Important reminders

[Synchronice]

I may be hated for saying this, but

Not you but I'll probably really be hated for saying this: Bitcoin become a victim of rich people.
What it was years ago | What it is today:

- P2P Electronic Cash system | P2P JPEG ownership transfer service
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- Low transaction fees | Abused network with high transaction fees
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- No regulations, no ETF, no restrictions | Regulations, ETF, restrictions
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- Mining was decentralized | Now mining is centralized
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Do you wanna know what's going to happen? Did you guys ever hear If you can't defeat them, be one of them? So, governments and rich people took important resources and taking it every day. Bitcoin ETF approval was one of the most important step. Exchanges are getting regulated too and there is KYC everywhere. They technically become one of them. Soon they'll force miners to filter transactions and don't include the ones that governments don't want to be included. This is where it's heading!

what's currently happening in the mempool is a feature, not a bug.

It's here because money is made. Miners are earning tremendously big amount of money thanks to ordinals and ordinals are also making tremendously big money thanks to dumb people. Does anyone think that it will be removed anytime soon? Money!

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[BlackHatCoiner]

Most people don't like them. You hang up the phone, you block their numbers.. you censor them.

Great, so here's a fact: we don't do that in here. We cannot afford censorship. If you start censoring this and that, you open the Pandora's box, and be sure you might be next in line to be censored.

Why? Because Bitcoin's purpose is [reasons]

Great. So, what do we do to centralized exchanges and their users? They don't use it as a peer-to-peer cash system; it's clearly against the concept. Or, what do we do to dust attacks? I can claim they are spam and everyone would agree. What about second layers that do not go according to the whitepaper? Let's ban them too, why not? What about OP_RETURN? Clearly not an addition related to financial transactions.

What makes you think that your opinion on spam is the holy grail of truth we should all follow, whereas my opinion on spam is just subjective and must be ignored?

Miners are earning tremendously big amount of money thanks to ordinals and ordinals are also making tremendously big money thanks to dumb people. Does anyone think that it will be removed anytime soon? Money!

Dumb people don't have infinite money. A fool and his money are soon parted.

[Synchronice]

Dumb people don't have infinite money. A fool and his money are soon parted.

You are probably right, dumb people don't have infinite money but you completely ignore that there is an infinity of dumb people and they are constantly expanding like the universe does. So, technically we have an infinite money.

[BlackHatCoiner]

You are probably right, dumb people don't have infinite money but you completely ignore that there is an infinity of dumb people and they are constantly expanding like the universe does. So, technically we have an infinite money.

Not gonna lie. That made me laugh!

[RickDeckard]

Another behaviour that left a mark on me was the amount of fees that people were willing to pay, especially around block #840.000, to have their transaction around that block. For example, it makes me wonder who is behind these fees[1][2][3] (33k, 28k and 34k respectively) - could it be early adopters that saw that there is a big opportunity in earning more with Runes/Ordinals? I don't believe that the early adopters would embrace this idea to the point of burning so much in fees, so I rule out that option.

Could it be just crazy rich people that just want to attempt to be even more rich? I also find it hard to believe recent adopters, or average Joe's, just decided that Runes were the way to go regarding wealth and went crazy with spending money into them.

Could it be the miners that also take part into some of this behaviour in order to inflate the fees and make their whole operation even more profitable?

As a behaviour I reckon that I would like to find a reasoning behind such acts, but perhaps the error falls on me as these actions may not be supported in rational and structured decisions...
[1]https://mempool.space/tx/d906205fdb2fdad9d8f1999f890a05a49d6125ec712c83d0a9901be6b4dafe2e
[2]https://mempool.space/tx/e89ecbbe0a70a2305edc9c18c61f019f34b72c9af1b8221fa1231b0aa9351226
[3]https://mempool.space/tx/a58b4fe7bd215935ab07c54d014ffcd9fe7172734b5993634e259613d8b433b0

[LoyceV]

What it was years ago | What it is today:
- P2P Electronic Cash system | P2P JPEG ownership transfer service

That's the thing: there is no JPEG ownership, it's meaningless! It only "means" something on a made-up system, which only means something to the few people who are in on it. To the rest of the world, it doesn't mean anything. And on top of that, anyone can claim "ownership" of any image, with or without having the rights to do so. It's a scam.

