Topic: 'Attack on Bitcoin’ Claims Circulate as Transaction Fees Climb Higher (Read 1112 times)

I think that's already been done with RSK (if I'm not mistaken). Bitcoin can finally have the capability of interfacing with EVM-based smart contracts. Since the aforementioned solution is a sidechain, Bitcoin's on-chain performance will remain unaffected. Not like Ordinals which are "inscribed" on the main Bitcoin blockchain. There are other sidechains with smart contract capabilities that are dissimilar to the EVM (Stacks, bitVM).

With upcoming network upgrades, I'm hopeful "high fees" will become a thing of the past in the long run. In the meantime, the Lightning Network would be the only solution to keep using BTC without the high costs or long wait times. If only it had a better UX, people would've adopted it by now. Who knows what will happen in the future?

It appears that the conscripts are again back hehehe. I have also read some information being shared in social media saying that there are some developers who want to bring the Ethereum virtual machine to Bitcoin and use this for settlement. This will be very head shaking if EVM on Bitcoin will become a popular alternative for Ethereum because EVM users are very much okay on paying very high fees.



Demand for NFTs has been growing in recent weeks amid rising cryptocurrency prices, and Monday’s $16 million sale of a CryptoPunk—the fifth-most expensive NFT sale to date—put an exclamation point on that trend.

But the top overall NFT marketplace over the last few days isn’t the same one that ruled the pile as recently as mid-February, as the tides of the marketplace wars have shifted yet again. And the latest startup to take the throne can credit Bitcoin Ordinals for much of that shake-up.

Source https://decrypt.co/220154/bitcoin-ordinals-reshaping-nft-marketplace-landscape

When your body gets a virus you get sick as your immune system fights off the infection.  Most of the symptoms you experience aren't from the virus-- they're from the immune response.

Bitcoin has a defense against flooding attacks.  Like your immune system, this defense is somewhat painful even to things which aren't the attacker.  But whatever the attacker is willing to spend, it'll eventually be exhausted and Bitcoin will be free to continue.

Compare to BSV, for example, which removed the defenses... where in a few days >100GBytes was added to their utxo set, their chain is now terabytes in spite of virtually no real use, and the fact that its impractical for anyone else to validate it let them slip in rules that allow the miner to steal any coin it wants.  And these harms remain forever, even when the attack stops.

Is Bitcoin's defense the most that can be done against flooding attacks?  Perhaps not.  Especially for ones that involve conscription (suckering other users into participating in the attack) it may be possible to convince the conscripts to stop.  Unfortuantely, conscription is usually fueled through things like the unbridled greed attached to seigniorage.  It's hard to convince people to not fuck over others when they think they can Make Money Fast.  Attempts to do so can backfire and just give validation and free press to the attack. (something some people have been quick to exploit, it's not that uncommon to find that the very first online mention of some new sketchy thing is anonymous complaints that the thing is being attacked or opposed. ::sigh:

That's the plan. To make Bitcoin expensive so people would stay away from it. BTC is now Wall Street's coin, especially with the approval of spot ETFs in the US and abroad. You can see why see wealthy figures like Michael Saylor and Elon Musk are supporting Ordinals inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain. Miners and the Elite win, while average people (like you and me) lose.

Fortunately, fees won't stay high forever. At some point, the craze will end leaving us with the opportunity to use BTC on a daily basis. Market prices will react negatively when fees stay high for a prolonged period of time. That's the way it works. Ordinals supporters should move to ETH and leave Bitcoin alone. We can't predict the future, so lets hope for the best.

The biggest challenge in attacks like Ordinals is that majority of the participants in the attack don't know what they're doing. You can see that clearly in this post:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/i-need-your-help-5481797

They all fall for the scam and think they can make a buck by participating in a hype. Most of them have no idea what they're doing, nor do they know what bitcoin is and how it works!
You can see here how one person is the reason for "tens of thousands" of spam transactions contributing to the ongoing Ordinals Attack and even they are facing the consequences of the attack with their lack of understanding of Bitcoin protocol (ie. lots of dust transactions that would cost more to spend that he made).

Let me quote myself again:

It would be extremely naive and so "idiot" to think governments could proceed an or their attack with like an (assault tank) !

A typical and first move to (I don't like to call it govs, lets call "Evil") to do is to infiltrate the whole community.. . And when you see the nowadays influence of big govs over cryptos and the level of the ations they can try comparatively the thing is no longer just a theory but appears clearly to be fact !



And to be clear about my point of view, there is no "attacker".. the schema is clear: price start rising in correlation with the activity.. then fees follows too, so the activity is braked which is abviously echoes the price.. and vice-versa again and again !

We are here now:  Bitcoin is already no longer able to sustain to the needs of the network !




just, Jaaaa.. that excellent tweet to laugh a bit ! (or not? )
https://x.com/moo9000/status/1747550937885884479?

One can never know the true intentions of the government. BTC has been soaring in price despite the rising fees, anyways. Miners are the ones who're winning, while the "attacker" is losing big time. It will all fade away after the hype comes to an end. We just need to be patient.

It's a good thing we're not limited to a single cryptocurrency for day-to-day payments. With plenty of altcoins to choose from, we can save money on fees. There's also Bitcoin's Lightning Network (although still experimental) for those who don't want to abandon the premier cryptocurrency. Whenever governments like it or not, Bitcoin will be here to stay for a long time. After all, it's the future of money. As long as it stays decentralized, there should be nothing to worry about.

All these conspiracy theory type of things do not really phase me, I do not believe them. I have been involved with crypto for nearly ten years, and I can tell you that I have heard it all, from FBI trying to stop it to governments trying to block it to many other things, none of that ever came true, media tries sometimes but media is not just one place, some try to kill it while others promote it as well.

