Topic: Expect the Orginals game to get even bigger - actual games (Read 787 times)

I see, but few website shows conflicting information. For example,



What do you think?

AFAIK with shareware all that is required is that the Credits list the original creators/owners, it not be modified, and that it be provided for free. It can be distributed in any form.

1st result when searching "shareware":

Actually dogecoin is only used to store the file. But it's still cool to play DOOM on dogecoin ordinals explorer.


CMIIW, but doesn't the creator or publisher still have right how their shareware is distributed?


NFT already exist on altcoin, but Ordinals on Bitcoin manage to gain popularity. So i doubt those people would move to altcoin again.

doge would be used by the broke folks; the rich ones will stick to BTC. Also, ordinals on BTC are somewhat different since they are associated with a particular Satoshi that is thought to have some intrinsic value that most people don't see  . I think these folks will come back again to BTC to pay another visit when a new wave of madness forms up. Ordinals on BTC will be like TikTok trends; they would be most active during bull markets when BTC is making new highs and is getting more attention in the news. Then they fade, wait for another wave, scam a few dozen greedy folks, and fade. Rinse and repeat until people find a new way to make value out of thin air.

I don't see why Ordinals people would switch to Dogecoin, when they didn't even have to switch to Bitcoin in the first place; all of this functionality basically already existed on Ethereum and other cheaper blockchains, before.
But I guess with the popularity of Dogecoin, the fact these people are likely no hardcore Bitcoiners, and consistently high transaction fees lately, there's a chance they lose interest in using the Bitcoin blockchain. We can only hope!

And now you have not a know-off but the entire shareware part of DOOM running on dogecoin
https://wonky-ord.dogeord.io/shibescription/02d0c9820dc020acd8128d80955ff5b7fbeb8c80ee229a408dce5fe6573f404bi0
Interesting part is that since it's a shareware copy nobody can sue on it!

Somebody mentioned 20 doge as cost for it, don't know how accurate that is, but I guess we can say bye by to bitcoin ordinals and a flood to doge at these prices!
Full fee reward was under 15k for doge last 24h so cheap enough to inscribe a shitload of stuff there.

Odds are these guys will price themselves out. Like if such a novel service cost so much to do it'll weed itself out right?

Hmm, just came across this in the Project Development area...
Methinks it deals with what I started this thread about: Using the BTC blockchain for storing retro games... In all fairness the op of that thread does say "a blockchain" (emphasis is mine on the 'a') vs explicitly saying the BTC blockchain.
Nonetheless it still makes one wonder...

Regarding illegal content, from a legal (not moral) perspective, the simplest solution may be to make your node only reachable through Tor. You'll still be doing something illegal, by distributing material that you're not allowed to distribute, when seeding the blockchain and broadcasting new blocks containing such data, but it will be tough for local authorities to find you and get you to shut the node down and / or punish you.

This solves neither the moral concern of distributing such data, nor does it solve the reduced usability through high fees and our nodes' memory being filled up quicker than needed.

I think long-term, Bitcoin needs a Grin-type solution that allows us to 'prune' unnecessary parts of transactions, encrypts addresses and so forth; for privacy reasons, making it easier to spin up a node, as well as stopping attacks that abuse the blockchain for things that are not monetary transactions.

True, I believe we were discussing the matter from an angle that is irrelevant to the big picture. In my previous replies, I focused on the legal consequences for the person uploading legally protected content. However, does that even matter? I mean, anyone can do that and maintain their privacy, and nobody would go after them. I think what matters most here is the other side of the problem: users storing and rebroadcasting that shared content.

Suppose I upload a copyright-protected file obtained illegally (bypassing the discussion of whether I have the right to do so, because clearly, in this case, I don't). If that file becomes part of the files YOU own, by law, you are required to get rid of it, and there is the problem.

The blockchain, as it stands, probably contains a lot of illegal data, be it copyright violations or other illegal content like child pornography or anything deemed illegal by many countries. Now, the question arises: if enough government pressure is imposed on all node operators, how will they be able to prune all that illegal content without affecting the ability of the full node to operate properly (maintain censuses and validate transactions?).

Currently, if an attacker puts something illegal in the UTXO set, pruning it would be difficult without affecting the full node's ability to operate as it should. However, for authorities to know whether your node has that piece of legal info or not would be complicated. In the future, if enough pressure is put on node operators in the U.S, everyone may push for a change. As of now, vjudeu's reply to my suggestion (which I read somewhere in the past) regarding using Zero Knowledge Proof so that nodes don't need to store the complete UTXO set makes perfect sense. there is no interest, especially from mining pools, as it could reduce their profits. However, if shit hits the fan, mining pools might support and even fund a similar fix to protect themselves from governments. As it stands now, it seems like we are giving authorities much more weight than we should. Perhaps, for now, we may as well continue ignoring them as if nothing is happening.

I get your points, and the law is way out of my field, but what concerns me is that only the participants of that illegal activity are held accountable, and permit distribution.

- If I upload Oppenheimer on Google Drive, and then distribute the download link, then I'm responsible for that action. The authorities will warn Google about the incident, and Google will notify me about its deletion.
- If I upload Oppenheimer on Pirate Bay, and be one of the seeders, then I'm also responsible for that action. The authorities will contact me, and request to stop distributing it (in the best case scenario). Then, maybe they request from every other seeder to shut down their operations.

What happens if I upload it on the blockchain? Maybe I'm still responsible, but I hold no permission over the Bitcoin network. So, maybe I get a fine, but the activity is still on-going. I am no longer accountable. So, who is to blame if not every node distributing it?

How is it different? storing something on the blockchain is not exactly "distributing" it, your UTXOs all stored on my PC, but only you can "use" them, the song you bought is stored on the same disk I use (dropbox for example) and i also can't use it.

Also, how do these things differ?

1- you upload a copy of a file you bought to google drive ( meaning you are now by default share it with google and everyone who has access to storage files in google)

2- you upload the same file to blockchain, encrypted where nobody can view it.

I believe at this point, fair use still plays out, when here is how to break it.

