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As often there is a way just not 100% Bitcoin. swap into LTC, channel your funds and reswap into BTC.
Money saved, Time saved win win.

First off, that's what LN is for. By the time businesses accepting Bitcoin actually becomes a thing I expect it all to be done through LN, I would never expect on-chain payments from merchants, that simply doesn't scale. On-chain is for moving money around, LN is for paying.

It seems you don't understand the uniqueness of Bitcoin. Litecoin, BCH, other Bitcoin forks, as well as every other cryptocurrency, are nothing like Bitcoin. They have none of the advantages/strengths bitcoin has. Bitcoin's uniqueness has nothing to do with it being the first mover. It is also the first mover which helps it, but its uniqueness and the inability of Litcoin, BCH, or any other cryptocurrency to be able to do what it does or be anything like Bitcoin is what keeps any altcoin from ever having the ability to replace Bitcoin.

As I said, Ethereum doesn't have those advantages. There is nothing unique about Ethereum, it just has first mover advantage. There is no reason why another smart contract network couldn't replace Ethereum if its first mover advantage failed. That is not the case with Bitcoin. Nobody is going to abandon Bitcoin for some altcoin just because tx fees get high for a bit because then they'd lose the entire purpose they were using Bitcoin in the first place.

Bitcoin is hard money, globally secure, sovereign, immutable, trustless, and decentralized. You'd be hard pressed to find any other cryptocurrency that is any of those things, let all all of them, I mean maybe Monero would be closest to having some of those but its privacy is actually its downfall because it is too closely associated with nefarious uses due to its privacy. Not only is Bitcoin unique that has nothing at all to do with it being the first mover, but there is nobody these days even interested in trying to make a cryptocurrency that attempts to have Bitcoin's strengths. Probably because if you wanna make money you don't make something you don't control and own, you make a centralized token. Also every attempt to make something that could compete with Bitcoin completely failed and none of them had any of Bitcoin's advantages anyway. It's also much much harder to grow a decentralized immutable blockchain from zero than it is to make some centralized token or app that you control and can sell for fundraising.

Basically Bitcoin is entirely unique and there is no market or will to make something that could compete with it. You only need one Bitcoin in the world. If anything Litecoin proved that. For years it was seen as the "silver to bitcoin's gold". That narrative completely fell apart by 2020 as Litecoin finally started going sideways long term while Bitcoin just kept going up. To make that fact clear, at the 2013 peak LTC was about 4.1% the cost of BTC, now its about 0.29% the cost. LTC was the closest thing to a competitor or something that could possibly replace Bitcoin if something happened to Bitcoin, that has ever existed, and it has clearly completely unraveled from that potential. The market has clearly shown that the world only needs one thing like Bitcoin, and since Bitcoin is entirely unique there is no chance of anything replacing Bitcoin as that thing.

Haha, your point is noted bud..
But come to think of it, first understand that I am not pessimistic on bitcoin, I am optimistic as any one else could be, but this does not mean, to say no word when we see things that are not suppose to happen happening.

Yes, the spam attack(as you referred it as) only lasted for two days, and to you, that's not a problem at all, but do you know that there is what is called an aftermath impression? Yeah, two days is not such a long time after all, but what impression have the experience of that two days left in the minds of the people?
Though its rare to see, but imagine a business that only accepts bitcoin as a means of payment for its good or services, that's equals to two days of no business, because no average customer in his or her right mind will be happy spending double the money he used to spend for the same goods or service.

Now lets move away from the currency side of bitcoin, you mentioned that bitcoin is unique and Ethereum is not, first understand I wasn't and will never compare Ethereum to bitcoin, what I said in my first comment is just giving an illustration for better understanding of what I mean.
Bitcoin is unique, but what about litecoin, Bch and all other bitcoin folks? Aren't they using the same pattern of blockchain code bitcoin is using? Most especially litecoin..?

If for example, cost of per transaction goes to $100 and above on bitcoin blockchain and stay so for a very long time, do you think the average bitcoin user will not find an alternative chain/coin to continue doing transaction with? And even if bitcoin continues to stay ahead at such a time, I think the only reason it will stay ahead is due to first mover advantage, as you mentioned that it's what is keeping Ethereum ahead of its alternate chains.

Fees are already back to $2 and the mempool is being cleared out. I don't see how a spam attack that lasted a couple days made bitcoin lose its charm haha.