So all in all, I think it should be considered fine, we can't really make it work any other way, it just doesn't feel like it could be all that much terrible. I hope that people could realize that nobody is attacking, we are growing, we are as high as possible, it is 40k+ dollars per bitcoin, nothing that gets an attack could grow this well.

That's the problem with this form of attack, there is not centralized attacked with a limited amount of funds. They got regular newbies to participate in the attack without knowing it. And they will continue to have funds as long as there is a market where they can scam each other with fake things they call "token" or "BRC-whatevers".

Since the token market (ICO scam that started years ago) is not dead, I don't see any reason for this scam market to die either.

Because L2 doesn't end with Lightning.  It's also the gateway to the next layers and the things that can be built there.  It's "big picture" stuff, but people are only looking at what they can see now.  Try not to cast a final judgement when you haven't seen the final product yet.

I believe at some point, the "attacker" is going to run out of funds. When that happens, network fees will decline back to the way they were. But increasing the block size, will give the "attacker" more room to continue flooding the Blockchain with "spam". I really hope things settle in the long run, especially if we want BTC to be used as "digital cash" (not a store of value). The current situation will force many people to move to an altcoin with lower network congestion.

Bitcoin's Lightning Network is definitely not an option. Especially when you need to pay a high on-chain fee to open/close a channel. The LN is limited to the main chain's transaction capacity. I don't get why developers keep focusing on L2 instead of what matters most. Only time will tell us what lies ahead for Bitcoin. As long as it remains a decentralized and censorship-resistant cryptocurrency, there should be nothing to worry about.

This whole argument about increasing block size is irrelevant here because the adoption hasn't increased and legitimate usage of this "payment system" is not higher than the current existing capacity to require a capacity increase.

Right now there is a mempool congestion and fees are high only because of the ongoing attack so the solution to that is to prevent the attack not increase the capacity to store more of their spam transactions. After all Bitcoin is not a cloud storage so that we increase the block size so that these attackers can store more of their arbitrary data in its blockchain.

In developed countries like the US and UK? Yes. But that doesn't apply to people living in developing countries like El Salvador and Argentina. The vast majority of these countries' inhabitants are living in poverty. Keeping Bitcoin accessible to everyone is the best way to ensure decentralization and longevity. Otherwise, we'd be creating another banking system where the "Elite" has all of the advantage.

I'd prefer to pay high network fees, as long as decentralization/censorship-resistance is preserved. If you really want low fees and reduced wait times, then I'd suggest you choose among the plenty of altcoins (or "shitcoins" if you want to call them that) available on the market. Eventually, BTC on-chain fees will settle as the Ordinals craze fades away into oblivion. Developers are already considering how to prevent a further spike in network fees, anyways. As long as everything is done in a "balanced manner", we should have nothing to worry about.

Really? I mean nowadays, when you can easily get micro SDs of 1To and 100Mbts line connexion ??

Nowadays everybody is watching the TV over internet!

When developers increase the block size, the node software's storage/bandwidth requirements will increase. People will be forced to have powerful machines (PCs) running Bitcoin Core in order to keep up with the huge block size. This will make the network more centralized, because only a small few (mainly wealthy individuals and/or corporations) will be able to afford running a high-powered node. Data centers will be the ones with the most advantage on the Blockchain, leaving the "little guy" (average person) out of the system.

That's why scaling Bitcoin is a very delicate subject. Hopefully, developers will find a way to scale Bitcoin without sacrificing decentralization. The Lightning Network is flawed by design, and utterly-centralized. We can't predict the future, so lets hope for the best. 

I wouldn't call it a drama though, fees are supposedly low before this whole ordinal, BRC-20 exploit on the code and then causing the fees to go up that majority of us are complaining now. So before that, we can transact with at least 1 sat/vB.

But then when someone see a loophole of the code itself and then advantage of it and think that he is doing good cause, everything was broken.

Now it's on the 150's sat/vB again, in the last couple of days it did go down a bit, not much but manageable to some of us.

Their is something I understand in this drama of bitcoin high transactions fees that we experienced now, but it's obvious that anytime bitcoin price is going up alot of people would like to exchange and make a profit because their mindset always being that the increment will not stay long and die off, so therefore the congestion is being that it follows the increment and some times is not caused by miners but many of us even hope that miners is the caused of unconfirmed bitcoin transaction or makes the congestion of bitcoin that warrant the high fee we experience.

Excuse me I do not understand..  How or in what maner that is giving power to central authorities ??

Maybe that the non popularity and low mining difficulty could open a way to some parties to put influence on it, but what is the correlation between bthe blocks size and this ?

Spamming network could be stoped by simple parades like for example deciding a reasonable minimum fees price ..

Historically the miners have chosen not adopting the block size increase (which in implementation figuring on the original code of Bitcoin) just to assure themselves a good revenue from fees!  Even Gavin Andresen was very partisan to the block size augmentation and just gave up from BTC after that episode!

Yes. I'm aware that raising the block size would make the Blockchain more centralized. That's why I've stated that it should be done in the most balanced way possible. Something like slowly incrementing the block size after a few years would do the trick. That's assuming storage/bandwidth costs decline over time. Between BCH and BSV, I think the former is more conservative with its 32mb. But nothing beats the security/decentralization/censorship-resistance of the original Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain.

If everything is done in a "balanced manner", Bitcoin could reach mass adoption in the future. Again, the LN is not a solution to all of Bitcoin's problems. Let the community decide the path forward for this revolutionary kind of money. Who knows if BTC will go as far as replacing Fiat in the future?

Bcash SV is literally just terabytes of spam transactions. The BCH and BCH SV approach to scaling just made them more centralized. Prioritizing cheap fees only makes it easier for people to abuse the network and gives more power to centralized authorities.