For google drive, you intentionally share the download link to that file.

For blockchain, you intentionally share the private key to decrypt the file.

I did some reading in regards to U.S copyright laws, and it is no where near simple, i.e, you can't just say storing a copyright protected file on the blockchain is illegal or legal, it is more complicated than that, i have read different opinions regarding to this subject, you can dive into the rabbit whole by searching for "storing encrypted copyright protected files online".


I was talking about this project itself, the team that inscribed this ninja game.

Such restriction would require a fork (either soft or hard fork), where it's unlikely to happen.


Actually in past miners were prioritizing some transaction with "Aged" UTXO. Anyway, miners merely followed default Bitcoin-Qt (now it's called Bitcoin Core) behavior. But after some time, mining become more serious stuff where miner prioritize profit.

Storing a copy of a legally obtained file locally is not illegal. Distributing a copyrighted file universally without the creator's permission is definitely not legal.

Storing it locally on a cloud service is completely different than distributing it to the entire Bitcoin network.

Both. When downloading a movie from Pirate Bay, sure, you're committing a crime, but so is the seeder who has uploaded it. In fact, most of the times, the authorities look for the uploaders.

Do we really know which people are behind Ordinals? What prevents me from anonymously buying / selling / issuing Ordinals?

This is apples vs oranges, stealing a bike is illegal, storing a copy of a file you obtained legally and lawfully own is not illegal, if you buy a movie/song and store it on your google drive, dropbox or some random VPS that is legal as far as I know.

If I manage to access those files and use them, then it is me commiting crime not you, and I think the same will apply to these ordinals, those folks are not stupid and have probably consulted the right people given that their identities are known to the public -- they would unlikely take that risk.

And as long as there are no cameras and nobody around, how can anyone know you've stolen a bike? Nonetheless, it is illegal to do.

Isn't it already apparent that sweet profit is the answer? Transactions which pay a lot more than "aged" transactions, have priority. Maybe a small amount of profit does not incentivize them enough to bypass such rules (e.g., standardness), but millions of dollars worth of bitcoin definitely outweigh these rules.

Wouldn't be a potential solution to this drama  the implementation of the block space restriction for transactions which use coding to bypass the 'datacarriersize' limit?

AFAIK, in the early days, miners prioritized the  "aged" transactions. Why not continue favoring those transactions that do not circumvent the default 'datacarriersize' cap?

I wholeheartedly agree!
That's why I said the same thing earlier. Now the concept of of using A decentralized public blockchain as an immutable type of cloud storage for what is otherwise ephemeral digital content is a sound one and provided DRM issues can be resolved, having the content publicly accessible would be great so We The Public can read/view/play, etc it.

Just as with out of print books, there is a shitton of games, movies, software etc. that is no longer distributed by the copyright holders that users would LOVE to have access to and be willing to still pay the copyright holders for the rights to access it. Again, that said - using the BTC for it is NOT the way to do it.

Not a lawyer either, but as long as you don't intentionally expose the private key then how would anyone know the content?  besides the law explicitly says according to what NFW posted above


And the size of inputs is 4x the size of outputs.

My bad. You can inject arbitrary data in UTXO. It's just more expensive.

The history of those coins can be safely ignored in the sense that they were recreated, but you do need to know about their past to reach their future, so some nodes will still need to store that piece of information.

Imagine that you are an attacker. Start regtest. Set it in pruned mode. Try to spam. See, what is kept by another node, and what is pruned. Note that "blocks" directory is pruned, but "chainstate" is not. And note that consuming a single input, and producing a lot of outputs, has the same feerate, as some another transaction, which will consume a lot of inputs, and produce a single output. Which means, that "UTXO consumers" are not rewarded, even though they make running pruned nodes easier. And note that "UTXO producers" are not punished, even though they can just produce UTXOs out of thin air, without any limits, and then never spend them. And also note that the number of UTXOs can be bigger than the number of satoshis in circulation.

I agree. Encryption won't help there, because all that is needed, is just using weak encryption key, or just using a simple XOR, and pretending that something is "encrypted" sufficiently. Which means, that to discourage people to store their data on-chain, they should receive a clear message, that nodes are not going to serve those data, and all they will do, is to make sure that signatures and public keys are correct, and not much more beyond that.

By the way: Bitcoin is not about storing data forever. It is about double-spending problem. And if some coin was created, then moved between many people, and then 100% of that was turned into fees, then that history can be safely pruned, because if a coinbase transaction, which collected those fees, is good enough to be spent, then everything below that is now rock-solid, and will never be reorged anyway (and also, the same transaction flow can then be recreated from any other fees, so the chain of signatures starts with the coinbase transaction, and ends, when the coin is sent as fees).

I get it. The gamble is whether this conservative approach of not doing anything prevails on the long term. It is as much a problem as a feature. But, to not go off-topic, I believe this will not pass. No sane miner would accept working on a chain that censors this type of transaction.

Pruned nodes keep the UTXO set, but you can't inject arbitrary data there, like Ordinals. So, how can you store as much data as non-pruned nodes?

Not a lawyer, but distributing illegal material encrypted sounds illegal. What if you post your private key publicly? Encrypted isn't local.

If you put it on the blockchain in plain text then it becomes accessible by everyone, which i suppose is illegal based on what you posted above.

Maybe you can encrypt the content using your private key, this way nobody else can retrieve the content of the file you inscribed.

And then, as a node operator, you would only worry about your country's law (assuming your node sits there too).


Well making attacks more costly is indeed better than doing nothing, but the kind of attack we talking about here does not require redundancy, an attacker would only need one transaction to "infect" the blockchain and then take you to court, so if it costs $10 or $1000 when done only once, it won't make any difference.

For other attacks that depend on frequency, this indeed would help reduce them, we just need to evaluate what could be broken along the way of doing it.

But don't you agree it's better than doing nothing?


Do you refer to ZeroSync (https://zerosync.org/)?


IIRC ZKP on Zcash used to create private/anonymous TX rather than UTXO set.

