"non-financial" transactions

[alani123]

I just stumbled upon this website page:

https://thebitcoinportal.com/live/spam/overview

Supposedly they're trying to quantify what percentage of all bitcoin transactions are not made with the explicit intention of transacting BTC. For example an ordinal transaction is made with the intent of inscribing on the Blockchain rather than simply getting BTC from one address to another.


But I think the website authors are counting all transactions including OP_RETURN as "non-financial".
Does that make sense? Please explain your thought process if you could.
I'm just trying to understand

[cryptoaddictchie]

Supposedly they're trying to quantify what percentage of all bitcoin transactions are not made with the explicit intention of transacting BTC. For example an ordinal transaction is made with the intent of inscribing on the Blockchain rather than simply getting BTC from one address to another.

I think both cause he labeled the financial and non financial on his graph. The financial probably refers to the normal data like sending btc and its movement like payments or withdrawals from exchanges. While the non financial are those like what you explained ordinal inscription and maybe other stuff like metadata or messages.

But I think the website authors are counting all transactions including OP_RETURN as "non-financial".
Does that make sense? Please explain your thought process if you could.
I'm just trying to understand

Regarding that OP return is the highest in the graph means all non financial are labeled in that because its doesnt really related to the mivement of bitcoin since these are data like messaging, indexes or probably little data such as timestamp.

Its really a nice experiment on the author sides. But since its his study we cant say his wrong but someone with tech background with bitcoin metadata can definitely disagree with it if found some flaws or inconsistency especially its published on a website.

[Upgrade00]

But I think the website authors are counting all transactions including OP_RETURN as "non-financial".
Does that make sense? Please explain your thought process if you could.

OP_RETURN outputs are probably unspendable, so it makes sense to classify all transactions under that as non financial. It's meant as a way of storing data on the chain while allowing nodes to safely ignore it and prune it out since any coins involved are effectively burned.

I'll like to know their break down of what "other data" is classified as non financial besides the 3 mentioned in the graph. I can't see any information on that on the website.

[alani123]

So is it really safe to say that around half of the bitcoin transactions on chain are for non financial purposes right now as this website shows? This isn't the result of hyperbole of at the very least subjective categorization?

[BattleDog]

OP_RETURN being classified as non-financial makes sense most of the time because it is literally used to attach arbitrary data and the output is provably unspendable. Nobody is receiving spendable BTC from the OP_RETURN output itself, but that still doesn't mean the entire transaction had zero financial component. It still has inputs, fees, maybe change outputs, and sometimes other spendable outputs too.

So yes, the category can be useful, but I'd call it subjective. The safer wording is "about half of recent transaction size / blockspace was classified as non-financial by this website," not "half of Bitcoin transactions are non-financial."

[DaveF]

To make an even better point there is no such thing as a  "non-financial" transaction on BTC.
Miners don't work for free.
Someone PAID a TX fee to have that transaction mined.

Everything else is fear mongering / deliberate misinformation from people supporting censoring transactions.

-Dave

[alani123]

To make an even better point there is no such thing as a  "non-financial" transaction on BTC.
Miners don't work for free.
Someone PAID a TX fee to have that transaction mined.

Everything else is fear mongering / deliberate misinformation from people supporting censoring transactions.

-Dave

But honestly what's the incentive right now for upwards of 50% of all BTC transactions right now to be like this?
The ordinals trend is dying and has lost almost all steam..
So what is it this time? What type of transactions are these?

[Smartprofit]

To make an even better point there is no such thing as a  "non-financial" transaction on BTC.
Miners don't work for free.
Someone PAID a TX fee to have that transaction mined.

Everything else is fear mongering / deliberate misinformation from people supporting censoring transactions.

-Dave

But honestly what's the incentive right now for upwards of 50% of all BTC transactions right now to be like this?
The ordinals trend is dying and has lost almost all steam..
So what is it this time? What type of transactions are these?

It's possible these are traces of the Runes protocol (the transfer of meme coins and tokenized assets on the Bitcoin network). These assets are traded by both bots and humans. This explains why there are so many of these transactions.🙋

I'd prefer a different answer: that these are traces of L2 protocols like Bitlayer or Babylon. But that's most likely not the case. Most likely, the Bitcoin blockchain is "littered" with new meme coins. On the other hand, this is a source of income for miners in the form of fees. And everything that's good for miners is good for Bitcoin.💁

[alani123]

I'm looking at ordiscan:
https://ordiscan.com/blocks

It shows both ordinals and BRC transactions afaik

I can see each block has up to double digits of such transactions. But block capacity is thousands of transactions.
So based on what is the site in the OP claiming to see around 50% "non-financial" transactions?
Sorry, I still don't seem to understand where all these OP_returns are coming from unless I'm missing something here.

[FinneysTrueVision]

I'm looking at ordiscan:
https://ordiscan.com/blocks

It shows both ordinals and BRC transactions afaik

I can see each block has up to double digits of such transactions. But block capacity is thousands of transactions.
So based on what is the site in the OP claiming to see around 50% "non-financial" transactions?
Sorry, I still don't seem to understand where all these OP_returns are coming from unless I'm missing something here.

You can use the mempool goggles feature on mempool.space to get a better visualization. Most OP_RETURN transactions are related to something called Runestones.

OP_RETURN outputs are probably unspendable, so it makes sense to classify all transactions under that as non financial. It's meant as a way of storing data on the chain while allowing nodes to safely ignore it and prune it out since any coins involved are effectively burned.

Having one unspendable output wouldn’t make the whole transaction non-financial. Bitz.io includes an OP_RETURN output in their withdrawals. They are also used in THORchain deposits and Whirlpool coinjoins. These might be niche uses, but it is still financial activity.