If I'd tell you each of my satoshis is worth $1000, and if I'd create a wallet that actually shows that, and if I were to hype it enough, I could probably get some gullible victims into paying me that much. Just like the ICO scams did when Ethereum was facilitating all those scams. I really don't like the idea of Bitcoin faciliting this.

Dumb people don't have infinite money. A fool and his money are soon parted.

You are probably right, dumb people don't have infinite money but you completely ignore that there is an infinity of dumb people and they are constantly expanding like the universe does. So, technically we have an infinite money.

I was thinking of:

“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”
― George Carlin

[Eclipse33]

A fool and his money are soon parted.

[Pmalek]

Great, so here's a fact: we don't do that in here.

Bitcoin doesn't censor because there was no grave need for that. No transactions should ever get censored. I don't consider the Ordinal/Runes spam to be transactions (going back to the P2P transfer of digital cash), so the same rules shouldn't apply. My personal opinion, of course.

If you start censoring this and that, you open the Pandora's box, and be sure you might be next in line to be censored.

Now you are exaggerating. Don't forget that you need a huge majority support to make important changes in Bitcoin. Even a solution for inscription spam might not pass that threshold, let alone something that shouldn't be prevented.

Great. So, what do we do to centralized exchanges and their users? They don't use it as a peer-to-peer cash system; it's clearly against the concept. What about second layers that do not go according to the whitepaper? Let's ban them too, why not? What about OP_RETURN? Clearly not an addition related to financial transactions.

We don't do anything. They aren't a threat. Ordinals don't use OP_RETURN (I think). Runes do. A solution should be found to filter out only inscription spam, nothing genuine. For the record, I don't consider what Luke Dashjr is doing as a good solution because it affects coinjoin transactions.     

Or, what do we do to dust attacks? I can claim they are spam and everyone would agree.

There is already a solution to that which prevents us to make transactions below the dust limit. 

What makes you think that your opinion on spam is the holy grail of truth we should all follow, whereas my opinion on spam is just subjective and must be ignored?

That's the beauty of discussing different topics. You share your opinions and people either agree with them or not. If the majority agrees, it can be implemented. I don't see why a random person would look at the current situation and go: This is fine, let's not do anything and just pay $20 or $50 per transaction, depending on how much the spammers are spamming at the time.

Btw, there have been multiple posts about these spammers soon losing their money and stopping their attacks. Possible. But the enemies of Bitcoin with access to money printers could also improve their approaches and clog the network in the same way. The current spammers have showed them the way.

[nutildah]

That's the thing: there is no JPEG ownership, it's meaningless! It only "means" something on a made-up system, which only means something to the few people who are in on it. To the rest of the world, it doesn't mean anything. And on top of that, anyone can claim "ownership" of any image, with or without having the rights to do so. It's a scam.

You're right, with Ordinals there is no proof of ownership on-chain -- it is only enforced at the Ordinals protocol level. With Runes, which I haven't really looked into, supposedly the proof of ownership is on-chain, although I don't know how it works.

There was a saying by Joe Looney, an early Counterparty user, wallet dev & former Rare Pepe Scientist, "the token is the art." A lot of famous Counterparty "NFTs" (quotes are needed because most are actually fungible) don't have the artwork attached to the token at any level, or the original image-containing URL it pointed to on-chain is broken. Doesn't affect the price or collectability of the token in any way.



https://xchain.io/asset/RAREPEPE

With Counterparty, the token itself is the art; the art is merely a representation of the token.

With Ordinals, people are basically just collecting dust, which is why I never got into it.

Runes is basically a more crude, expensive & better-marketed Counterparty AFAICT.

[RickDeckard]

Btw, there have been multiple posts about these spammers soon losing their money and stopping their attacks. Possible.

What is the discussion around this particular case? Ordinals have been going on ~ mid 2022[1] and their behaviour hasn't slowed down to the point of being non-relevant in the network and Runes are following the same trend (albeit in a bigger scale at the moment, but the data is still few).

But the enemies of Bitcoin with access to money printers could also improve their approaches and clog the network in the same way. The current spammers have showed them the way.