It is technically possible, but nobody proposed it yet. Note that you need:

1. Some kind of formal proposal, like BIP.
2. Source code with changes, and creating a Pull Request.
3. Some code for testing, that all of this is "safe enough to be added".
4. If a soft-fork, then an activation method, and showing support by mining pools.
5. Reaching consensus, and getting enough ACKs, to get it merged.

This is a long path, and it usually takes months, if not years. But yes, it is possible.

And note that it is more likely, that the whole work will be there, but won't be merged. Which means, that you can spend a lot of time on creating something (for example zero knowledge proofs), and people can say "no, it won't be merged". Then, you can get some criticism of things, that you should fix before trying again.

And one of those points could be: "users will use signatures and public keys to spam anyway". If your proposal cannot stop it, then it won't be merged.

So, you can "improve" it, and say "using ZKP is mandatory". And then, someone will point out, that "old, timelocked transactions, which are valid today, will be invalid, when your code will be merged". What then?

Another point to address is "mining pools won't accept your proposal, because it will lower their profits". And then, like it or not, your proposal can be covered with not enough Proof of Work, which means, that it cannot be a soft-fork. What then?

And because all of that, I think "the fix" should be a no-fork, applied on the level of Initial Blockchain Download, without touching consensus at all. Then, it would be 100% voluntary, but if it will be propagated sufficiently, then people will install and use it, when their nodes will be taken down by DMCA complaints.

But the most likely outcome is that nobody will propose anything, which means, that you are left with, what we have today. Which is again: not that much beyond pruning.

re: In the US at least, legality of storing/archiving copyrighted content, in this case vintage Nintendo games, per established case law and quoted from the decrypt article:The catch there is what constitutes a 'backup copy stored by legal owners of the original (and previously purchased) content" and the legality of said 'backup copy' being viewable and/or playable by anyone - not just the legal owner of said previously purchased content?

For those interested in how this interactive variant of Ordinals works using the SNES emulator here is the process used by pizzaninjas

While I applaud the archiving of otherwise ephemeral digital content and acknowledge the need for it (just talk to folks that purchased movies from several streaming sites that later shut down), using the BTC blockchain to do it is just wrong. There has to be another way to create immutable & public digital content libraries that use tokens for DRM control and a widely distributed blockchain...

All that said, as a miner do I like the fees being generated? Hell yes and come the 1/2ing those fees will probably often be close to or exceeding the block rewards.

As an occasional user of BTC so far when transferring coin I have yet to pay what I would consider an excessive fee to have a tx confirmed in less than 1 day. The catch there is, 'excessive fee' compared to what? Late summer of last year I moved several BTC from an online exchange to my hardware wallet for less than $100 and 1st confirmation was within a couple hours. For the last payout from Kanopool 7 days ago to the PPLNS users of the pool Kano used a near-zero fee to distribute the rewards from the pool wallet and it still was confirmed within a few hours. Go fig.

Ja using BTC for lots of <$50 tx's is no longer viable but when the ocassional tx is worth several $k and more - still cheaper and faster than a wire transfer.

This isn't going to cut it if you want to protect BTC from illegal content, making something more expensive doesn't stop an attacker from doing it, especially if they need to do it only once.


What about using Zero Knowledge Proof to make pruning the UTXO set possible? I recall reading about something like that in the past. I mean, my node would keep only block headers and UTXO commitments, and your node would provide a valid ZKP that certain parts of the UTXO set that I am checking are valid. I think Zcash operates in a similar manner.


In another thread discussion about the "ban of Ordinals," I did mention that contrary to what many people believe, changing any part of the code is like playing with fire. Anyone with enough real-world application experience would always be hesitant when applying any fix to anything. There is a reason why many billion-dollar companies still use old code that could be optimized. Some people think it's a matter of adding a simple if statement that would automatically ban all BRC-20 transactions without damaging anything.

Lawmaking is difficult in the real world, and so is in BTC. You try to fix something, like making transactions cheaper for the good lads, and you end up making potential attacks like flooding the UTXO set easier and cheaper. There is a huge fundamental issue with BTC, and that is its security is directly related to its value. The higher the value, the more difficult it is to attack, whether that is in terms of 51% attacks, spamming, or UTXO set flooding.

Because all limits are successfully bypassed, one-by-one. And UTXO set has no consensus-enforced limit. Which means, that if it is possible to abuse pruned nodes, and to make them store as much data as non-pruned ones need today, then someone will do that.

This is one thing. Another is history:

1. Block size limit: set to 1 MB. Reached.
2. Witness size limit: set to 4 MB. Reached.
3. Sigops limit: set to 20,000 (and for witness, increased to 80,000). Reached.

In progress:

1. Time limit: around 0x7fffffff in 2038, and 0xffffffff in 2106. The first one would cause some issues, because nodes cast types between signed and unsigned integers, between 32 and 64 bits. So, even in 2038, there would be some problems, even if those values could work well until 2106. You can always set your system clock to 2040, and see if your regtest node is affected or not.
2. UTXO limit: unlimited, enforced only by the physical specification of most nodes. Will be abused, sooner or later. And then, some limit will be introduced, or it will be abused further, if community will be too lazy to "fix" it.

There are more to-be-reached limits. But we are not there yet, to discuss them properly, because each "fix" and each consensus change, can dramatically change the situation, and stop some attacks, or make other attacks easier. It just depends, if something will be changed, and it depends on how exactly it will be changed. Devil is in the details, and I can guess, what will happen, but I cannot be 100% sure about that. But of course, by writing some code, and testing some scenarios, you can figure it out.

Well, this is the way to stop the attack, because it is too late to stop it in other ways. But you should think about it more widely: I would rather see a soft-fork, which would allow regular users to join their transactions, than a soft-fork, which would explicitly block Ordinals. Because if you "censor" anything, it will have some bright and dark sides. So, it is more clever to do, what the network should do: to prefer payments over Ordinals. And "making regular payments cheaper" is not the same thing as "blocking Ordinals explicitly as a protocol rule".