This obsession with mass adoption is a fool's errand. Bitcoin can never be optimized to fulfill the needs of every single person on Earth. Any attempt to do so will likely result in serious compromises that would make it hard to distinguish from fiat currency.

here are your last 50 or so block fees are huge.


so for a miner getting 2 btc in fees and blocks at 8.25 coins btc is more like

8.25/6.50 = 127% or 54576 usd a coin

not bad but if the ½ ing drops us to  3.125 coins add 2 in fees you get 5.125 coins a block. lets say 3.5 should be correct.

then 5.125/3.5 = 146% which means to that miner  a 43000 coin is 62964 usd.  I think we are seeing what miners want to accomplish after the ½ ing. (big 100 megawatt farms)

I think we need to gear ourselves to exchanges that offer LN.  Keep 1 btc on the chain in you own wallet and 0.10 or less on an exchange that gives you LN. people you need to adjust.


last 50 blocks:

Yes. Claiming Ordinals inscriptions are a "technical issue" or a "vulnerability" is completely wrong. This is more like a feature than a bug as it proves Bitcoin's use cases far beyond finance. High fees may be annoying, but I believe things will settle after the hype. Even without the Ordinals craze, network fees were going to rise due to high demand. The more popular BTC gets, the more congested it will be. It's up to developers to introduce scaling techniques that will keep network fees as low as possible.

Censoring Ordinals is not an option because it goes against the fundamentals of Bitcoin which are freedom/liberty/censorship-resistance. Aren't banks censoring Fiat transactions at will? Then why should BTC do the same? It must make a difference by being a viable alternative to Fiat currencies in every way possible. We can't predict what will happen in the future, so lets hope for the best.

Correct.

I mean, there's nothing wrong to give miners profit from time to time since they also deserve it. We just have to make every transaction worth the transaction fee so we can save money as much as possible. It's not worth it to transfer bitcoin to another wallet in which transaction fee is much bigger than the amount of bitcoin that's going to be transfer.

The situation is VERY annoying, but as what has been said before, Bitcoin is still doing its job, and doing its job well. It has been chugging along, producing block after block, while also incentivizing the providers of network security. But is it currently giving its users the best UX? NO, and although I agree that something should be done, I believe it shouldn't be taken by the community as a sort of drama/social/philosophical issue. I believe many developers would contend that it's a technical issue.

There's no utility in Ordinals inscriptions. Most of them are driven by hype more than anything else (pure speculation). Everybody wants to get rich, right? It will be all over faster than you could imagine. In the meantime, I'd suggest you hold onto your BTC unless it's really something important.

Moving out of BTC into an altcoin can be challenging, especially if on-chain fees stay high for long periods of time. Getting paid directly in an altcoin of your choice (or even the LN) may be your best bet of avoiding high fees altogether. Many users are angry of Bitcoin's current situation, so it should only be a matter of time before the dust settles. As long as decentralization is preserved, there should be nothing to worry about.

Agree with all said here, the Ordinals guys will run out of money or move onto the next stupid craze. It’s disruptive & makes fees much higher but I think they will move onto something else soon. It’s like the ICO craze of 2017, the NFT craze of 2020/21. Those crazes dried up & people got bored, they will also get bored of stupid images stored on the blockchain too.

Ordinals happened because of Segwit + Taproot? Can a developer correct me on what I'm about to post, but no ser. Ordinals would have still happened without Segwit + Taproot, and if the network didn't have Segwit, Ordinals would be embedding arbitrary data within the blocks itself, not in the structure where the witness data resides - which is prunable.

Plus merely increasing the block size at the cost of centralizing the network is not scaling.


 

frankandbeans, stop gaslighting Abiky. The full nodes enforcing the network's consensus rules is NOT censorship.

bitcoin has always censored transactions.. thats what validation rules are for!!!
its why we dont see LTC BCH BCV XRP, DOGE transactions in the bitcoin blockchain
its why we dont see double spends, dust and a whole array of other cases of transactions that didnt fit the ruleset


doing a true consensus activation to reduce fee's is not a solution. what needs to happen is actual code REINTRODUCED to actually understand the opcodes used, disable the opcodes with no conditions and only treat unconditioned opcodes as block acceptable if the block version is noted as activated to a higher ruleset
that way people cant just abuse unconditioned opcodes and blocks wont put junk into a block out of fear of having blocks rejected for having junk that the network does not understand/validate

the other option is adding a fee priority formulae again that just penalises users that use certain opcodes.

It's all because of SegWit + Taproot. Without those upgrades, Bitcoin would've stayed a pure money system by now. Forks like BCH and BSV didn't need Taproot because they took a different approach for scaling (increasing the block size). They are safe from Ordinals. Now BTC developers would need to find a way to lower the fees without censoring Ordinals inscriptions. I know miners won't like this, but it's the majority that counts (users, node operators, businesses, etc). If a super majority approves a reduction on network fees, miners would have no choice but to "go with the flow".

I hope this issue gets solved ASAP, for Bitcoin to reach the masses. Especially people in developing countries. At its current state, Bitcoin can only be used by whales and the elite. This creates an unequal system where the rich get richer and the poor, poorer. The future is widely unpredictable, so we can only hope for the best.

Sometimes these things do appear as an attack on Bitcoin.  You can't deny that Bitcoin's mempool being full had an effect on coins like Solana, that suddenly doubled or more in value.  It would make sense if this sort of thing were coordinated as a way to help pump their bags.  However, even if this is just an "attack" on Bitcoin, someday the real usage of the blockchain will result in this sort of backlog and higher fees.  It would be wise to start thinking about ways to prevent this from bringing Bitcoin activity to a hat anytime someone wants to try and pump their altcoin bags.

Or this just a response to threats because the pola is basically the same and continues to develop, but at a glance if you look at capacity, perhaps not all organizations have sufficient resources to adopt the latest security technology and recognizing that together is important and considered a positive step. There is a real need for Security Technology Evolution at this time to protect/embed data even though we know this pool is very vulnerable to attacks.