And the comparison with Ethereum and BSC doesn't hold. Because altcoins have been trying to do that to Bitcoin for many years with zero luck. The huge difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that Bitcoin is unique, while there is nothing unique about Ethereum. Ethereum could easily be replaced by other smart contract chains, it was just the first so it has first mover advantage which is a powerful force and so far allows Ethereum to continue to dominate that market. OTOH, there is nothing that can do what Bitcoin does, so no, it is not losing its charm as a currency and there is no adoption moving away from Bitcoin. The only thing that has moved away from Bitcoin over the past half-decade or so is the wild speculation get-rich-quick investing. Those sorts of people now stick to random altcoins like meme tokens and all the rest because Bitcoin is now too big to move up 100x in a market cycle while, so the gamblers not prefer to throw dice at random alts. We've never gonna see a 2013 or 2017-like bitcoin bull run again because all the get-rich-quick first-timers buy up stupid meme tokens and other random alts instead of Bitcoin these days, but that's the only adoption that Bitcoin has lost and those are people who will crash out of the market anyway during bear markets until they learn enough to realize they should have just been buying bitcoin the whole time.

I understand. But what is correct for a nowadays blockchain can become different for some new invention. Different ideas of layer 2 or sidechains or other things are just in the very beginning. You can say that these decisions are at least less secure and I won't argue with that. But it is a way of searching for a solution which can bring new type of blockchain or other distributed ledger. Layer 2 or sidechain is not a solution by itself, we need something that will work inside the main network, but it is a way of research. If not researching we'd never had bitcoin as well.

If the problem will not be solved bitcoin will never become what we expect from it. "Digital gold" for richies to become more rich? "Digital gold" which will be too expensive and elitist for middle and lower class? Is it what we want from bitcoin? I hope devs will find a solution because otherwise there will be not the bitcoin I hope to see.

You do not seem to understand, this is not a hypothesis, but a theorem - it has already been proven that this is the case, so there are few who want to spend time to prove that the proof is wrong.

A very difficult moment is to decide how much we are willing to sacrifice security and decentralization for the sake of increasing speed. When updating taproot, the consensus conditions were somewhat weakened, this is largely a reserve for the future and we still do not see the fruits of this decision, but an unexpected side effect has surfaced in the form of misuse of the blockchain, which we are now actually discussing. In the case of a centralized application, the developers would quickly release a security patch and be done with it. And now opinions are widely divided, because the lack of a single point of failure in the case of a decentralized application has to be paid by the lack of a single decision-making center and the need to reach consensus to make any decision at all. This is neither good nor bad - just an architectural feature.

If not try to prove something is wrong there will be very small probability of occasional proof. Of course we understand that if there was a solution already invented then devs just implemented it immediately. Not so long ago the idea of a decentralized financial system like bitcoin was not less insane and now we see that there is a solution. I'm sure there could be a solution for a scalability problem which can be implemented without significant lowering of a decentralization and of a security. If I don't know which it doesn't mean it can't be invented. And to invent it the one who can do it shouldn't think that it is impossible.

The issue of scaling is important, but not paramount. There is the CAP theorem (consistency, availability, partition tolerance), which, with Buterin’s light hand, is better known in the crypto community as the blockchain trilemma. Among decentralization, security and scalability, you can choose any two of the three at best. Until this theorem is proven wrong, any well-designed and implemented centralized solution will be significantly faster than bitcoin. Of course, if we do not want to sacrifice security and / or decentralization for the sake of high speed. It seems that our plan to seize world domination assumes that the entire burden of solving the issue of scaling falls on the shoulders of second-level networks, and let's not demand from the developers of bitcoin core the obviously impossible.

It's an issue and a very big one. I was supposed to make three small-size transactions earlier this week but I have not been able to because the network fee is like half the price of the amount of BTC I want to transfer, and it takes too long to complete. It's frustrating. Not to mention that for the past couple of days, yesterday was the only day Bitcoin went us by a few percent, it's just been going down. This kind of thing shouldn't be happening to Bitcoin at this time. The worst part is, if it's not handled, it will only get worst in the future.
Even those that only see Bitcoin as an asset also get affected because they might begin to panic in times like this.
Making payments with Bitcoin was supposed to be wah easier than making payments with fiat or any other currency.
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If not NFTs then there will be something else. The issue of scalability should be raised again and again even if the situation is not catastrophic at the moment. We need that developers to work on solving this problem, because to be a competitive alternative bitcoin should be able to pass billions of transactions a day, and it is as for now. There should be a possibility of even increasing that number in the future. Otherwise we will face with the same problem again and again. What if, for instance, some huge retail corporation like Walmart will start accepting bitcoin... dozens of millions customers a day... it is not what bitcoin can deal with at the moment, and we need it to be prepared to anything like that.

I very much agree with your statement on this one. Very interesting! I am among those who are sad about the current direction of Bitcoin development  . Many people have adopted Bitcoin for speculation and fun. I think that the benefit of Bitcoin is that we can make all forms of payment transactions as freely as possible, anywhere and anytime. It's fun to imagine we can pay monthly internet bills or buy domains using some of the bitcoins.