However, if nothing will be done, then all you can do, is to discourage people to use Ordinals. And if you want to do so, then what you can do with officially released software? Not that much beyond pruning, I guess.

There was a discussion, when the attack started (but not about soft-fork, because then, it was not that serious as today). And there were no decisions to block anything, which means, that status quo is preserved. For many different reasons. Also, because if you want to change something, you have to propose it, and reach consensus. And for simple fixes, like "blocking relay for Ordinals", they were rejected, and not merged into Bitcoin Core, which means, that this proposal was unsuccessful.

And today, there are consequences. Some of them are good, and some of them are bad. The good thing is that some attackers focused on Ordinals, which means, that they can be "censored" in the same simple way, as long time ago, when the attack started. And it is a good thing to keep it like that, to then throw everything away at once, using the same new rules. But of course, there are bad things, like "UTXO flood", which are going to happen in the future, which means, the "fix" will have to address both issues at once: spamming with data, and spamming with UTXOs, at the same time (or it will be insufficient, and will not stop the attack).

Note that "status quo" is the default. Which means, that everything works without any changes, unless you successfully propose something, write a code, write some tests, get it accepted, and then get it merged. The path to change consensus rules is much harder, than the path to fix typos in translations.

But, why will it happen anyway? Do you mean that it is simply possible to happen given enough incentive?

I see. So you're arguing for softfork. I don't watch the mailing list lately, I think since the Linux foundation announced they will be shutting down their mailing servers. If I recall right, you were active in bitcoin-dev, so let me ask you, is there discussion about implementing a softfork for this very purpose? I mean serious consideration, not just beating the air.

No, it will happen anyway, even if you don't "censor" any transaction. It depends if UTXO-level batching will be there or not. If it will be there, then many UTXOs can be summarized into single ones. But if not, then the network will be flooded, and pruned nodes will suffer from that attack. Which means, the "fix" for Ordinals should also "fix" that issue, and its consequences. In other case, the situation would be only worse.

There are better ways to attack the network, but I don't want to help the attackers by publicly revealing those ways. Also because some of them cannot be used, as long as some "fixes" for Ordinals are not yet applied.

Every soft-fork causes that. It would be no worse, but in what other way you want to upgrade the network? The current software is not resistant to Ordinals attack, which means, that any patch will cause a potential split. But if Proof of Work will follow, then no split will happen (or rather: every split would be called an altcoin, because those users would use hard-fork to stop the "patch").

If something is needed for consensus, it will be processed. It is only about ignoring OP_NOPs. And also, "potentially genuine, non-Ordinal content" can be standardized. And then, standardized transactions could be batched.

Because of double SHA-256, you can just keep the result of a single SHA-256, and validate it in the same way, as OP_CHECKDATASIG would work. Also, you can apply any kind of zero-knowledge proof, which means, if that would be shorter than the data inside Ordinals, then you can replace it in that way.

Another thing is that you only have to verify the chain of signatures, to the nearest coinbase transaction. Everything below that, was turned into fees, which means, the same transactions could be re-created on any other compatible chain, out of different fees. And if a given coinbase transaction is "sufficiently confirmed to be spent", then everything below that also is.

And if you have all coinbase transactions, and all "coin flows", then you can be sure, that no coins were produced out of thin air. You don't need historical "everything turned into fees" transactions to prove that the chain of signatures is valid. And it can be a standard procedure to "turn coins into fees, claim them in the coinbase transaction, and restart the chain of signatures", just to compress it further, when needed.

That is probably what's going to happen if you attempt to censor Ordinals. The Ordinal users will find another loophole, and flooding the UTXO set is their last resort.

That is actually an interest approach. However:

- That will split the network in terms of clients, similar as to how anti-segwit and segwit nodes operate separately (e.g., anti-segwit nodes ignore witness).
- Everything inside OP_NOP will be ignored, including potentially genuine, non-Ordinal content.

Also, how can you verify the signature hash if you don't have the full message?

For example UTXO flood. And of course, there are worse things than UTXO flood, but some bugs are not yet disclosed, and there is no reason to reveal them now, if nobody is affected yet (because we don't have UTXO-based Initial Blockchain Download yet, and some attacks can be applied only if you apply some "fix" on Ordinals, and each attack vector is dependent on your exact "patch").

Why? Nobody stops you from having that data, and storing them on your drive. The problem is when you serve those data to the users. Which means, if you have full node for yourself, and pruned node for the outside world, then you are safe from DMCA complaints, because then you don't serve those Ordinals.

It is only true, as long as Initial Blockchain Download requires downloading everything. But it doesn't have to be the case. It is possible to check only signatures for Ordinals, and skip their data entirely. They are just huge OP_NOPs. But if you can verify signature hash, then you don't have to store signature data.

Of course, if you use only pruned node, then there are some disadvantages. But if you have only pruned node, exposed to the public, and there is some full node behind it, then you can handle everything fine. Because the strength of Ordinals lies in the assumption, that their data will always be available, no matter what. And the key to stop that attack, is to break that assumption. And how to break that assumption? By stopping serving that data, and by implementing Initial Blockchain Download in another, simplified way.

And of course, there could be better ways to deal with Ordinals. But as long as nothing is done, to stop that attack, then pruning is the only widely-deployed option, that you can safely use. At least for publicly-exposed nodes, because of course, you can still have a full node for your personal use. But making it public is now more risky, than it was, so I guess more people will do that, if no other solution will be deployed.

Like what?

This sounds like a really bad idea. First things first, my full node only serves them bandwidth-wise. It does not act as their Ordinal explorer. If I don't serve them bandwidth-wise, someone else will, probably mining pools or just people who would rather buy a good Internet connection and a terabyte drive than their 1000th Ordinal.

Secondly, suspending my node's access to the blockchain for the sake of the Ordinals sounds like an actual defeat. Pruning comes with disadvantages on an individual level and we all know about it.