I believe everyone should zoom out and get a view of the situation as if they were outside, not inside. There are some people who are becoming too emotional and they try to make it as a sort of drama/social problem, instead of what it really should be - a technical problem. Because if the knee-jerk reaction is to prevent propagation of Ordinals, then they will send those transactions directly to a miner for validation, OR, they might start looking for other ways to embed data within the part of the block that's not prunable, like Bitcoin Stamps.

While I don't doubt your intentions are good, the way in which most people seem to be going about this, the proposed "solution" sounds to me like a bigger threat then the underlying problem.  You don't cure the disease by killing the patient.  All I see is an angry, ignorant lynch-mob with their pitchforks and torches threatening to burn down the whole village to "fix" things.  If people burn this thing to the ground, there will be nothing left worth having.



That's just it.  Nothing I've seen so far even remotely resembles a fix.  Just clumsy hacks that won't prevent someone determined to embed data and could have long-term unintended consequences.  I don't think farcical games of 'whack-a-mole' are the way forward and that's all I've seen proposed so far. 

The community needs to know the nature of this attack so it has to be explained as many times as required. Specially when the scammers run a much bigger operation on the internet advertising their scam as a legitimate thing calling arbitrary data "token" and attacking any attempt at fixing the exploit by calling it "censorship".

It is very strange to see certain users so bothered each time there is a discussion about ways to protect Bitcoin and fix the exploits that malicious projects are abusing 🤔

Actually let’s just let them waste their efforts. Bitcoin is like facing challenges head-on and evolving to stay ahead. It's a team effort with miners, developers and the community joining forces, showing that flexibility is the name of the game in this ever-changing crypto landscape. Thats how bitcoin is always adapting and flexing its decentralized muscles.

I very much disagree. Does this person look something similar to someone who has caved? He is not transforming himself to become Sam Bankman Fried only to cave. I am quite certain that Open Ocean's change in stance should make everyone begin to wonder what is Luke's plan.

You're responding to a post I've made many months ago, in the first half of the year. Indeed, this whole inscription thing hasn't died sooner rather than later. Apparently, it has become a big deal. I hope we are in the climax part, although I doubt it.

To be fair, however, despite the rising fees and unconfirmed transactions piling up, Bitcoin is continuously sailing. The price has even increased significantly. Back in May of this year, when I made that post, Bitcoin was only $27,000. Today, it's $44,000. So, whatever damage Ordinals have caused, it hasn't really discouraged people from Bitcoin.

Concrete steps are taken. Ordinary users like us will have to wait. But I believe that even if all these things are left unattended, things will get better at some point. This whole thing is built on sand.

"conduition" only got involved 4 days ago
this debate has been going on nearly a year

so your screams of relax and be patient.. when talking to people that have been discussing it FOR A YEAR
yet you want to congratulate someone that only got involved 4 days ago..

seems you have things backwards

Beg to differ.  A truly mature community would be calmer and less reactionary.  All this endless whining is, quite frankly, unproductive and a little pathetic.  If you aren't working on a solution yourself, just accept the fact that your input isn't assisting with the situation.

The sense of entitlement some people exude is palpable. 

---

To clarify, there absolutely are ordinals developers and they have a GitHub where they're discussing this exact issue:  https://github.com/ordinals/ord/discussions/2879

Another discussion, spun off from luke-jr's failed pull request, is taking place on a personal GitHub here:  https://github.com/conduition/conduition.io/pull/5

People are working on stuff, but users here on the forums aren't even bothering to look.  So impatient users just make assumptions based on nothing and we end up with loads of worthless threads about it here on the forum.

I feel bad for the "developers" and the investors of those BRC-20 tokens. They will learn, the hard way, that they were merely pretending/deceiving themselves that those tokens have utility.

It's good to invest into now while there's money coming in, but what would happen when everyone learns, the hard way, that "BRC-20" is an inefficient, impractical way to issue and trade tokens?

dude he caved!  now even lass hashing power is filtering Ordinals...

there will be Ordinals in every block forever 

theres no need for a hardfork, miners could mine empty blocks if they so choose, simply allowing minners to choose to filter out the ordinal spam would be a softfork.

and indeed this it seems to be happening.


Good!

but now how much % of he hashrate will filter out ordinal? are minners really going to turn down short term profits for the good fo the network?

Is Bitcoin still experimental after 13 years of existence in this field of business? What do you mean by this? A lot of money has been made here, and a lot of big companies have also invested, but I still can't see that it is still in the experiment with the value it has now.

It's just that the only thing that's not really okay is that the requested fee is inhumane and a lot of pain in the pocket to actually conduct a transaction here. If the developers would just fix this thing in the ordinals, there wouldn't be such a problem.

People who supported Ordinal at the beginning did not see that the emergence of this shitcoin could have a bad impact on the network. It's true that they pay fees for the transactions they make and the Bitcoin network is decentralized and can be used by everyone, but when one community annoys many people on the network with their shitcoins and empty dreams, shouldn't bitcoin devs take action against it? but as far as I can see no concrete steps have been taken, only empty talk to tell members to wait patiently for the network to return to normal.

There's no easy way to undo ordinals at this point. You are going to need to gather enough capital and mining power involved to basically push for what would be a BTC hardfork without ordinals, and this would need to be done in a way that guarantees no future ordinals are possible, but then again, how do you this without causing another hardfork civil war, and how do you do it without getting rid of taproot? because if taproot is possible, I believe there could be ways around any restrictions put into ordinals to come up with alternatives.

It appears the writer of this news article does not read between the lines hehehee. Luke Dashjr did not capitulate on his criticism on Ordinals. What Ocean Mining is only doing is it will recommend 3 block templates for their miners and let them decide what they want to use. I speculate that this is only the beginning. Luke Dashjr might have a roadmap already created to minimize Ordinals' effect on fees.


Sarcastic Luke

Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr fought the rise of Ordinals, which he called "spam," but now his mining pool is allowing them.