And as for NFTs, I honestly think it's a stupid idea that some people think is cool. I mean what will we get from an NFT ? Sure, some NFTs offer benefits and exclusivity, but come on! How many of these so-called NFTs end up being trash on the blockchain network because so many people are trying to profit there? Which in the end only made the direction of development of the Blockchain network towards something that was not really needed.

An interesting topic I must say, and as disappointing as it is, it's simply the truth, bitcoin is gradually loosing its charm as a currency that is supposed to be used as a means of payment for goods and services, something has to be done and needs to be done fast..

The high transaction cost will do nothing good to the bitcoin network, but rather will limited the networks usage, as well as take adoption far far away from bitcoin..

Ethereum network fees was what gave birth to binance smart chain network as an alternative, and today, binance smart chain have take over 50 percent of what is supposed to be Ethereum market share, just imagine what the price of ether would have been by now if the network was good, and there was no bsc...

im guessing your going two write two books
well if the first book is where you want to call it the rise and fall of bitcoin(your mindset)
then i suggest: compromise and fool of lightning

i know u only have notes to advertise lightning as "cheap fees" but never done the math..
how about do some research on the network liquidity issue of payment routing

LN is not the solution your told it is

One day when all this blows over, somebody needs to make a documentary about the Lightning Network.

real bitcoin miners get shares of bitcoin rewad. many POOLS managing miners and blocks set their share scheme that the POOL MANAGER takes the fee's and the miners take the reward. thus miners dont benefit (unless the POOL is also the asic farm)

these bloating tx may waste funds proping up fee's but REAL BITCOINERS will transact less. sell up or move to other networks
then when the bloating stops millions of users have moved away and given up on bitcoin. thus end result bitcoin has lost its appeal

MINERS dont gain more profit from fee's they gain it from spot market speculation

..
wording it another way
if bank wire transfers were cheap say $0.05 7 years ago and moved any value within the same hour
but then delays and fees rose to $30 per wire, which made people think they needed to invent something like paypal that promised to offer fee's of a few pennies but took middleman profits from those fee's

what they are not saying is this. it costs $30 to subscribe to paypal. and $30 to unsubscribe
this causes idiots to lock into paypal and never want to leave. or they simply avoid dollar and paypal entirely and try euro(ether analogy) with venmo(ethereum subnetworks)

right now there is more bitcoin being pegged to other subnetworks on other mainnets.. such as avalance and WBTC.. much more liquidity in 2 years than lightning achieved in 5 years
(analogy. american prefer EU venmo rather than US paypal)

lightning has not just the locking-unlock fee problem of bitcoin mainnet. but also the many flaws of LN itself. many have tried LN and found LN flawed, it just cant scale. its just a small niche service for small value. it wont cope moving large value in one go. NEVER

so many are moving away from bitcoin and playing with value over on ethereum based subnetworks.

people need to stop this 5 year long broken promise of "move to LN its the saviour", "dont fix bitcoin, use LN" .. its not a saviour, its not capable of doing what bitcoin does. its broke.

meaning that when devs fail to fix a bitcoin exploit and they want to push people into a subnetwork thats also a failure. people will end up just giving up on bitcoin entirely.
and when the drama ends and the fee mania ends. the user base wanting to transact on bitcoin will be far lower, because everyone had gotten used to using ethereum and other shitcoin mainnets and subnetworks

..

if pools want more fee's
the better economic plan long term is this:

actualy have rules that actually involve lean byte usage. where every byte has a purpose/format/rule/reason for a BITCOIN transaction, not aimless useless bloat. then allow actual utility of the full 4mb limit without out the 1mb 3mb cludgy split of what can go into which part of a block... so that 3x more transactions counts can happen. meaning 4x the users normal transactions, meaning people pay less but in a sustainable long term way while totals increase overall for the pools

also give up on the broken promise of LN and start afresh/from scratch a new subnetwork devoted purely for and functionally just for bitcoin that actually can do the job it promises, as a subnet for certain usage types

The most funny part for me its, some of this pro NFTs guys are saying this cray things like before NFT BTC was dying badly.

Man WTF we have a large history we a future and we dont need them, so from where they come with all this shit, now they are trying to install something like, without NFTs BTC cant live because of miners fee bla bla bla.

Ok maybe we need to rethink some things but come on....

After gathering info about what's actually happening in the Bitcoin blockchain, I agree with your sentiments OP based on what I've read on this thread. I just also want to get back to those days when we're seeing news about transferring millions of dollars through bitcoin and paying fees with cents. That's like the pride that we've got and not these images stuck on the bitcoin blockchain. This is like an indirect attack to bitcoin because they've seen how it went going with ERC20 and other networks that have these features for their NFTs. I believe that this is just like an obstacle, a temporary one that shall be passed not just by Bitcoin alone but also us, the community that have the same sentiments about this matter.