Literally true and is hypocritical just to see some members of this forum being supportive of this trash, claiming bitcoin is for everyone and everyone has what they want to do with it, were as this is far from what was written in the white paper and Satoshi spoke about this here on btt :https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.28917 while if you speak about this some will say bitcoin is bigger than Satoshi now, like are you all not ashamed, after speaking is Bitcoin or Bitcoin and now have more from using it for your daily transactions, the altcoin you critise one time is what you use now and some still have the full courage to say Ethereum has a larger number of individuals using it for transactions than bitcoin, where as we already know that Blockchain is flooded by dev mainly creating scam tokens and NFTs and  victims of these scam.

The fact is that they don't actually care much about Bitcoin except from making more money, as long as nothing affects this, then they see Bitcoin as just fine and OK even after all they have spoken about altcoins and CEX, they are not ashamed to run to them (hypocrite). I guess Bitcoin is for everyone to them doesn't include those that use it for small transactions

We can also severely penalize storing arbitrary data on the blockchain by making witness data starting with OP_FALSE OP_IF taxable as standard OP_RETURN bytes.

Luke-jr tried to merge the commit, but failed because there was too much bickering on the Github issue. Also the commit didn't even work anyway (it failed its Continuous Integration tests).

Of course. For example, altcoins like Grin, are resistant to those attacks by design. If you have only public keys and signatures, then that kind of chain is resistant. And if public keys and signatures are combined, and finally you have just a block with one huge transaction saying "consume all of those M inputs, and produce all of those N outputs", then there is no room for that kind of attack, because transaction data would be stripped during Initial Blockchain Download anyway.

Just read the whitepaper "7. Reclaiming Disk Space". Imagine that it is applied on the level of Initial Blockchain Download. Imagine that the chain of signatures is checked only to the nearest coinbase transaction, and everything else is confirmed by Proof of Work. It can be done, we are just not there yet.

Of course, it is possible to introduce UTXO size limit, in the same way as block size limit was introduced. And to have a fully-functioning chain, a single UTXO is all you need, to build a working sidechain, and just move it forward from time to time.

Of course it is possible, if you stop serving that kind of data from your node. Which means, you can serve signatures, and stop on that. Signatures are correct, so you can move forward. If you want to get more data, then run your own node. And if you think that people will post data inside signatures, then note that signatures can be combined. So, if you can join transactions, then that kind of chain is resistant to inserting data. Because then, you can just cover batched transaction with enough Proof of Work, as a part of consensus rules, and move forward, without caring that some data was lost in the process. And to preserve some proofs, you can always commit pruned data into batched version, to keep normal users unaffected.

This is what could be worse than Ordinals. And this will happen in the future, unless some UTXO limits will be introduced (for example: maximum N new UTXOs per block, or: consume M UTXOs to create N UTXOs, or: transaction fee, based on the number of UTXOs consumed and produced, or anything like that).

Edit: You can argue, that it is possible to flood the network, just by putting data in unspendable public keys. But again, it is possible to prevent that with Pedersen Commitments. For example:
And then, imagine an attacker, flooding the network with " " entries. First, that attacker will quickly run out of money. Second, all of those transactions will be joined into some "rct", flying on-chain, from which it would be possible to take "a" coins, by using "x" key. That means, you can attach and detach any set of keys and amounts, from that kind of address. The only missing part is introducing some new sighashes on Taproot, and allowing users to spend those coins in this way, and making sure the design is "cryptographically secure".

So yes, it is possible, but just nobody implemented it yet.

I completely agree. But I think once illegal stuff is pushed on to the Bitcoin blockchain (if it has not been, already) then the community and especially devs will be under much heavier pressure. I think that will be the point during which finally some progress will be made towards ending the entire madness called ordinals.

I am actually surprised that this whole issue managed to hang on to life for almost a year now. I would have really thought that the situation would be fixed by now. I guess people view Bitcoin more of a storage of value than a method of transaction. Otherwise people would be fighting much more actively against higher transaction fees...

 

not that true for scrypt.  but for other coins very true.bitmain has always pushed dollars per watts and that any coin will do..

My goal if to have Sha-256/scrypt/gpu and switch on and off to what ever works best.

because I am thinking they are shoving us that way.

do I like this no but do I see it yes.

But is it even technically possible to prevent such an attack on Bitcoin? I am not talking about witness data or OP-RETURN, but speaking of the UTXO set where even pruning is not an option. This "exploit" has been there since the inception of BTC. It's impossible to stop people from putting ALL types of data that we don't want. Of course, it gets easier and cheaper with the current implementation, but what has changed in that regard?

From an attacker's standpoint, wouldn't it be cheaper to just insert illegal or copyright content into the UTXO set and spend all these millions that are otherwise going to the miners in suing wallets and exchanges, forcing them to shut down their nodes?

Also, to what extent is such an attack even feasible? Where I live, by law, I am only obliged not to sell illegal content. If my PC was searched by the authorities and they found some copyright violation, there is nothing they can do to me. It's perfectly legal as long as I am not making money out of it. I can put some cracked software on a pen drive and send it to anyone, and I would still be operating within the legal boundaries of the law. Many countries don't deal with copyrights the way the U.S. deals with it. Is it feasible for Nintendo to go after everyone who runs a full node? Do the attackers really think they stand a chance to kill BTC taking that route?

I personally don't think that is doable. I also don't think that Ordinals/BRC-20 are an attack "by design". It's possible that the attack is a probable byproduct, but the main purpose is profit. I think calling them scammers would fit more than calling them attackers (speaking of the devs behind all of this nonsense NFTs/Ordinals/BRC-20 on all platforms), and they feed off the greed that many people think they can sell the scam to someone else at a higher price sometime in the future.


I believe the reason why other algorithms have a better earning ratio in terms of both power and cost is the fact that a tight equilibrium is hard to reach on them. Simply put, not enough investors trust those coins. In contrast, with BTC, it's the exact opposite. If your $1,000 investment in a BTC ASIC miner makes you $100 a month in profit, you know it would take way too long for that $100 to turn into 0. On the other hand, if that same $1,000 investment makes you $200 a month on another algorithm, you know that it won't take too long to get to $0. It's basically the higher the risk, the greater the reward. I think of mining altcoins as bond class B and BTC as bond class AA. The former is likely to net you more profit but is also more likely to make you lose more.

because this is to crush btc maxers

basically this is all about  power into wealth..

so if you only care about wealth per dollar and you mine you will switch to other pow coins.

just look at LTC/DOGE vs BTC. what is harder to attack via flooding with data

 So if you want all your pow to  be BTC it is tough risk

Has it crossed your mind that hosting jpegs on the world's most secure blockchain is the one and only selling point of these blockheads?


