Does exploiting the Bitcoin blockchain act as a major cause of congestion ?

[Felicity_Tide]

The issue of scalability, which has raised my curiosity and lots of personal questioning, has refused to fade away in the past weeks. As a none expert who wants to gain more knowledge on so many Bitcoin technical terminologies, asking questions for the benefit of gaining knowledge from experts has always been my number one priority.

I raised a topic about two days back concerning the issue of scalability and possible solution to congestion and high TX fees we get sometimes. I came across so many opinions which I believe are all from expert perspectives, but I am not still satisfied. Perhaps, I might need to skip the scabiliity aspect of Bitcoin and go about reading other things, or I should try to find all necessary answers to my questions to understanding it properly.

What we've been experiencing for a long time is not a scaling issue. It is a spam attack issue that I've been talking about for just as long. The spam attack under the name Ordinals is injecting the mempool with a lot of junk transactions because there is a scam market creating the incentive for regular users to participate in that spam and basically fund the attack.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5498790.msg64171767#msg64171767

The quoted text above was one of the reply I got, which wasn't too technical, but easy to read and understand even for someone who joins the forum at this instant. The writer was so confidence that spamming attack has literally been one of the main problems of congestion(please correct if I misquoted).

The introduction of Bitcoin Runes, Ordinals and BRC-20 has all been speculated as possible means of spamming the Blockchain. Ordinals which are also called Bitcoin NFTs allows the inscription of images, text, etc, on the Blockchain. BRC-20 token is an experimental standard token that allows minting and transferring of fungible tokens via ordinals protocol, while Runes is also a standard that allows the creation of fungible tokens in a more efficient way.

When I took my time to process what they are, I realized that the quoted text above might be correct.

An example of Rune which is already live since April, is the DOG memecoin. As we can see, it has a market cap of over $1B(all thanks to Bitcoin ). The circulating supply is 100B, which Bitcoin will be used in processing it's transactions, and also act as a store as for them. This is just what I could use as illustration. There are other runes that will follow same part, in addition to ordinals and BRC-20 tokens.

By having so many of these projects that will be built on any of these three protocols, increasing the block size won't help matters at all as there will be more taste to flood the supposed increased blocks. Not sure if anything can be done to handle Ordinals, Runes and BRC_20 token at the moment as they are already active. But I think we might start pointing fingers as more Runes projects are released, and investors begins to capitalize on early profits by making massive transfers

Am not sure if there is a limit to what the Bitcoin Blockchain can hold or do, but i see the intelligence of trying to create other things aside Bitcoin as a way of exploiting the Bitcoin Blockchain.

My Question:
1. Is this exploit done for selfish or general benefits?
2. Do you think Ordinals, Runes and BRC-20 will become a massive problem in the present and future?
3. should we focus more in resolving them or increasing block size instead?
4. What's the answer to the topic title above?

About Dog(Runes) : https://www.talkimg.com/image/cQAzN
Most visited Cryptocurrency according to coinmarketcap: https://www.talkimg.com/image/cQX33
Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dog-go-to-the-moon-rune/



I am 100% open to correction as I still see myself as a learner. Pardon any of my error and share your personal opinion

[Charles-Tim]

1. Is this exploit done for selfish or general benefits?

Obviously it is.

2. Do you think Ordinals, Runes and BRC-20 will become a massive problem in the present and future?

Bitcoin developers allows it and they should know what they will do about it. If another huge buying comes, they will also still add to the blockchain congestion. We should have lower fee rate by now. So they are even a problem now.

3. should we focus more in resolving them or increasing block size instead?

Only bitcoin developers are the ones that can make this discussion and it is clear that they want the tokens to stay.

4. What's the answer to the topic title above?

Yes.

[d5000]

OP, a lot has been written already about this issue in several threads. Most were however more active in 2023 and early 2024 when the Ordinals wave was at is maximum, when I think you weren't still around in this forum. I'll try to briefly summarize my opinion about these topics in simple terms:

1. Is this exploit done for selfish or general benefits?

There are two problems with Ordinals/Runes.

The first one is the presence of transactions with big amounts of data (up to 4 MB in some cases). This is actually the  "exploit" some talk about, because a Taproot "feature" was mis-used to circunvent limits for standard data transactions and thus storing lots of data in a transaction became cheaper. However, these transactions have only led to mempool congestion for a brief time in early 2023.