I agree with Op's thoughts and am willing to support him. Still, there are controversial comments needed to be figured out first of all we need to decide what we actually want because when I was new to Bitcoin I was a joiner of Bitcoin as an asset and my primary thoughts about Bitcoin were simple this is an Asset directly proportional to the digital gold and this was how my journey started.

After a specific amount of time, spent in the worn direction I came to know it's not like how I am taking it actually the role of BTC was to provide a patent system seamless to any central system and this concept was the beauty of this project. Now here are two types of narratives as I did explained earlier decide the STandings first then we can take a deep look into the fundamental changes which are most required at this time otherwise it will be alarming.

Ordinals is not a small topic I directly oppose this this is not a playground it's the real independent financial world and these Ordinals are the Bugs here in the financial field. ETH bow down and now we all know why now this fire is in the front face of us we need to reap it out. Because otherwise there can be dirty game on the name of community views.

Actually it just hit me.

A few months ago I posted the James Jani video to Bitcointalk, that was a critique about Bitcoin. It was mainly about scalability, but it also criticized the wider crypto industry for useless NFTs.

Many people here including myself did not like it, but coming into the future, he has a point.

That video has 2 or 3 million views.

That means, potentially several hundred thousands of people agree with the verdict that NFTs are useless and should be avoided.

Now I have heard some miners and youtubers say that we need to keep BRC20 to preserve the miner fees, but that only works if people continue to use it.

Do you guys really think that BRC20 is going to be around strong forever like how Bitcoin is strong?

It is highly more likely for BRC20 to disintegrate and fall by the wayside just like ERC-20 NFTs fell. (And don't tell me "well they are actually still around" I know that, but their usage is a far cry from what it used to be. That is exactly what will happen to BRC20.)

BRC20 mining income is not sustainable, and it will probably not even last for a full two years (the time it took for NFTs to fall from its peak).

Honestly, fuck all this "DECENTRALIZATION FREEDOM FOR ORDINALS" bullshit. This income is not sustainable for miners and it will actually drive users away from the network, which will decrease the total number of users.

The battle is truly and earnestly on, and we must not only smash this harmful use of Bitcoin, but also set up sustainable deterrents such as Lightning Labs Taro and make sure they are in end users' hands, so this kind of user payment disruption (not necessarily mempool congestion) can never happen again.

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Sustainable miner income means assets that are continuously transferred on a protocol without the possibility of a traffic jam.

Bitcoin is "A peer-to-peer electronic cash system". This is what Satoshi invented.

In 2021 I moved from shitcoins to Bitcoin only. I have set a multisig vault with money for my retirement.

I hate NFTs, I hate Ordinals.

In 2023, if Bitcoin doesn't get rid of this bullshit, I will sell all of my Bitcoin.

One solution, hopefully, the one, is a blockchain that adapts mining difficulty and transaction fee to transaction size, thereby following the dynamics of time dilation according to which for different masses come different perceptions of time. In Bitcoin terms, this would translate to each transaction being associated with its proper confirmation time according to its size in BTC units and based on a central reference.

The main purpose of this solution would be to scale the network of transactions in Bitcoin in the same way the Universe scales the network of interactions between bodies of different masses.

To solve any of Bitcoin's problems we must attune this monetary system to the laws that define how energy behaves in the Universe. We should compare the two systems, understand them by comparison, and apply the rules of the Universe to Bitcoin. And we should also understand that Bitcoin is outstanding and efficient the way it is thanks to Satoshi having based their system on the mechanics of the Universe, either consciously or unconsciously.

To solve Bitcoin's scalability issue, we need to learn how the Universe has solved it for itself. As it seems, It is doing it by associating each plane of observation of change/movement, and therefore, of time, with its proper dilation of the universal timeline. Each dilation has its pulse frequency, that is the rate at which data updates (block creation time), and so a unique, although related to every other dilation, display of relevant data. Then it is needed to identify the agent of this association, of which the base principle is energy’s interaction with spacetime.

In Bitcoin, this would mean creating a multi-plane blockchain that associates masses of monetary energy to proper confirmation times while simultaneously having and constituting a universal chain of reference.

It is similar to what we see when charting a financial asset across multiple timeframes. A financial asset has a single history, yet this history is subdivided into multiple planes of observation by changing the “pulse frequency”, that is the frequency at which a unit of time is being created. Candlesticks, the single temporal units, are blocks; a candle creation is the block creation; a timeframe (plane) is the confirmation time or block creation time; the candle chain in each timeframe is the different translation of the original chain, the asset’s financial history, as the blockchain for each confirmation time (pulse frequency) would be the different translation of the original blockchain, Bitcoin’s history.

