits. Even the profits you might earn aren't worth destroying the best chance of an uncontrollable way of sending money that we have. 

But don't you think if the people from crying category enters the embracing category the hype will increase more and thus the tx fee will also.

How does that help anyone? We should all upload bananas and enjoy the high transaction fees? That's what you are saying.