A prominent Bitcoin Core developer and Ordinals critic, Luke Dashjr, may have had a change of heart about the NFT-like assets. Or at the very least, his company is moving beyond his own hardline stance around Ordinals.

With the update, Ocean says, miners can choose from three block template policy options: Ocean Recommended, focusing on what the company calls “real” financial transactions with minimal spam; Bitcoin Core with the “Ordisrespector” spam filter; and the unmodified Bitcoin Core, mirroring other pools with fewer financial transactions but more “spam”—meaning Ordinals and BRC-20 token transactions.

Source https://decrypt.co/210662/bitcoin-ordinals-critic-caves-jack-dorsey-backed-ocean-mining-pool-flips-inscriptions

Are you suggesting a hard fork? I'm pretty sure that's going to happen if developers decide to block Ordinals from the Blockchain. Miners will be running the original chain (with Ordinals), while the rest will be running the "filtered" chain. With fees increasing each day, it should only be a matter of time before this happens. Remember that users (businesses, individuals, etc) are the ones who make Bitcoin what it is right now. Not the miners. They only validate transactions but don't have full control over the network consensus.

We'd have to decide whenever we want fees to keep rising or all the other way around. Off-chain scaling methods (eg: Lightning Network) are experimental and not a long-term solution for the "scalability problem". Hopefully, everything will be back to normal soon. Maybe high fees will become a thing of the past?

No matter what they have done in the past, it's still futile and nothing they do to stop bitcoins from spreading has been fruitful to them, it only ended up in regret because instead of putting bitcoins in the people's blocklists, they became curious about it and ended up becoming investors like just like one of us. Let's just say, that whatever they think does not really define what the reality is, instead, they are just using every opportunity to confuse people and not all of them are fools because whenever they throw these kinds of FUDS people often look for real answers and end up here in this community getting enough answer they really wanted. We have improved a lot in the last 10 years and there will be many more improvements in the future, this is how should one of us think because we are one when it comes to this innovative financial revolution.

Bitcoins are not burned after fees are paid. The fees go to miners.

That's where I ask you - what entities do you think are driving this activity on Ordinals. Do you think it's just crazy people? Or do you think they are interests who are in some way affiliated with miners?

I could not possibly believe for a second that all of this Bitcoin are being wasted on ordinals. I can only believe that the fees are in some way going back to those who are causing the issue. This is all that makes sense to me.


That is right. Unfortunately though, that is human nature. People do not show any concern or care unless it is something that directly effects them. Sure, some people would have thrown a merit or raised a voice ot support the concerns of intelligent members like yourself who have foresight, however the rest of the forum may have just read and moved on...not paying attention that as a community and with consensus, these problems can be prevented.

It's a shame where we are now however now we have to find the solution.

Your concern is valid and very insightful and Bitcoin community need more insightful people like you.

Things started four years ago with Taproot upgrade. I used to believe Taproot is something cool and helpful for Bitcoin users but the fact is opposite and it has been shown clearly in 2023.

Taproot is coming: What is it and how it will benefit Bitcoin?

I did not realize sooner that deploying smart contracts on Bitcoin blockchain will bring more issues for Bitcoin mempools and will seriously affect Bitcoin users.

The problem now is diagnosed and one solution was proposed by LukeDashjr and Jack Dorsey but it was not supported massively because it will break one of strongest strength of Bitcoin blockchain: censorship-resistance.

Many Bitcoiners including me have been calling Ordinals an attack for nearly a year now and I have to say the fact that part of the Bitcoin community needed the fees to go up first before they could see Ordinals as it really is shows the community has still not reached complete maturity and I dare say some of them have not yet understood what bitcoin is.

A mature community would have been this concerned a year ago when the attack began by exploiting the protocol and when the attackers abused bitcoin blockchain by turning it into a cloud storage; not when fees went up and it started affecting them individually.

Well, I say... let them burn their money, if they are doing this to sabotage Bitcoin. Let the miners do their thing and let the developers analyze this threat and implement their counter measures.

We should never forget that Bitcoin is still experimental ... we still need to figure out if the tx fees will be enough to reward the miners.. once the Block reward falls away.

It is just part of the evolution of this technology and ALL other tokens would have collapsed under an attack like this.... Bitcoin is still standing. 

There is no "Ordinals developer". There's only a bunch of people throwing programming shit at the wall to see what sticks.

As for bitcoin developers, well the default tendency is to do nothing, except for a small minority of them.

I'm happy that the last time the craze blew over, so I just hope we'll see the same again soon. Unfortunately, there seems to be a big enough market for those useless images and inscriptions. Ideally, Bitcoin just shouldn't be used for that, and I'd be in support of a motion to restrict such projects on Bitcoin blockchain because there are plenty of other blockchains to use for that stuff. Leaving Bitcoin alone is just basic decency. Its transaction capabilities aren't that good even without all these extra transactions, and using other platforms for this stuff is not a hard thing to do.

Huhhhhh Ordinals is crazy bro the sats and rats pumping hard like 200% in a fucking single day and it seems this transaction not gonna stop.

I don't know but the Bitcoin developer or the ordinal developer should figure this out or the fee will be this high for a long time. ordinal should move to other chain or figure it out to creating new chain like layer 2 for bitcoin so rollup all the ordinal transaction and push it to bitcoin I think is the best idea for now rather than do on chain like today.

Agreed on NFTs are not dead. Anyone who mentions that they are dead appears to have not made their research. They only need to look the price of a Cryptopunk on opensea.io.

In any case, on BRC20, it is a token standard that uses ordinals inscriptions. Similar to how images are inscribed to a satoshi for ordinals NFT, on BRC20 a json file is inscribed.

I think there are a lot of powerful people who do want us to stop using bitcoin, however since it's a free world and regulations are not that high, we do have a lot of people who are rich and likes bitcoin as well. So I think there is an argument at the top, some people want us to stop, and want to do something about that, and some people wants us to use it and like it and they are fighting for that.

