Are there impacts of too many projects on the Bitcoin blockchain?

[Felicity_Tide]

After reading a post https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5497591.0 by @examplens early this morning, I saw the need to go back to reading (cross checking) the Bitcoin white paper to see if there were certain hidden things I might not have read in my early days or new things that were added. My reason for doing this is due to the implementation of the Bitcoin ordinals protocol, BRC-20 Tokens, Bitcoin Runes, and now the incoming Stablecoins and crypto dollars on the Bitcoin Blockchain.

At first, I tried to compare the Bitcoin white paper to the Ethereum white paper and ended up discovering a massive difference in their main purposes for being introduced. Satoshi emphasized more on a p2p form of transaction (absence of third parties), double spending, timestamp, PoW, etc. On the other hand, the Ethereum white paper looked beyond financial transactions and included smart contracts, Dapps, etc. Ethereum was primarily a project designed to house other projects.

Over the years, we've seen several projects deployed on the Ethereum Blockchain. We can attribute those vast numbers of projects as part of what might have affected the scalability of the Ethereum Blockchain. Even on the Bitcoin Blockchain, we've experienced the crazy side of Ordinals, as we now see them as junk that litters the Blockchain.

The Bitcoin network itself is the center of attraction, which makes people feel that it's ideal to implement something not inline with what Satoshi proposed.

The price of Bitcoin has gone too far ($67.6K) for us to gamble with. The Bitcoin Blockchain shouldn't be a place to house other projects that are in form of junks. Ethereum is around ($3.8K), which still gives room to anyone who wants to use its Blockchain for the benefit of everyone.

I am one of those who appreciate what the developers are doing to improve Bitcoin itself such as the Lightning Network, but introducing anything outside Bitcoin such as ordinals and others is a terrible idea to me.

My question
1. What would be the future impact of adding too many projects to the blockchain?
2. Are the impacts positive or negative?
3. Are there no ways to oppose some of these projects before their implementation?

The price of BTC and ETH in this post are the current price as at the time of my writing

This post was not meant to condemn any project, but basically what I think is right for the Bitcoin Blockchain and based on my opinion.

[ABCbits]

1. What would be the future impact of adding too many projects to the blockchain?
2. Are the impacts positive or negative?
3. Are there no ways to oppose some of these projects before their implementation?

Here's my short thoughts,
1. Blockchain size and total UTXO keep growing at rapid pace.
2. Depends on the project, but IMO many of example you mentioned have more negative impact.
3. Unless you can convince Bitcoin dev/community to make transaction created by those project as non-standard or invalid, probably no.

[vjudeu]

What would be the future impact of adding too many projects to the blockchain?

Well, you will see just more congested mempool. And then, users will switch into other chains or coins (or even transact with fiat currencies), which on the other hand will decrease this load, and the whole cycle will constantly repeat. It is self-regulating mechanism, just like the mining difficulty.

Are the impacts positive or negative?

It depends. There are some projects with some positive impact, for example sidechains like RSK. Because then, you can experiment with new features, without affecting the main chain. But obviously, there are also other projects with negative impact, for example Ordinals (it is all about data pushing, and the whole "ownership" of satoshis is more or less random, because creators didn't think about things like "signatures" or "sighashes", to do it properly).

Are there no ways to oppose some of these projects before their implementation?

Of course, you can talk with some people, and try to convince them, that some idea is bad, or should be done differently. But many times, people don't listen, and they have to make some mistakes, to see in practice, why their idea is bad. For example, I told them in 2022, that zero satoshis could lead to some problems:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-February/019985.html

The system sounds expensive eventually to cope with approximately 2,100,000,000,000,000 ordinals.

What about zero satoshis? There are transactions, where zero satoshis are created or moved. Typical users cannot do that, but miners can, we currently have such transactions in the blockchain, for example 9f0b871e28fa19e2308e2fa74243bf2dcf23b160754df847d5f1e41aabe499d1 (check the last two inputs).

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-February/019986.html

​What about zero satoshis?

A zero satoshi input or output carries no ordinals, so an ordinal index can ignore them.

And here is what happened in 2023: https://github.com/supertestnet/breaker-of-jpegs

[goldkingcoiner]

I do not consider Bitcoin NFTs and other parasitic "business" schemes as "on the Bitcoin Blockchain". They are a separate thing, which utilizes the Bitcoin Blockchain.

But they are not an intrinsic, irremovable part of it, like the ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain, for example.

[Findingnemo]

My question
1. What would be the future impact of adding too many projects to the blockchain?
2. Are the impacts positive or negative?
3. Are there no ways to oppose some of these projects before their implementation?

1. More spam tokens invading the Bitcoin network then it results in the surge in TX fees and by this time we had already been aware of it for over a year and they are not really part of Bitcoin but just found the loophole to use the Bitcoin's popularity to sell their tokens for lump amount.

2. Bitcoin gains nothing from it but leaves the users who transact BTC to pay higher fee than they are supposed to be.

3. Here truly decentralization comes into play, no one can decide what they allow or not to do with the bitcoin network.

[pooya87]

The price of Bitcoin has gone too far ($67.6K) for us to gamble with. The Bitcoin Blockchain shouldn't be a place to house other projects that are in form of junks. Ethereum is around ($3.8K), which still gives room to anyone who wants to use its Blockchain for the benefit of everyone.

To be clear the main problem is not that these things are "junk", the problem is that they are abusing Bitcoin by exploiting it. You see Bitcoin is not a cloud storage as you already figured out. It is a payment system. So it should not be used to store arbitrary data (which Ordinals and its alternatives are) and that's causing a problem.

The price is also irrelevant here in my opinion. In this context Ethereum was created as a token creation platform and should be used. Ordinals if created on Ethereum can be an actual token instead of arbitrary data injected into transactions by using an exploit.

1. What would be the future impact of adding too many projects to the blockchain?
2. Are the impacts positive or negative?
3. Are there no ways to oppose some of these projects before their implementation?

It depends on what "projects" mean.
Stuff like Ordinals are not projects added to the blockchain, they are arbitrary data (or a spam attack). And like any attack they have a negative impact on Bitcoin. The more severe the attack, the worse the consequences will be.

3. There is. The way is to patch the exploits so that such malicious "projects" can not abuse it to spam attack the blockchain.