The different planes of the blockchain, which would regard different confirmation times, would exist to scale transactions to their proper frequency according to their size. In other words, everyday transactions would be confirmed much more frequently than large transactions, proportionally according to correct mathematical manners. To have different confirmation times we should have different planes of mining difficulty. The grand feat of mind would then be knowing how to distribute the total hash rate across all planes and how to interconnect them while simultaneously representing a universal blockchain.

Blocks must have the same universal block size. In other words, they must appear one across all chains (but differ in the data they represent - just like single units of time on different planes of perception). This is fundamental concerning special relativity, as it seems such a universally fixed capacity is what permits each special observation to be the same if considered in an isolated way. That is, the perception of time is the same for every observer, but not when we put these perceptions to each other.

I’m open to discussing this solution with anyone interested in further development.

Ethereum is going to implement sharding so they are on a way of solving a problem of scalability. If it will work we'll see. As for bitcoin, its value is less connected with the amount of possible transactions. "Digital gold" conception can work for a while. Main problem is that we need bitcoin not just for holding, we want bitcoin to be a complete payment system and scalability problem must be solved for that. To stay on the top bitcoin should solve that problem. And I hope we'll see how it will be solved in the near future, at least partly.

Rather than create bitcoin cash they should have solved the problem on the original bitcoin. Now it looks like bitcoin is diluted with one that is geared towards low fees for retail, and the original stuck with high fees when it's overloaded. Top 2 marketcap coins suffering from the same problem, wonder how long they will keep the top 2 spots for

How do we not see problems with commissions? The problems are quite serious, since the whole bitcoin-community is alarmed. Even a binance temporarily suspended BTC withdrawals  due to excessively high fees. And ordinary users will think 10 times whether it is worth doing any actions with bitcoin now, especially with small amounts, if they need to pay a lot for the transaction. So it turns out that despite the workload of the mempool, there are few transactions from real BTC users, and everything else is garbage transactions from Ordinals.

It was impossible to allow this, but this event had already happened and there was a reason to solve this problem. Perhaps this is even for the better, because it will correct this defect and improve bitcoin-network and prevent a similar effect from occurring in the future. I am pleased to see that the community is not indifferent to what happened and as it happens, the problem will push to find a solution to the problem. It remains to wait for all this to stabilize, and now, it turns out, the bitcoin-network is temporarily dead for ordinary users.

I don't think that the congestion in the mempool will contribute to mass adoption. Rather the opposite. This will scare off regular users who are currently unable to use BTC due to expensive fees. It seems to me that for the most part, the activity of real btc users will slow down now, instead of increasing, as you think, thanks to the influx of NFT fans.

So, can you throw some estimates?
For example how much longer it will take for a 4vMB block to propagate through the network compared to a 1vMB?
It might be also interesting to scale this appropriately and with the internet speed difference between 2009 and 2023
Cause I have a feeling hobby miners in remote regions would have had more trouble uploading 1 MB then than 10 MB now....just saying.

Same for the cost of running a full node.
What extra cost would a 4vMB imply over the next 4 years let's say compared to a 1vMB?


That boat has already sailed a decade ago:
https://btc.com/stats/pool

Larger blocks increase centralization.

Let's say you and I are both miners, both working to find a block at height 800,000. I successfully mine a block at height 800,000. I broadcast that block to other nodes. Each node which receives my block has to validate the entire block, and then propagate it to other nodes, which also validate it before further propagating it, and so on. The larger the block is, then the longer this process takes. So after I've found block 800,000, I already know it is valid and can immediately start attempting to mine block 800,001. However you are at the other side of the network, so the whole time my block is propagating you know nothing about it and continue to attempt to mine at height 800,000. I have a distinct advantage here since I can attempt to mine at 800,001 for potentially several minutes before you.

Large and well connected mining operations have an advantage over smaller miners here, and not just because of better hardware and connections meaning they can receive and validate blocks more quickly. If a mining pool has 30% of the hashrate then they find 30% of blocks on average, meaning they have a propagation delay disadvantage 70% of the time. If a small miner has only 1% of the hashrate, then they are at a disadvantage 99% of the time. Over time the smaller mining cannot survive, and hashrate becomes more centralized.

There are other considerations too, as larger blocks increase the hardware cost to run a full node (again tending towards centralization), and the longer propagation time as I've outlined above also increases the rate of stale blocks and chain splits.

You can take this to the extreme and look at BSV with its 4 GB blocks, which experiences chain re-orgs of over 100 blocks and has essentially only 2 mining pools.

You are referring to the blocksize wars of 2017 and that ended up in the big blockers going to Bitcoin Cash and the small blockers staying here, and also a marginal increase in block capacity by using segwit.