I might have skipped a season, but hasn't it always been possible to host copyrighted material on the blockchain?  The only change this time is that people are actively doing it.  They could have done this long time ago.  And I am pretty sure some did.

Fair enough, I hadn't been considering the ignorant enlisted-- e.g. people spamming out BRC-20 tokens because intentional attackers will buy them-- as attackers.  They don't intend to attack, they intend to "use" bitcoin to make money fast it just so happens that the actual attackers have managed to arrange things so that the "usage" is disruptive.

There are plenty of people who are irritated by the high fees created by this traffic who respond with suggestions to eliminate the resource limits, which are the only things holding back the attack and making it expensive-- and that's more where my warning applies.

And right you are that neither the attackers nor many of the people just trying to make a quick buck on the traffic give a damn if bitcoin is worth anything 5 years from now. But for the same reason, their concerns shouldn't weigh highly in everyone else's evaluation.

No, I think non-aware attackers, that are regular users from Bitcointalk, who are pro-Ordinals, don't run any full node, so they can happily support Ordinals, without having to deal with the consequences.

I thought about those attackers. They support Ordinals, they tell, that "it is good for fees", but most likely, they are not miners, to benefit from those fees, and they are also not full node owners, to be affected by any of that. They are traders, or exchange-based users, so they have no reason to shout "save us!", because they will happily jump from Bitcoin to any altcoin or stablecoin, just to cash out, if there would be any troubles with Bitcoin.

I can't decode the misunderstanding required to produce that answer. Do you think the attackers would accomplish something by getting themselves shut down for copyright infringement?

The attackers goal in that attack is make every node operator a copyright infringer and then they or someone else can shut any one of them down with an email and the rights holder has standing to drag anyone to court and bankrupt them with legal fees before they ever get to the novel leal question.  The attacker never needs to run a full node, it's better for the attack that they don't.

It would be true, if the attackers would run some full nodes. But I doubt it. I doubt that a significant percentage of pro-Ordinals users from Bitcointalk actually run a full node. It is more likely that they use just some SPV nodes, and they only use external sites to show their Ordinals.

Related developers implemented this on BSV a couple years ago, in "CryptoFights". It serves no purpose except as a cover to add garbage to the blockchain, no code was ever even written to read the data back out that they wrote in... and why would anyone do that? Writing game state to a immutable public ledger serves absolutely no purpose itself, but for the damage you can do to other people's ability to validate the ledger.


.Because . Its . An . Attack.

Stuffing the blockchain full of unlawfully copied material is an attack, it's probably no accident that they picked the notoriously litigious nintendo as an initial target.

Doubling the UTXO set size with meaningless 'tokens' that have absolutely no purpose is an attack. (people talk about ordinals a lot but by far most of the congestion when I've looked is actually BRC-20)

If the usage were genuine they could save hundreds of millions of dollars in fees just doing it on their own blockchain, or almost any one of a thousand pre-existing ones.

The very same people doing this stuff are BSVers funded by Calvin Ayre.  This isn't speculation or a conspiracy theory, you can simply look them up. They carried out the same attacks on BSV, adding 165 GB to the utxo set in just five days (not the chain! the utxo set!), pushing off every other known non-calvin-controlled/funded node off the network.  At least in Bitcoin it mostly just drives fees up rather than forever destroying the network in days, because robustness to these kind of attacks was considered.  Many people are mistaking the protection *working* (fees go up making the attack astronomically expensive for the attacker) for the problem itself.

Most of you are absolutely fucking idiots. You deserve what you get.

Eventually you will figure it out as one by one your nodes are turned off by DMCA complaints, you get fucking bankrupted by vexatious copyright litigation and other bullshit resulting from attacks on the network that you were happy to pretend were actually good when you thought they could pump the price and you will look up and shout "save us!" and I'll whisper "No."

If there will be more abuse, then expect solutions (like those mentioned above) to be deployed. Nothing is changed yet, because:

1. There are worse things than Ordinals.
2. Not enough developers are against Ordinals.
3. Some changes are not yet ready (for example assumeutxo). But sooner or later, they will be.

If you want to show, that you don't support Ordinals, then just enable pruning. If enough people will do so, then those Ordinals owners will need to start running their own full nodes (and taste their own medicine) to see their data.

For Nintendo games.

Not for Nintendo games though, right? That would be way too slow on Bitcoin (or almost any other blockchain), when a game sometimes requires pixel-perfect inputs.

I didn't know about that roadmap though; pushing not only binaries but also game state to the blockchain is a whole different beast. I still don't understand why they can't use RGB or Taro. These would suit the use case so much better.

That is exactly what they are doing, I looked into their roadmap and they talk about things like saving the game status on the blockchain, next would likely be saving how many zombies you killed (or whatever the Ninja hero does in the game) on the blockchain, those transactions would be tiny in size, combined with other similiar transactions it would be pretty damn cheap, a single on-chain transaction would be enough for a dozen players data.

@stompy, lol, it may look like something that would never work, but given that probably over a hundrred billion dollars are spent on video games every year, i won't be too confident that we won't see many games make it to the blockchain.

Inscribing the code and binary of an emulator is not the same as 'turning Bitcoin to a distributed and decentralized play station'.

The former means that you can 'download' a piece of software from the blockchain and run it locally, meanwhile the latter describes running code on the blockchain, i.e. every interaction with it would need an individual transaction to be mined; that's the way people used to play chess on Ethereum, for instance.