This is the reason why there isn't a clear noise coming from the top, even if you are some crazy person who thinks illuminati rules the world, it's literally the same logic, think about it like not all illuminati people wants it or hates it, they have arguments over it together. So all the powerful people in the world likes to see them argue.

I am unsure of precise difference between ordinals and brc20 but, these two combined have congested the network. There plenty brc20 tokens are popping up these days, and on the first glance they look literal shitcoins but people are printing money, exchanges are listing them.

It's hype of these tokens that's congesting the network, we have seen similar happening on ethereum.

NFT hype may have toned down, they are certainly not dead.


I wouldn't honestly ban them (however you do it, idk), I feel like it's running away from the problem (that's Bitcoin's inability to handle larger amount of transactions) than solving it.

interesting discussion.
probably a mainstream cause as the extent of the problem appears important.

Months past and clealry this is still seen as an issue. And correct me if I were wrong but I don’t think Ordinals is doing that much of an impact to network congestion at this point, cause surprise surprise, NFTs are effectively dead. Now this either means that there’s something else afoot causing all this unnecessary traffic and high transaction fees over long wait times, or scalability is already becoming a more prevlanet problem in the bitcoin network than what we have expected. Perhaps this is the blocksize war biting our asses back with twice the PSI

Now what do we do in this situation? Do we just wait? Do we ban Ordinals so they can’t contribute to the traffic any longer? What’s in place to make sure that even temporarily we have this be taken care of?

I can quite agree that this is certainly what they are doing. It might also be the only reason and they do not really care which altcoin we use to replace bitcoin. BSV coin might only be a trick to make everyone assume that someone is scamming us. The real reason might be as straigthforward as they only want us to stop using bitcoin, however, we cannot see this.

To effectively address the issue of increasing transaction fees in Bitcoin, it is crucial to determine the root cause of the problem and verify if it is a deliberate attack. Given the complexity of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, there could be various factors contributing to the issue, including attempts to disrupt Bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem. Thus, it is essential to conduct a thorough investigation and gather reliable information to determine if there is a coordinated effort to counter Bitcoin. That's my view.

Then all those who are paying high fees for their garbage inscriptions to get prioritized have malicious intentions. Is that what you are saying?


To be honest, this is a minor issue to me. If it's the BSV people, that's understandable. They've been attacking Bitcoin and its supporters non-stop for years now. They've been spending money for it. If it's the government, the same thing. Bitcoin is a threat to them.

What is a major issue to me is that there is something in Bitcoin that could be taken advantage of by its adversaries to bring it down. And the attack is happening right now at the expense not just of Bitcoin's reputation, its adoption, but more so of the people who have relied on it one way or another.

Many things look different depending on how you look at it. Yes, this is an attack on bitcoin and yes, it happens naturally. Yes, it's a problem, and yes, it's okay. Yes, it's junk on the blockchain and yes, it's stored value. Yes, we would like to avoid a split, and yes, the expectation of a split can be a powerful driver for the price of bitcoin. Yes, we want to keep Satoshi's original vision and yes, we welcome expansion into new areas of adoption. This is the way.

"First they don't notice you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you. And then you win."

@Darker45. A malicious intention is when someone spends much funds to spam and cause bitcoin's transaction fees to be high and also cause it to be unusable for much of the users who use it as a medium of exchange. It is very much similar to a denial of service attack.

If verified true that it is an attack, it is also very important to ask who is paying for this denial of service attack. Is it a competing project like BSV? Is it the government? Is it both of them working together?

It isn't okay for me, of course. But if that is proven, I guess I'd even be somehow relieved, because I know that it won't last. How deep are the pockets of these BSV scumbags that they can sustain such an attack? Not that deep, I guess. If they are, I know they aren't bottomless.

But what if this isn't an attack coming from them? What if this is happening naturally? To me, this is a more serious concern. I think it would be such a great waste that a decentralized currency will just do down the drain because some garbage transactions are killing the monetary ones.

And what is a malicious intention for you? Isn't it malicious when you are clogging the network, delaying monetary transactions like remittance, salaries, purchases, and so on for days, discouraging its adoption as a currency, causing a terrible increase in fees with your frog pics?

Exactly, what else you will expect to the BSV community after believing that its the real Bitcoin when in fact it is just a fork from a fork of Bitcoin.

So it was Ordinals all along. Jesus christ.

Too late though. Pretty much over 300k transactions remaining on mempool waiting to be resolved, and it shows considering fees aren’t as jigh as it was before. Ultimately still going to be a recurring problem however which could only result to either Ordinals getting exiled out of the bitcoin network for inadverrently causing these clogs, or Ordinals coming up with a solution to this problem. Bitcoin could only take so much and it’s not the best when it comes to facilitating transactions (let’s face it) so it needs all the help it can get to stay afloat. This “attack” further solidifies that fact and is nothing but a big massive slap to the face of bitcoin visionaries who seem to not see any flaw with bitcoin.

I have known this since the story of ordinals came up and i had known they were up to something which i could not really decipher what their plans were. I had known that things  were  not well. Well, my own happiness is that the ordinals attack is gradually fading away and that those bankrolling them would soon see it that they wasted their funds and succeeded making miners richer than they could expect so soonest. They never had the thought of the previous attack on bitcoin which did not see the light of the day years back before they came up with another scheme which they could not succeed.

Bitcoin is an entity that has stood the test of time on its own now and i believe no matter what and how the pressure and propaganda is schemed, it can not in anyway surpass bitcoin existence in nature.

Have you not thought that most merchants are actually not holding Bitcoin?  Most of them are converting Bitcoin in real time the moment the customer paid in Bitcoin with the third party processor.  With this merchants are also forced to pay the transaction when they convert the BTC payment to fiat.  Although someone can argue that it is already paid by the customer


Also, the transaction fee is going back to normal.  No those FUD spreaders have lots to say, they can even use your way of eating to FUD the market  .  They have lots of ways to attack the sentiment of the market since I believe these people have a grasp of trading psychology.