This point brings me back to my previous comment[2], especially when combined now with this suspicious from LoyceV[3] - If this is the work of one individual, how deep do you have to trust these implementations to sink hundreds and hundreds of dollars in (fees) transactions that, supposedly, have a unique characteristic that will make somebody in the future find value in that? Like I said, surelly this isn't the average Joe that heard about bitcoin in the news, nor this is the early adopter whose pockets are the first ones that I believe could sustain such "investment".

Or is this a case of a very, very bored individual that sees Ordinals and Runes as the next boom (similar to what happened so far with Bitcoin) and want to take the early benefits of it?
[1]https://rodarmor.com/blog/ordinal-theory/
[2]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5493652.msg63979843#msg63979843
[3]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.msg63981471#msg63981471

[BlackHatCoiner]

Bitcoin doesn't censor because there was no grave need for that.

Absolutely disagree. Bitcoin doesn't censor for the simple reason that it is the right thing to do. If you don't like censorship-resistant always-no-matter-what cash, there's a host variety of cryptocurrencies I can direct you to.

Bitcoin doesn't censor because there was no grave need for that. No transactions should ever get censored. I don't consider the Ordinal/Runes spam to be transactions (going back to the P2P transfer of digital cash), so the same rules shouldn't apply. My personal opinion, of course.

- "I don't consider OP_RETURN spam to be transactions (going back to the P2P transfer of digital cash), so the same rules shouldn't apply".
- "I don't consider LN channels to be transactions (going back to the P2P transfer of digital cash), so the same rules shouldn't apply".
- "I don't consider centralized exchanges' transactions to be peer-to-peer (going back to the P2P transfer of digital cash), so the same rules shouldn't apply".

Do you get it now?

We don't do anything. They aren't a threat.

According to you. According to someone else, they might pose a threat to the P2P cash model. According to me, no transaction that complies with the consensus rules is a threat.

There is already a solution to that which prevents us to make transactions below the dust limit.

That's only non-standard. It's perfectly valid to create dust. Be certain that if enough people were willing to trade millions of dollars for dust, the miners would bypass any standard rules. Especially if dust was standard beforehand, as already happens with Ordinals.

If the majority agrees, it can be implemented. I don't see why a random person would look at the current situation and go: This is fine, let's not do anything and just pay $20 or $50 per transaction, depending on how much the spammers are spamming at the time.

If you want the system to scale, work on scaling. Not on censorship. That's the appropriate response.

[RickDeckard]

To add to the discussion, and since I have recently been reading more about Ordinals and Runes, in the first article written by Casey regarding Ordinals[1] he says that the concept of Ordinals had already been discussed, in some ways, back in 2012, right here in the forum[2][3]:

~
In another sense though, ordinals were in fact created by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 when he mined the Bitcoin genesis block. In this sense, ordinals, and especially early ordinals, are certainly of historical interest.

I personally favor the latter view. This is not least because the ordinals were independently discovered on at least two separate occasions, long before the era of modern NFTs began.

On August 21st, 2012, Charlie Lee posted a proposal to add proof-of-stake to Bitcoin to the Bitocin* Talk forum[2]. This wasn't an asset scheme, but did use the ordinal algorithm, and was implemented but never deployed.

On October 8th, 2012, jl2012 posted a scheme[3] to the the same forum which uses decimal notation and has all the important properties of ordinals. The scheme was discussed but never implemented.

The idea never reached adoption and generate some discussion about it and eventually Casey would make a post about his idea on the forum on December 2022[4]. What I can't seem to understand so far is the contradiction that Casey makes regarding Ordinals when he says that he has views from those whom he considers being labeled as "ideological Bitcoin maximalists", without being himself a ideological Bitcoin maximalist:

If you ask me my views, they will be nearly indistinguishable from those of, for lack of a better term, ideological Bitcoin maximalists. I loathe the state, have no particular respect for authority, and believe that Bitcoin is the path away from the debauched debasement of our lives and civilization that fiat currency has wrought.

However, I do not consider myself an ideological Bitcoin maximalist, with the primary reason being that ideology often does not survive contact with reality.
(...)