The second problem has much more incidence in the congestion: the appearance of tokens like BRC-20 and, more recently, Runes. These transactions are small, but their purpose isn't to transfer Bitcoins so they can be seen as "spam" by those wanting to limit the Bitcoin network for "payment" transactions. However, tokens on Bitcoin are nothing new. They exist since 2013 approximately (coloured coins, Omni/mastercoin). And more important: with the Bitcoin protocol it can't be prevented that such tokens are created (early token transactions looked exactly like normal transactions but had the data embedded in sequence fields and fake public keys).

2. Do you think Ordinals, Runes and BRC-20 will become a massive problem in the present and future?

I believe we will see some waves still, more from Runes than from Ordinals, but they will become much less pronounced. BRC-20 is already almost dying. Runes transactions have seen a second wave now but it's lower than the first wave (near the Halving event in April).

3. should we focus more in resolving them or increasing block size instead?

Neither of both. We should support all investigation which goes into second layers (which is the "transaction batching" aspect some mentioned in your other thread). This is not a fact like the answer to 1, but a personal opinion. I'm generally in the "small blocker" camp.

4. What's the answer to the topic title above?

If you think every data transaction is an "exploit", then probably yes. Data transactions like Ordinals, Runes, and to a lesser extent older protocols like Counterparty, Omni etc. are making up around 50% of the block size currently.

But if you only take into account the Ordinals which used the exploit I mentioned above, then its incidence is low, as I mentioned before.

Only bitcoin developers are the ones that can make this discussion and it is clear that they want the tokens to stay.

Disagree. They are quite neutral about them, but an aggressive development action against OP_RETURN tokens like Runes could cause massive side effects like a bigger UTXO set due to "fake public key tokens" like Stampchain.

[Felicity_Tide]

OP, a lot has been written already about this issue in several threads. Most were however more active in 2023 and early 2024 when the Ordinals wave was at is maximum, when I think you weren't still around in this forum.

I hadn't joined at that time. I saw the need to ask questions so I could catch up with many things that I have missed so far. I guess this might be the last question based on this matter.

[ABCbits]

I raised a topic about two days back concerning the issue of scalability and possible solution to congestion and high TX fees we get sometimes. I came across so many opinions which I believe are all from expert perspectives, but I am not still satisfied.

FYI, almost or all who reply aren't from expert. By expert, i mean someone who get paid as blockchain or Bitcoin developer or known for major contributing on Bitcoin protocol or software which utilize Bitcoin.

My Question:
1. Is this exploit done for selfish or general benefits?
2. Do you think Ordinals, Runes and BRC-20 will become a massive problem in the present and future?
3. should we focus more in resolving them or increasing block size instead?
4. What's the answer to the topic title above?

1. Short answer, yes. But IMO using OP_RETURN is tricky to be considered as exploit when it's created to store aribtiray data. Meanwhile, i consider usage of witness data, signature (on multi-sig address) and similar stuff as exploit.
2. Probably yes. I expect someone will try to rebrand those as "new" or "unique" innovation.
3. Yes. Who wants to see block size got increase only to be filled with Ordinals or other TX which aims to store arbitrary data?
4. Yes, i've seen some chart which shows majority of block filled with Ordinals (or similar ones) for some time.

[pooya87]

I hadn't joined at that time. I saw the need to ask questions so I could catch up with many things that I have missed so far. I guess this might be the last question based on this matter.

Then you may like to see some history about spam attacks as well. I tried to list some cases in this topic a couple of years ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1776143.0

We've been dealing with different types of spam attacks for a long time. I consider Ordinals to be the continuation of the same attacked called "stress test" back in 2015 but much more severe as it get regular users to participate in the attack without knowing they are actually performing an attack.

All the prolonged and major mempool congestions so far have been due to spam attacks.

Not sure if anything can be done to handle Ordinals, Runes and BRC_20 token at the moment as they are already active.

This should have been nipped in the bud. At its very early stages when the scam market hadn't grown, introduction of standard rules could have had a high chance of preventing the attack from growing. There weren't that many txs to reject.
As time passes the chances of making them non-standard to make propagation of such spam txs hard is not looking good.

I believe the best (cheapest) solution at this point is to create some sort of side-chain that carries the name Bitcoin (so the scammers can still get their junk hyped) and encourage newbies who buy this junk to migrate there.

1. Is this exploit done for selfish or general benefits?
2. Do you think Ordinals, Runes and BRC-20 will become a massive problem in the present and future?

1. It's hard to know the reasons for this with certainty. But it looks suspicious enough, specially the early stages of storing massive data in chain. It was done in the dumbest way possible and it is hard to accept it from someone who could read the code, understand the scripts and find the exploit and yet not be able to come up with a less buggy and more efficient way of exploiting it!

2. I think they are as big a problem as they can be. There could be other consequences in the future like government bans because some idiot stored something illegal on chain...