My stance on this (as a home miner) is that the drama is not about the miners making a lot of money, it's about the blockchain becoming less usable; if we extrapolate to a worst-case scenario, where a potential majority of users might stop using it and selling their BTC due to lowered usability, everyone else (i.e. the people who love inscribing data on the blockchain) suffers, too.

Therefore, I think it's in the best interest of everybody to keep Bitcoin usable and appealing.

Nintendo is even more hawkish at copyrights than federal governments themselves, they got countless ROMsites shut down for copyright infringement, so the last thing Bitcoin needs is for this sort of thing to take off and then suddenly there is legitimate (ie. not from Craig Wrong) legal action taken against it.

I've heared this idear many times before... IIRC, previous times the mempool was completely full and a fee bidding "war" was plaguing the community, fingers were also pointed towards the miners... I guess they might try to do this, but it also comes at a risk (and a cost) to them...

What if a big miner decides to drop 1 Gb of transaction data (excluding witness data) into the mempool... They want to start a bidding war and profit big time, so they add 50 sat/byte tx data to these unconfirmed transactions... That's 1.073.741.824 bytes * 50 sat/byte =~ 537 bitcoin (at a current preev rate of $45k/btc, that's little over $24 million).

Offcourse, we (the users) have to outbid the transactions in the mempool, and we have to use a fee of >50 sat/byte to get our transaction into a block... Great profit for the miners... However, if on average we (the community) create less than 1 Mb of transaction data (excluding witness data) per 10 minutes over a prolonged amount of time, OTHER miners will start to add the transactions broadcasted by the miner that dropped the 1 Gb of transactions on the mempool... OTHER miners will start to confirm those transactions and claim the fee. In the end, the miner dropping the 1 Gb of unconfirmed spam transactions will be out of a big chunk of his $24.000.000. He'll only be able to recuperate the fees of the transactions he himself puts into a block which he succesfully solves.

Bottom line is that it would be a big risk for him (at least, that's my point of view). IF the community keeps on broadcasting more than 1 Mb of transaction data (excluding witness data) per 10 minutes for a very long time, he'll be able to push all our fees upwards and he might be able to make a nice profit... If we broadcast less that 1 Mb of tx data per 10 minutes, he might be at a (big) loss.

Miners earn tons of money, thanks to that exploit. People make millions of dollars by selling simple trash, so, who wants to get rid of that exploit? Governments will hugely benefit if illegal stuff will be pushed to Bitcoin Blockchain because it will give them a fair reason to centralize it even more. No one is going to ban Bitcoin, they are taking it over.

Think about it:

• Centralized Exchanges
• Bitcoin ETF
• Centralized miners
• Centralized mining pools
• Blockchain Analysis firms
• Soon there will be censored blockchain, i.e. unwanted transactions won't get confirmed.

Why should you ban it when you can take it over?

---

By the way, what's the plan or solution if we stop ordinals but miners create many dust transactions to artificially increase transaction fees? How will we be able to stop them?

In the last year, I have noticed the following situation repeatedly in the Bitcoin community:

- Ordinal users broadcast their transactions.
- Suddenly, users panic and deem Bitcoin as non-usable (which is partly true).
- Users propose solutions, most of which include the censorship of Ordinals.
- Nobody does a thing in response.
- A new wave of Ordinals is broadcasted.

Somehow, people believe that complaining on Internet boards about this will magically fix it. If you cannot propose a viable solution, or implement it, then chances are, it won't fix itself. Censoring Ordinals, at least at this point, is not a solution. Maybe you disagree with me, but I don't find it appropriate for a censorship resistant network to censor transactions that don't pass the "monetary transaction" check of some.

Here you go. That is absolutely acceptable. The thing is: will it find support? Financially and in terms of development. Because as far as history is concerned, Bitcoin forks don't go well.

A better suggestion would be to opt out to a reputable altcoin, like Monero. At least for small amount of transactions. It already has support and a dynamical block size limit.

This mess is getting bigger and bigger with each passing day without any action being taken to prevent it. The natural consequence is that for the quick profit of a few, the masses are moved away from the adoption of bitcoin considering how expensive the fees have been for some months.
Back to OP topic : is the transaction mentioned in this tweetrelated to Nintendo thing or is it just another nuisance goin on there ?

Who says there are 4 billion people that want to play games and 100 that want to buy coffee? As it stands now, it's possible there are 100 that want to play games and outbid 4 billion people that want to buy coffee, making the blockchain an ideal playground for those 100 whilst driving 4 billion people away causing long term damage to the ecosystem... What i'm saying is that IF a change was proposed, at least you'd know what the people want... Maybe a proposition would gain majority support, maybe it wouldn't... Maybe it would be dropped, maybe a fork would occur... Maybe 2 forks would live next to eachother, maybe one of the forks would dissapear. As it stands right now, nobody knows the ratio, we only know the "game players" have more money than the "coffee drinkers".

As for the miners: you do have a point... Nobody did care when they went out of business but when they're making a lot of money suddenly there's drama... Truth be told, i don't care either way (i don't care if they get rich or if they are forced to close their business), i just want to be able to be part of the ecosystem, and that includes not having to spend $30 to make a $100 purchase. I would be fine with paying more than i used to pay in the past in order to keep a reasonable amount of miners "in the green" so the blockchain remains safe, i would also think it would be ok if some miners decided to leave the ecosystem because they could not add 3000 transactions with an average fee of $30 to their blocks aswell.

The thing is that i've used bitcoin mostly as a form of payment, and not a store of value (i'm not saying i don't hold a little bit and hope the price rises). At the moment, it is completely impossible for me (and with me a lot of users) to use the main chain as a payment method for anything under the value of ~$250, since the fiat value of the average fee has been between $10 and $30 the last couple of weeks.

When you talk about a free market, i personally think this market would also need an alternative... Even if this means a fork... If you agree with the fact ordinals are abusing a vulnerabilty, use the "bitcoin" fork, mine on the bitcoin fork, have bitcoin fork wallet,... If you want to keep on pushing ordinal crap and nintendo games, by all means, switch to the bitcoin-ordinal fork, mine on said fork, have a bitcoin-ordinal wallet... I'm pretty sure the fork with the majority of the community behind it would be the fork that would make it big. It's all about freedom and choice.