The network is decentralized and based on consensus mechanism, so it is not in the hands of anyone to just increase the block size limit, there has to be consensus within the community, and it is always hard to get everyone to agree on an upgrade, it would either lead to a soft or hard fork.
I did a small research on this question when ordinal spam became a problem, though i was not satisfied with the result, but i found out there are BTC developers who support smaller block size, while there are some who support bigger block size, but one point i found interesting in support of people who support smaller block size is that an increase in the block size will reduce the tx fees that miners earn from transactions. If the block size is too big, i don't have to pay too much because there is no competition for blocks, and it may be a problem once block rewards are no more and the network has to depend on only tx fees, so if miners are not incentivized to continue mininig, it can disrupt the security of the network. I am also eager to learn more about this from more technical users like o_e_l_e_o, pooya87 and others.

I must admit, this is truly troubling. While we do not see too much problem with the fees right now, I can already imagine how big of a problem the fees will be in the future when another bull run happens and we reach new ATHs. I am not against NFTs but for it to be stuffed on bitcoin when there are dozens of other options for NFTs and is affecting the function and the main purpose of bitcoin, it just doesn't seem right.

Yes, it may have a small impact in increasing mass adoption due to the increase of popularity of NFTs nowadays but in my opinion, it isn't worth all the trouble that it causes to Bitcoin. What use is there even for popularity if we can't even use Bitcoin the way we wanted to or envisioned to when we first started jumping into this industry? It just doesn't make sense to me.

Looks quite decentralized and resistant to censorship. Abusing such methods is a good way to turn bitcoin into a comfortable sofa dog.

The blockchain is created for Peer to Peer transactions so stop making transactions sounds very weird idea. So will the Bitcoin blockchain need to exist either?

It is true that if Bitcoin adoption becomes bigger and bigger which I believe will happen, blocksize must be increased and increased again. I don't know that why in 2017, people only decided to increase it to 4MB maximally for a block (1MB Witness, 3MB Non-Witness data)?

Why don't increase it to like 100 MB/ block?

Does block size increase will bring some technical problems to miners and nodes? Like they have to upgrades their resources.

Hodl is never a solution, it is just a way to wait out the problem. If not stupid pictures then something else will happen — like stompix said about possibility of 100 millions of Indians to start using bitcoin for small payments. Scalability problem can't be solved by not making transactions. Even increasing a block size will be a temporary solution as we need billions transactions a day to compete with main centralized payment-processing services. If devs will not find a reasonable way to solve a scalability problem we will face the same situations again and again and bitcoin will not become a real mass payment system.

I don't think this is an issue since we had times with blocks being half full just a month ago, if nobody wanted to make a spam attack they won't be doing it with a 4vMB block size. As for the disk space, what would be the additional cost in let's say 3 years of full x4 blocks for a node?
50k blocks a year, 150k in three years, extra 500GB!

Also:
On BTC a 1 sat/b tx costs 4 cents on Bitcoin cash it's 200 times cheaper in $ value, so you could send about 2000 of them for the price of a soda can.

That would be a good start but it would somehow have to be done in a way to avoid the pitfalls facing BCash and BSV - most transactions in a block are not real transactions but they are spam, but the only difference is, instead of flooding the mempool, they will eventually overwhelm the full nodes beyond disk capacity (remember that a large percentage of nodes are hosted on Hetzner and AWS).

So it's not something I see happening as it's currently idealized right now.

And Western Union! Remember how it was expensive to pay 5$ for a 100$ cash transfer?  


Ok, let's assume everyone would be like you, and we would have those 100 million Bitcoin users in India some claim they really exist, doing a single transaction to buy stuff. Suddenly you would have 100 million tx in the mempool, not 400k. How would that work?

Let's start admitting the past mistakes, sticking to this 1vMB block size it's just stupid!
It might have sounded reasonable by 2009 costs per TB and internet speeds back then but we're in 2023 when I can get 80Mbps on my phone in the mountains and a fucking 2tb EVO is 110$.

If the protocol that was supposed to bring down the whole old order, banks, central banks, and governments, change the global economy, raise millions out of poverty will die before achieving that because:
- you can't have a few thousand pay 200$ for a full node while we brag about 10000x profits
- a horde of jpg monkeys is crashing the network with daily fees that match only what the US Navy is spending daily on one! aircraft carrier group
then we must admit something went completely wrong in the planning!

A soft fork basically, but yeah you're on the spot. It's going to have a footnote at the end though:

"Please be advised that your failure to agree to these changes by 1 November 2023 will result in a User Activated Soft Fork getting deployed to forcibly resolve the issue."

It worked for Segwit, it nearly scared them to death that time.