This is all fine and well - I suppose he supports a hybrid model regarding supporting some basic fundamentals but embracing other perspectives - but this is the part that triggers me:

So, what should you do about inscriptions?

Just ignore them. More valuable use-cases will price out the majority of inscriptions. There will always be some high-value inscriptions, but they don't compete seriously with hard money and uncensorable transactions. Bitcoin's destiny is high fees. Embrace it.

I would very much would like to ignore Inscriptions but sadly I can't - Every now and then I am faced with 100 sat/vB fees if I want to make a payment of a couple of dollars to any kind of service. How can I choose to ignore them when they have a huge impact on the core functionality of Bitcoin?
[1]https://rodarmor.com/blog/ordinal-theory/
[2]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102355.0
[3]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117224.0
[4]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117224.msg1273726#msg1273726
[5]https://rodarmor.com/blog/inscriptions-a-guide-for-the-ideological-maxi/
*He mispelled bitcointalk  (Bitocin??)

[Pmalek]

Absolutely disagree. Bitcoin doesn't censor for the simple reason that it is the right thing to do. If you don't like censorship-resistant always-no-matter-what cash, there's a host variety of cryptocurrencies I can direct you to.

It's not cash. Again, my opinion. Anyone is free to agree or disagree.

According to you. According to someone else, they might pose a threat to the P2P cash model.

Then, that someone is free to suggest what should be done to change/stop the threat and the community will decide the course of action.

If you want the system to scale, work on scaling. Not on censorship. That's the appropriate response.

I don't disagree. But how good has that done us? We don't have a solution for scaling on L1 that wouldn't affect the decentralized nature of Bitcoin and which wouldn't require much more storage at the same time.

I would very much would like to ignore Inscriptions but sadly I can't - Every now and then I am faced with 100 sat/vB fees if I want to make a payment of a couple of dollars to any kind of service. How can I choose to ignore them when they have a huge impact on the core functionality of Bitcoin?

It's already been ignored, thus Ordinals led to Runes. Tomorrow Runes will lead to something new, and then we can all enjoy our censorship-resistant Bitcoin at 500-700 sat/vByte.

[cryptosize]

What it was years ago | What it is today:
- P2P Electronic Cash system | P2P JPEG ownership transfer service

That's the thing: there is no JPEG ownership, it's meaningless! It only "means" something on a made-up system, which only means something to the few people who are in on it. To the rest of the world, it doesn't mean anything. And on top of that, anyone can claim "ownership" of any image, with or without having the rights to do so. It's a scam.

If I'd tell you each of my satoshis is worth $1000, and if I'd create a wallet that actually shows that, and if I were to hype it enough, I could probably get some gullible victims into paying me that much. Just like the ICO scams did when Ethereum was facilitating all those scams. I really don't like the idea of Bitcoin faciliting this.

No-coiners will also tell you that BTC is meaningless, it's a made-up system...

Only 1% of the global population owns BTC, to the rest (99%) of the world it doesn't mean anything. Ordinal users are a subset of an already small subset (BTC users).

In the end it's all ones and zeroes. However we decide to interpret it is a matter of perspective (for art lovers art makes sense, for others not so much).

Even copyrighted material (such as Nintendo video games) is ones and zeroes.

Nintendo will tell you it's not just ones and zeroes, it's their intellectual property (because that's how they interpret it from their own perspective) and they may even try to take down BTC nodes with a DMCA notice.

Piracy lovers/preservationists will tell you it's just ones and zeroes, not much different from other data stored in the BTC blockchain.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Then, that someone is free to suggest what should be done to change/stop the threat and the community will decide the course of action.

You're missing the point. Sure, theoretically we can softfork and "fix the exploit" if there's enough demand. But, the Ordinal users can find another loophole to store their data, and it'll probably be worse for the rest of us. Imagine if Ordinal users bloated the UTXO set instead of using tapscript. That'd be a verification nightmare, and I'm sure they can handle it financially!

There. Is. No. Room. For. Censorship. The more you try to censor what you deem as "spam", the more you're pushing that spam to become indistinguishable from monetary transactions.

I don't disagree. But how good has that done us? We don't have a solution for scaling on L1 that wouldn't affect the decentralized nature of Bitcoin and which wouldn't require much more storage at the same time.