I really want to see how is this majority defined and who gets to vote.


Yeah, I'm stating to get some kulaks purge vibes here 
Nobody cared when miners went out of business, nobody cared when sky high tariffs change made them losing money, but when some feel like they are getting too much profits, chop their heads, ungrateful bastards how dare they invest and risk their money in a business and not do what we tell them to!
It's pretty easy to get rid of those miners, the community just have to buy a few millions 5KW Asics, set them up and mine over at Luke's Censorship Church..of wait,  Ocean Pool.


Bitcoin and the blockchain are tools, users define how they are used and what they are, that's the beauty of it!
If 4 billions want to play games on the blockchain and 100 want to use it to buy coffee, how do you define what the blockchain is about?

They should store it on Internet Archive, other archival service or Bitcoin sidechain. But at least it's less spammy compared with most data inserted to Bitcoin blockchain through Ordinal.


Nothing can stop people from doing that. But as long as software you use (e.g. wallet) doesn't execute binary or code by itself, in practice there's no security risk.

Well there ARE rules, there is a protocol... It has been there since the start and it has changed in the past due to vulnerability's... I'm not saying it would be easy to change the protocol, but, IMHO with what's happening now it would be ok if the developers proposed a protocol change and see if there's a majority that would agree on this.

It would be tough to convince miners to give up part of their short term profits for the long term goal of keeping bitcoin attractive to new users tough... There probably would be (a lot of) drama... Short term it wouldn't do us any good... But for me, it's clear the blockchain's usecase wasn't to host nintento sourcecode or keep those ordinal guys happy... It was designed as an immutable ledger to store transaction data.

And here comes the no pills taken in the last month paranoia
So some gamers are saving Nintendo games in the Bitcoin blockchain to stop the dollar from bring replaced by the russian ruble and Iranian rial  


And suddenly a permisionless blockchain is not that good anymore as we need some rules, somebody to enforce those rules, but...nobody in charge!  
Never gets old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_-w_T-t8aM
As for the fees, yeah, some farmers in India make a ton of cash by selling rice at 2 euros per bag in Europe where a shitload of it goes wrong in storehouse, rather than selling it for 10 cents in Central Africa where people are at risk of starvation.  Welcome to a free economy in the real world, where the ones that have money can outbid the ones that don't have!


I'm gonna wait till they put the whole Ark game with all the expansions there, I had a nearly perfect bred Trex I spent days on getting only to have him lost in a battle by some really damn stupid bug The size of the game might be a problem since it seems it's 230GB on my drive but...you never know!
But till I get that, just witnessing this is pretty entertaining enough!  

I personally think that those ordinals guys are abusing the blockchain... Sure, there's no central authority and the current protocol allows them to do what they're doing, it still doesn't mean that they're not abusing the blockchain.
The miners make some nice profit from the fact "real" users have to outbid those ordinal folks, but i've heared new users actually giving up on bitcoin due to the large fees and the unpredictability those ordinal guys are bringing in the average confirmation time. I think nobody realises this abuse might have negative results in the end.

Now they're thinking about using the blockchain to store this kind of data? I think that's preposterous...  Why would thousands of nodes want to use their disk capacity to store this kind of crap?

I personally hope the devs and the miners start to show at least a little bit of concern and close this "attack vector" (yes, i see this ordinal crap as an attack on the community)

These people, bitcoin purist needs to understand what likee let's be serious bitcoin has always been able to minimise its scalability problems, then Ordinals showed up and now these people are becoming innovative to creating games. I guess those dev say Ordinals will die down, will be sensible to do the right thing now.
Don't really know why they just don't want to create a separate Blockchain for Ordinals and everyone would be happy.

That's what happens when the community (users, devs, node operators, miners, etc.) is lazy and doesn't do anything to fix the exploit that is being abused for about a year now. The abuse keeps growing.
It's only a matter of time before illegal stuff is going to be pushed to the bitcoin blockchain in a way that would raise enough alarms for the authorities to start doing something to bitcoin like banning it for example. Shutting down mining pools, seizing ASICs, and other crazy stuff... We know they're desperate for an excuse already specially since dedollarisation is getting stronger...

Ja, on the technical end of it, for 1, currently it is targeting the low data space vintage Nintendo games, specifically the SNES. From the article:
What would be awesome would be porting Castle Wolfenstein and its later progeny such as Doom to a blockchain. Just not the BTC one...

A more detailed article about it is here

edit - it seems that they already did it with Doom!
Link to the preview version here.  

One huge concern I have is using recursive inscriptions to hold code that can be assembled into an executable - in this case the SNES emulator... What is to stop using the chain to distribute malware or C&C code for it?

I have mixed thoughts about it. On the one hand you have the issue of transactions becoming really expensive because the blockchain is being used for dumb stuff like this, but on the other hand, this fear of how in the long run Bitcoin would collapse upon itself in 100 years when mining rewards were too low, perhaps are now out of the question because all these weird usages people are willing to make out of the blockchain? at the end of the day as long as there is demand for the blockchain, there will be fees an thus there will be miners working on processing blocks. But one would also assume that fees would be high in the future due transactions alone. We will see how things develop, but removing ordinals doesn't seem realistic right now.

Yes, they've inscribed an entire Nintendo Entertainment System simulator on the blockchain, complete with the game code.


Currently, you only pay for creating a new "ninja," which is only 1 KB. However, they claim some other features are in the pipeline. For instance, saving the game status on-chain. Imagine finishing level 5, instead of saving that locally, you inscribe that worthless piece of info on the blockchain. So, the next time you open the game, it picks up where you left off. And yes, your friends can witness your game status too.

It's incredible how people find ways to create value out of seemingly trivial things, and even worse how many people buy into this. Love them or hate them, those devs are as sharp as a tack.

Now there are plans in progress to archive vintage Nintendo console games in them.
One fun bit is that the code for playing them through a Web-3 based emulator is stored there as well.

Thoughts?