The best strategy is really not just stressing over it too much, but just wait for the whole situation to settle,  place any transaction you want to do currently on a must-do basis. Any transaction not important can wait till later after things get normal or you do your transaction in the traditional way with fiat. To serious HODLers, the whole situation of high transaction fees is just another news because they barely use their bitcoins for any form of transaction.

BTC holders do not lose anything, to be affected by TX fees you have to make a transaction; the spenders are the ones that have probably been affected. As for people who accept BTC payment in their business, surely they still do because they have nothing to lose, if there are customers that want to pay through the high TX fees, then let them do, if there are none, you receive payments through other options, so why should they remove the BTC option when they have nothing to lose.

The mempool is also cooling off, there were over 400k unconfirmed transactions some days ago, but now it is below 300k and the fee rate for transactions is also coming down, soon the people who are using this situation to spread fud about BTC will have nothing more to say.

This entire fiasco is a short-term issue which I doubt will ever repeat again at any point in the future since whoever is responsible for it doesn't have unlimited money to burn. The silver lining here is that the miners made bank.

BTC has proven again and again that it can withstand any kind of attack which is the best answer to all of its haters.

Regardless of what those ordinals caused, the effect on Bitcoin holders was not a good one that the majority saw. And what's worse is all the merchants who accept bitcoin payment in their businesses which in my observation have definitely stopped because of the effect of the high fees. And because of these high fees, we can also clearly see that the ones who have benefited the most from this are really Bitcoin miners and not Bitcoin holders in truth and real talk.

If we are not going to be sentimental here, there's no big deal in giving bitcoin network a more applicable use case, bit not to our detriment or at our own expense, then we should also considers the blockchain technology as a network that accommodate alot of other networks such as bitcoin network, smart contracts and many more, which NFT could better fit in any of such category other than the bitcoin network, but yet, if this wouldn't serve a means of threat to the entire bitcoin network in the future then it's a welcome idea, which only need to get balanced with the issue of transaction fee.

Yes, that's the way the system works, if the BSV people want to give BTC miners a bunch of extra money then it's all good.
Miners made a lot more over the last couple of weeks and if it came at the expense of a bunch of scam artists then fine.

As a group, we have more time and money then they do.

-Dave

Yes, if everything has happened in a natural and organic way, for me it would be okay.

However, if there were malicious intentions, assuming that the information about the BSV developers and community are verified true, this should not be okay. Will it be okay for you?

It's not a free attack  and that's satisfying, since someone is paying for this I hope they can keep up as time goes on, there is always a end to everything and Ordinals will one day become a past story, let them keep attacking Bitcoin, as the only way they can keep attacking Bitcoin is spending a lots of money, the true winner is still Bitcoin.

Keep draining down their pocket Bitcoin, if you are going to go down at least there will be a larger consequences on the attackers side ..


Lol 😆. So satisfying.

I don't agree with you. It's true that everyone has the right to use the Bitcoin network for their various needs, but what these ordinal lovers are doing has disturbed other users on the network. Not only users, Bitcoin devs are also getting tired of their existence and will soon take action on it (https://decrypt.co/139576/bitcoin-developer-calls-block-ordinals-brc-20-tokens-network). Indeed, Bitcoin is free for anyone to use, but that does not mean that everyone is free to do anything on the Bitcoin network, everything has rules, and if they don't like it they can create their own network and develop their own community there.

ordinals is due to bitcoin core devs opening an exploit and casey(ordinals) then using the exploit
he is not a BSV.. bsv devs have no skill they are just copyright breakers then claim they own the copyright. they cant code even if they tried.
but casey is part of the sponsored devs of the corporate development of core and lightning community (not a bitcoin maxi)

anyone supporting making bitcoiners pay more fee's than fiat transfers cost. is not a bitcoiner nor a crypto supporter
bitcoin was suppose to be better then fiat

anyone supporting a subnetwork that doesnt even use blockchains has no clue of what blockchains enabled which cypherpunks/smart-contractors were unable to pre bitcoin

trying to scam people over to a insecure broken network has no clue about a real money system, especially if they want to price users out of utility

I'm a bit surprised. So if the Bitcoin network has turned into a network for sending poor frog images and worthless jpegs and lewd photos and whatnot but in such a manner that the transactions are natural and not deliberately done to attack Bitcoin, it is perfectly all right?

My point is that it is secondary that what's happening right now may be an attack by the BSV community and developers. There's not even an information which conclusively points at them as the culprit. The primary concern is that the Bitcoin network may end up filled to the brim of transactions that are not monetary in nature but ones which involve mere NFT-like collections.

Would it not concern you that the main philosophy of Bitcoin as a financial technology will be compromised because of these garbage inscriptions? Can you simply brush it off because things happened naturally?

Bitcoin Ordinals is a new Elon musk, China ban, John McAfee topics, Do we need more topics to discuss?

Fees have decreased from the past days, and for those who think that we should forget about cheap fees of 1 sat/vB, and therefore more need for the Lightning Network will push owners of daily transactions to use it instead of the Bitcoin network, image lovers and crazy people with these strange things.

The wonderful thing about Bitcoin is that it has become like a sponge that absorbs shocks, no matter how strong they are.

@tbct_mt2. I agree on we can brush this off if all of the activity and usage on Ordinals and the trading happening in their marketplace is a natural market occurrence. However, if the speculation that the BSV community and their developers are responsible for spamming bitcoin to make the fees very high are verified true, I reckon this can be considered an attack.

if transactions use opcodes that bypass normal bitcoin checks and just assumes "isvalid" then its non-standard
if transactions waste bytes on non bitcoin functionality/proofs then its not bitcoin

for years better devs made bitcoin lean. counting every byte used to solve a purpose of lean bitcoin proof of ownership/transfer.. the latest collective of devs have broke rules, loosened rules, bypassed rules and let bloat occur.