If you read the entire post of mine that you have quoted, you will see I was responding to a quote outlining a specific scenario where someone (usually an exchange) dumps a batch of transactions on the mempool at once, all of which pay a higher fee than needed, which then causes various wallets and websites to grossly and inappropriately increase their recommended fee to compensate. This remains a problem, but it is clearly not is what is happening right now. You only need to look at the transactions paying these exorbitant fees right now to see they are ordinals.

You are spitting facts.
The only way to fight this nonsense would be to just not send any BTC anywhere and HODL. Unfortunately we will receive less BTC because of the high transaction fees, which is bad, but whatever. Just stay in a safe place until the storm goes away and this ordinals trend/hype slowly dies. The BTC miners obviously want this BRC-20 protocol, because they make more money from the higher transaction fees. I don't know how are we going to hardfork Bitcoin Core and kick out all the BRC-20 supporters. Maybe some of the Bitcoin Core developers must step in and express their opinions about this problem.

I always knew that those stupid Ordinals will be a problem, and this could go on for years, using a technology for something it was not created for, the person that detected this thinks they are smart but they are dub, If Buterin could went ahead and create Ethereum, he know that smart contract is impossible on Bitcoin, it's going to cause a big problem for Bitcoin, and here we are today.

I do not know if you guys remembered the time when a casino (I think it was SatoshiDice) had all their bets on the Blockchain at one stage and it caused a lot of congestion. The forum went crazy and people agreed that use cases like this was causing too much congestion on-chain.

Well, that site is not operational anymore and things resolved it self.... so it is time for us to either find solutions for the problem OR to get rid of the problem. (Example : Creating a off-chain solution for those types of transactions) 

Using lightning network perhaps? Or at least seriously considering moving over to it. I think this is the endgame for the current issues of a bloated mainnet. I'm kinda glad this sort of thing is happening as scaling Bitcoin mainnet is virtually impossible, while having Layer 2s is the only solution. In these times I only look back at the development of the internet to see that there was nothing wrong with the original protocol, but it would take decades for L2/L3/L4 etc to develop in order to be able to watch videos and generally have high data transfers. In the meantime, many blamed the original protocol opting for something different...

Just like you can still transfer $100m for 10 cents if you are willing to be patient, Bitcoin clearly remains in it's infancy with a lot of development still to come, so patience remains key. Just my two satoshs.

Yeah it’s pretty bad. I don’t think it was bad in 2021 but it was bad in 2017 with that hash wars saga where miners would switch to BCH network and it took forever to get transactions going on the Bitcoin network, many assumed Bitcoin would die then but it survived.

Currently with a 500 sat per byte fee, if all you got is a simple 1 input and 2 out put transaction it’ll cost $20. So it’s high but i am used to this because ETH network usually has these crazy fees. Their gas was like 250 Gwei last Friday.

One interesting thing to think about is, what if because of NFTs, we eventually get a fork of Bitcoin to fix this bug and it actually becomes Bitcoin, and the original Bitcoin blockchain just becomes a dead space for useless jpeg NFTs.

Not saying that will happen, but its a possibility. If Bitcoin devs never decide to fix this, and it goes on for years, and if the NFT jpeg fad continues, and bitcoin blocks are full of stupid NFT data and whatever other hacks of the bitcoin data this allows, I could see the community taking charge and leaving the devs behind and moving to a NFT-safe fork. I guess the main thing would be to get the miners to come along, maybe since we're already talking about a fork (in this scenario) we'd have to double the blocksize to increase txs to get the miners to move from the bloated NFT chain to the new real money Bitcoin chain.


Just a thought! I mean if they literally never fix this I think that would eventually warrant something as dramatic as leaving the original Bitcoin blockchain behind as a NFT dead space and move on with a fork that doesn't allow such attack vectors. I mean I think the main reason for there ever to be a fork of the blockchain is if an update introduced an attack vector to Bitcoin and the devs refused to fix it, and that's what this is. I guess time will tell if a fork will be needed.

Agreed their needs to be an update to enforce a size limit on this. This would immediately kill off this spammy use of Bitcoin. There are sidechains that allow NFTs and that's perfectly fine for people who for whatever reason want to do NFTs on Bitcoin to use a sidechain. There is zero reason it should be on the main chain and clogging everything up.

Unfortunately for whatever reason it doesn't seem like the devs feel any interest in fixing this unintended consequence of the taproot upgrade. Tx fees are only a few dollars now, so it isn't like an imminent problem, but transaction fees will likely go above $50 again in two years during the next explosive bull run and if NFTs are clogging things up its gonna be way worse. This is a problem that needs to be fixed and implemented in the next 12-18 months.

This would be like building railroad and letting people walk down the tracks in clown suits while slowing all the trains way down. This isn't a valuable use of the blockchain and is not what bitcoin was ever intended for. I'm all for expanding Bitcoin's uses (even pictures as NFTs is a pretty dumb use) but do it on a sidechain or a L2.