Question: what should we do if instead of Ordinal users there were "legitimate users" who used Bitcoin as cash? Censor a percentage of those, or work on scaling?

Once more, what we are presently experiencing is the inevitable outcome of Bitcoin's nature.

[JayJuanGee]

What it was years ago | What it is today:
- P2P Electronic Cash system | P2P JPEG ownership transfer service

That's the thing: there is no JPEG ownership, it's meaningless! It only "means" something on a made-up system, which only means something to the few people who are in on it. To the rest of the world, it doesn't mean anything. And on top of that, anyone can claim "ownership" of any image, with or without having the rights to do so. It's a scam.

I am kind of seeing a similar thing while at the same time starting to feel some kind of a tinge of an attack on the bitcoin network and transactability of regular folks, but I still am tentatively considering that they are not going to be able to keep it up, becuase there would have to be buyers on the other end, so sure maybe for a while the hype can keep going, and maybe even several months, but is it sustainable in any kind of way that it is really going to break transactability?  or maybe this is just the beginning of variations of similar kinds of ways to remove lower paying transactions for these ones who are apparently willing to spend a lot of money on variations of their crap.. and then maybe it gives other actors (such as governments and financial institutions - even miners) more information about ways that they can drive bitcoin fees up and to discourage normies from getting involved in bitcoin, including that normies could become frustrated by not being able to engage in on chain transactions and normies are then tending to use third party providers and also realizing that they are not really directly using bitcoin, but they may well be able to get bitcoin price exposure.. ..

but then price dynamics that are partly motivated by a bunch of scams on top of bitcoin and contributing to confusion in terms of whether bitcoin is any different than any other shitcoin, which we should still realize that bitcoin is still different from various other shitcoins, just that the fees cost a lot to transact (rght now) and maybe we have to make sure that we are transacting in the thousands of dollars in order to justify the fees that we are paying.. although even if we might have to send $1k to $2k to some kind of a lightning network wallet, then maybe we would thereafter be able to have cheaper transactions on that wallet that we had initiated with $1k to $2k worth of bitcoin.

If I'd tell you each of my satoshis is worth $1000, and if I'd create a wallet that actually shows that, and if I were to hype it enough, I could probably get some gullible victims into paying me that much. Just like the ICO scams did when Ethereum was facilitating all those scams. I really don't like the idea of Bitcoin faciliting this.

Is it worth it to try to stop it rather than just letting it run its course.  I am having trouble considering that it breaks bitcoin, even though it is quite inconvenient, and it stacks a lot of cards in favor of rich people and against poor people and even normies wanting to get into bitcoin. .but there frequently is misinformation (information asymmetry) that normies newbies to bitcoin have to sort through in order to still recognize/appreciate bitcoin as a powerful investment that they should get rather than not getting, even though transaction fees happen to currently be high, and "we" seem to be going through a period of excitement in regards to how to propagate various scams on the bitcoin main chain.

Btw, there have been multiple posts about these spammers soon losing their money and stopping their attacks. Possible. But the enemies of Bitcoin with access to money printers could also improve their approaches and clog the network in the same way. The current spammers have showed them the way.

Sure.. I am kind of thinking that too.. and so you are implying that rich people, governments, financial institutions, anti-bitcoin folks will just keep throwing their money at bitcoin to clog it up.. and suggesting that they have enough money to actually accomplish their mission..

I understand the idea, and I have similar fears, but I think that we cannot necessarily presume such a thing without possibly letting it play out for some additional time, so in that sense, I cannot see what kind of a "rush" change would be good enough to NOT damage more than it solves, and I am kind of thinking that these high fees might be inspiring various kinds of developments that might be able to inspire some kinds of solutions that had not previously been considered.. How long these solutions take?  Who knows, but there are variations of them that already exist, even though they seem to have more centralization characteristics. 

Many of us who hold bitcoin privately are likely made aware of these matters, and there may well be some folks who hold bitcoin privately who have not yet become aware of these current high fee issues, and surely some of them could become inspired to sell their coins because of such matters or maybe fail/refuse to buy more bitcoin because of such matters, and yeah, they will become low coiners or no coiners, and maybe they will regret their decision later.. so yeah, we each make decisions about our own bitcoin holdings if we believe some of our use cases are being interfered with. and/or that we might have transaction sizes (UTXOs) that have become uneconomical to spend.. or marginally economical to spend, and some folks might panic based on these kinds of issues and misread them as more sustainable than they actually are.. and I am not going to proclaim that I know the solution, but I am not much of a fan of emergency measures based on even what seems to be currently going on.