What are fair Bitcoin transactions? What if others are willing to pay terribly high fees for jpeg inscriptions thereby causing the network to clog? What if monetary transactions on the Bitcoin network are left pending for days in the mempool because memes are getting the priority? Can we perhaps bring this discussion into a more fundamental level, in the level which defines Bitcoin as an electronic cash system and not a network made for frog artworks?

I think it should be allowed to use Bitcoin blockchain for transactions as fair as other reasons. We should not block some reasons that are not allowed to use Bitcoin blockchain for transactions even if the users are ready to pay transaction fee.

I believe solutions should be made not only to stop this escalating attack but also to increase Bitcoin blockchain capacity to cope with bigger demand, bigger transactions per block, bigger size.

It is better to see bigger demand on Bitcoin network and it shows us the recognition of community on the quality and security of Bitcoin blockchain and network. Many altcoins have bigger block sizes, faster transaction times but who care about them for their transactions. If they can, they will choose Bitcoin network.

I remember there were a number of Bitcoin supporters, even developers if I'm not mistaken, who brushed this Ordinals issue off when it was launched months ago saying it's not a big deal, that it will just die sooner rather than later, that they be allowed since they're paying fees for their transactions anyway, and so forth. Now, this issue has already escalated a lot and we seem to be taken back to step 1. Whether this now is a deliberate attack or not, bold steps should be taken. After all, it has already shaken the very core of Bitcoin. And I guess this transaction fee problem has not yet even reached its climax.

I reckon it certainly matters if there is a malicious intention and a motive to disrupt the normal order of business. You also say that someone is paying for this. I agree, it is us the users including all services and the gambling site that pays you for your campaign.

This good for the miners storyline manipulation is being used at our expense. We are being tricked that this attack, assuming that this is verified true, is alright.

In any case, this is being shared in social media.



Action should have been taken months ago. Spam filtration has been a standard part of Bitcoin Core since day 1. It's a mistake that the existing filters weren't extended to Taproot transactions. We can address that, or try a more narrow approach like OP_RETURN (ie, what "Ordisrespector" does). Since this is a bugfix, it doesn't really even need to wait for a major release.

(We already have pruning. It's not an alternative to spam filtering.)

Luke

Source https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg12637.html

Transactions are vitamins to keep the network lively. People who are readily to pay those expensive transaction fees deserve what they do but it affects other people who are not ready to accept very expensive transaction fee. They are either smart enough or poor enough and can not afford to pay such crazy fee.

I don't like what are happening with Bitcoin blockchain and its transaction fee but this attack gives us a signal that Bitcoin miners will be fine in future. Even in 2140 when no new bitcoins from block reward, they will still earn enough money from transaction fees.

it doesn't matter who is responsible for the attack and what types of transactions are flooding the blockchain... someone is paying for this.

"For instance, in the case of bitcoin, each valid block encompasses an average of 2000 transactions."
https://originstamp.com/blog/how-many-blocks-are-in-a-blockchain/

"Bitcoin Average Transaction Fee is at a current level of 30.91"
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee

so you have 60 000$ per 10 min = 9 mln $ per day. No matter if its bitcoin attacker that wanted the price to collapse, or pepe kids excited about new use case, sooner or later they will run out of cash. And there will be only one winner. bitcoin miners = bitcoin security = bitcoin network

News update.

This might be the storyline of the month hehehe. According to @Wublockchain on Twitter, the BSV community have been developing Ordinals software, platforms and have been using them.

The development team behind the wallet for BRC20 called Unisat was also the same development team that created BSV's smart contract solution. The development team behind Ordswap was the same development team that created a decentralized trading platform on BSV. Twetch developers created Ordinals wallet.

I reckon if verified true, this is certainly an attack on bitcoin.



The BSV community has extensive participation in Bitcoin Ordinals and BRC 20. Behind Unisat, the core wallet of BRC20, is the Chinese development team of the previous BSV community, which has developed Sensible Contract, a smart contract solution on BSV. By
@TechFlowPost

The team behind Ordswap, the first BRC20 trading platform, has developed RelayX, the first decentralized trading platform on the BSV network. Behind the wallet Ordinals Wallet is Twetch, a social application built on BSV. The founder of the Mempool mining pool is also a core member of the BSV community

Source https://twitter.com/WuBlockchain/status/1655793726474838016

It appears that the predictions and speculations of some of the members of bitcointalk about Ordinals have become another big storyline or has it presently become our reality?

This will certainly open a strong argument to adopt simple altcoins without smart contracts and Ordinals type capabilities.



The Bitcoin quadrant of Crypto Twitter was abuzz with concern on Sunday, as some users saw high transaction fees and a congested backlog of transactions as an attack on Bitcoin.

There are currently over 469,000 transactions waiting to be confirmed in Bitcoin’s mempool as of this writing, according to mempool.space. Before transactions are added to Bitcoin’s blockchain, transactions are sent to the network’s mempool, where they wait to be selected by a Bitcoin miner and inserted into Bitcoin’s next block.

The two metrics suggested that Bitcoin’s network was especially clogged, but some thought it was the product of nefarious behavior, aimed at cutting off those that couldn’t handle the uptick in transaction fees.

Still, others attributed the uptick in transaction fees and Bitcoin’s sizable backlog to Ordinals, a protocol used for minting NFT-like assets on Bitcoin. Called inscriptions, the total number of Bitcoin-based digital assets cruised past 4.3 million on Sunday, according to a Dune dashboard. Just last week, inscriptions totaled 2.5 million, based on Decrypt coverage.

Source https://decrypt.co/139259/bitcoin-ddos-ordinals-inscriptions-attack



Source where everyone can see the volume of ordinals marketplaces.

https://dune.com/domo/ordinals-marketplaces