I think it is way over dramatic to say bitcoin is on its knees lol just because you have to pay a few bucks for a transaction. It's not like transactions have never been this high, let alone much higher before, but this will become a problem yeah when people start flooding back into Bitcoin. At this point in the market cycle tx fees should be like $1-$2.

I am of two minds:-

One is frantic and unfocused. I am wondering what is causing the huge jump in fees. I'm wondering if Ordinals have spammed the blockchain beyond control. I'm wondering why proponents of Ordinals explained that mining would be profitable again, while simultaneously eroding the very network it protects. I'm thinking that many people are priced out at this point. Either OGs are HODLing waiting for older prices to return. or noobs who are making their first transactions getting turned off and moving to shitcoins.

The other mind is calm and wise. Having seeing Bitcoin tested,  FUD'ed and attacked many times in the past, I realize that panic spreads quickly, people call 'Bitcoin is dead' for the millionth time but, as usual, the news cycle moves on, the hype dies down and tick-tock-next-block. Yes, it's  a shame that we will be burdened with low quality, .jpegs that unfortunately pass as art. Yes, LN isn't ready and sats are stuck on exchanges. Yes, it's going to take some time for the damage of the Ordinals bloatware to be shaken. But I think this will work out. I look at the blocks and see that there are many more blocks at the typical 1.60Mb. People are getting the 'no your keys, not your coin' arguments after 2022. The price is stable and recovering, hash rate is always up and more people are getting to see the difference between real Bitcoin and the Bitcoin the mainstream media presents.

Just wish it could be smoother sailing but, hey, if it's really decentralized and the money of the internet, it ain't gonna be a smooth ride - doesn't mean we can't enjoy it though. Gonna keep watching the mempool

I knew the issue wouldn't die easily and quickly when it came out. I've read comments weeks after the Ordinals was launched that the noise would only be temporary and that it was starting to die down already, that the noise was just natural because it was something new and kind of controversial but it will be gone sooner rather than later. Now, it is not dying down. It is becoming a bigger issue. It is now becoming a strongly fundamental issue that might question the very role of Bitcoin.

What is Bitcoin really? Is it just something anybody has the freedom to use in whatever way allowed? Or does it have a strict purpose?

Surprisely, some people doesn't see bitcoin scaling problem as an issue but in truth, it is an issue. In the earlier stages of the adoption of Bitcoin, the low transactions fee, speed, decentralisation and security where the features that interest adopters, then scaling problem became an issue but some don't even see it as an issue because they no longer see bitcoin as a means of payment but rather more as an asset (so it is a more of a means of investment).

 I don't really know why the developers are not interested in increasing the block size because this will actually helps miners and solve the scaling but they rather prefer using means that are more centralise than the Bitcoin Blockchain i.e LN for solving scaling problem and the mining pool which is actually helping miners by combining their hardware together to validate a block in nutshell is more of centralisation ( only few solo miners are actually being able to earn bitcoin ).

There are more negative comments than the positive about the effects of Ordinal NFTs on the bitcoin Blockchain and so I still don't know why they allowed Ordinal NFTs to remain in the blockchain.

This is interesting and I thought that the biggest problem is this ordinals stuff creating this congestion, but then I came across this post


and I wondered in how far exchanges and miners can actually manipulate fees by creating overly expensive transactions themselves and then hope for people to just accept whatever their wallet calculates as the required fees? It makes sense to me as there have been times where I didn't pay attention myself and accepted whatever had to be paid.

But again, could fee manipulation be a long-term problem despite increasing adoption? Both exchanges and miners would have an incentive to do it if it's possible.

I think we are witnessing the first market failure of Bitcoin's fee market. Instead of efficiently distributing the rare commodity (blockspace) it has been monopolized by the ultra-rich who use it as a toy (NFTs). Maybe eventually the market forces will set everything right and NFTs will collapse like the beanie babies and tulips did, but this problem can be going on for years. The best solution would be to patch Bitcoin Core to make Bitcoin NFTs impossible, but development of Core is avery slow process and it can take years if the devs will decide to do it, which is a big "if".

How do you imagine it in terms of implementation? It should be some kind of open letter from the developers in the style of "dear miners, these records for the number of transactions are not at all the adoption that we all dreamed of, please vote for our changes so that you can earn less, and we can send transactions again with low commission"?

All the developers need to do is strictly validate Taproot witness sizes, and this loophole will be closed, everything will go back to normal.

A few years ago, while they were designing this specification for Taproot, they said that they did not want to prevent other use cases with Taproot. But in hindsight, it was clearly a mistake not to impose strict validation.

I have sent a message to the bitcoin-dev mailing list with this proposal and I hope to start a huge conversation about it over there.

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