[LoyceV]

What it was years ago | What it is today:
- P2P Electronic Cash system | P2P JPEG ownership transfer service

That's the thing: there is no JPEG ownership, it's meaningless! It only "means" something on a made-up system, which only means something to the few people who are in on it. To the rest of the world, it doesn't mean anything. And on top of that, anyone can claim "ownership" of any image, with or without having the rights to do so. It's a scam.

No-coiners will also tell you that BTC is meaningless, it's a made-up system...
Only 1% of the global population owns BTC, to the rest (99%) of the world it doesn't mean anything.

You're missing the point. If I own Bitcoin, it's mine! Nobody else can use it, nobody else can take it. It doesn't matter if someone else is interested or not: it's mine. The fact that many people don't use Bitcoin doesn't matter: 99.8% of the world, including me, doesn't own Swedish Krona. But nobody would say it doesn't mean anything.
I have many JPEG images. I own many of them: they're pictures I took myself. I never gave anyone a copy, which means I'm certain I am the only owner. If I'd upload it to a server, anyone can download it. If I upload it to a blockchain, it doesn't mean anything for ownership.

I am kind of seeing a similar thing while at the same time starting to feel some kind of a tinge of an attack on the bitcoin network and transactability of regular folks, but I still am tentatively considering that they are not going to be able to keep it up, becuase there would have to be buyers

I'm not so optimistic. Once one scam fails, they'll move to the next one. We've already gone from NFT to Inscription to Ordinal to Rune, just like many altcoins were created in the past, followed by many ICOs, many Bitcoin Forks, DeFi BS and more.

[satscraper]

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.

They just developed the technique of runes  metamining  over bitcoin blockchain. Thus,   patsies who spend hundred of bucks   for their dust transactions have    the incentive to increase the fee rate they allocate,  as the more such transactions are in one bitcoin block the higher the  likelihood  to get metablock relevant to runes. More on that is here.

[ABCbits]

Then, that someone is free to suggest what should be done to change/stop the threat and the community will decide the course of action.

You're missing the point. Sure, theoretically we can softfork and "fix the exploit" if there's enough demand. But, the Ordinal users can find another loophole to store their data, and it'll probably be worse for the rest of us. Imagine if Ordinal users bloated the UTXO set instead of using tapscript. That'd be a verification nightmare, and I'm sure they can handle it financially!

There. Is. No. Room. For. Censorship. The more you try to censor what you deem as "spam", the more you're pushing that spam to become indistinguishable from monetary transactions.

Ordinal users could just switch to Runes, since it use OP_RETURN which usually deemed as less controvesial. And soft-fork isn't needed as we could just make Ordinal TX become non-standard, just like how SegWit address with uncompressed public key categorized as non-standard.

I am kind of seeing a similar thing while at the same time starting to feel some kind of a tinge of an attack on the bitcoin network and transactability of regular folks, but I still am tentatively considering that they are not going to be able to keep it up, becuase there would have to be buyers

I'm not so optimistic. Once one scam fails, they'll move to the next one. We've already gone from NFT to Inscription to Ordinal to Rune, just like many altcoins were created in the past, followed by many ICOs, many Bitcoin Forks, DeFi BS and more.

At very least, Bitcoin Layer 2 and sidechain gaining popularity, so let's hope those arbitrary data spam or scam attempt will move to one of them soon.

[Pmalek]

Question: what should we do if instead of Ordinal users there were "legitimate users" who used Bitcoin as cash? Censor a percentage of those, or work on scaling?

Of course there should be no censoring of anyone using Bitcoin as digital cash, and I have never thought of saying something like that. I wish the situation post-halving was the result of legitimate use, but sadly it isn't. If it wasn't spam, but a genuine onboarding process of new users, these discussions and ideas wouldn't need to exist. The only ideas that would be valid would be ways of scaling.