Topic: If Bitcoin Ordinals endlessly spam the Bitcoin mempool to the brim, what next? (Read 373 times)

That's means those newcomers have another strategic point they are after, or they are ignorant of Bitcoin, it's only when someone is focused,it will have it's means of getting rich without following everyone's root, but a situation that no plans is been made the person will end up of arriving with nothing, a newcomers should have primary and secondary plans, because theirs no one anticipating to arrive to something or somewhere without a qualified plan, to be rich is something that deal's with calculation.

Yeah. That's what happens when bitcoin is introduced to people as an "investment" instead of a currency. We get newcomers who don't really want to use bitcoin but instead they want to become rich (in fiat).
This is exactly why some people are happy about the Ordinals Attack too, since they saw an opportunity for more profit while not caring about the fee spike and the chain spam!

I also have this opinion, to be honest I have never felt the benefits of NFT since its first presence.
If it is possible to make token-based transaction fees differentiated (several times more expensive) than regular bitcoin transaction fees, I would put forward this proposal to temper their use. This really sucks and will be more in the coming days.

Like i said (and showed) before, the nodes rejected the 1~2 sat/b tx forcing me to triplicate this value to be accepted again and yet its still waiting. The obvious thing is pay more fees thanks to the spammers for you, but not for everybody else.

its funny how people in another topic are talking about a coinbase advert where the advert is saying how fiat is slow taking days to make international payments where fee's are high and how coinbase wants to "fix the system"

then there is this topic where people are saying 'just pay more fee's', 'just wait a few days then make a payment', 'just make a payment and wait a few days for it to settle'

then we have another group that then say. if you dont like bitcoin delays 'use a custodian' or 'use a subnetwork' (that uses middlemen who charge fees to facilitate payments)

..
1sat/byte makes a 250byte LEAN tx $0.05 minimum

yet i remember the days pre 2016 where fees were fee's were below $0.05 even when bloated. and no one was shouting "just wait a few days" nor "just use a custodial or altnetwork"

how things have changed

But you could wait for 2-3 days and send a transaction 3 times cheaper?
Wasn't this the way you responded to everyone complaining about high fees over the years?
Just send 1sat/b and wait a bit more! Or, more interestingly, why aren't you using LN? It was supposed to fix this thing, milisatoshi fees!


Check back tomorrow bro, it's not even funny!  

Maybe it's about time to stop chasing the tail every single time there is a bloat in the mempool and do the obvious thing!

I was not referring to every miner, i clearly said certain, implying an specific individual who made such comments. But if you want to feel elitist as well and ridicule people for wanting to do normal transactions, that is your choice.

Its been 10 days, 3 since the spam forced me to triplicate the tx fee, still waiting... Are you happy with the suffering of others? Is your mining op any healthier now? Enjoy the price...

they took in ~3500-4000tx a block each with average tx size of about 300-500byte where the tx paid high fee's

seems binance and viapool the two main pools that allow ordinals.. accept the crap memes in at cheap fee's and ignore normal lean transactions.. but then decided to put in lots of normal payment tx who paid high fee's

Let's believe this challenge won't last long, but am so less worried about it since there's an alternative to it, yet i also in other hand believe work is ongoing to lessen the effect seeing from the introduction of bitcoin ordinance, remember this wasn't in place before and by tomorrow we may as well have an entire Change of story, the difference in the increase of transaction charges is not that much.

To date, they are using way less than the average fee users pay, and I really doubt it will go higher, the cost must be reflected by demand on the market and there isn't one yet that would cover millions in daily fees.


Depends, I've seen them consolidating at 1sat/b and at 10sat/ even with an empty mempool so quite hard to track.
There is another thing that is messing with the fees right now,  some really bad luck happening right now, we just had blocks with 5sat/b, then this:

Block 780016 Timestamp   ‎2023-03-09 16:05 (2 hours ago)
Block 780017 Timestamp   ‎2023-03-09 16:27 (1 hour ago)
Block 780018 Timestamp   ‎2023-03-09 17:57 (14 minutes ago)

and fees jumped to 40sat/b , of course after one and a half hours of no blocks mined...

My guess is that Ordinal transactions will be using the same amount of fees as average transactions, and not significantly more, so the only thing that will be noticeable is a fee rate that goes somewhere between 10 and 20 sats/vbyte.


BTW, I feel like the median fee is heavily skewed by exchange consolidation transactions.

In my opinion it will depend on the market that these scams are being sold on.
Remember that this is not a normal spam attack. In a normal one the attacker has to spend money and as the fees go up their spam "budget" shrinks real fast.
In this type of spam where they are selling some garbage to idiots, those idiots are going to be willing to pay any fee. Just check out the very high withdrawal fees that exchanges charge to get your bitcoin out. Since the incentive for the Ordinals bag holder is high (there would be money to be made in a parallel market) they would happily pay the high fee while regular/normal bitcoin users don't have that incentive.

So it depends on whether that parallel market is going to get big or not. If we're lucky people would realize Ordinals is a scam and an attack on bitcoin and won't pump and dump the completely abstract and virtual token hence this nonsense dies.

Otherwise the full nodes should take swift steps to reject any tx containing the Ordinals junk and if that didn't work we need a soft fork to make them invalid by consensus rules.

as for those discussing hashrates and mining
asics do not read transaction data and it does not matter if a block has 1 tx or 3000tx an asic still does the same work based on hashing a 256bit reference id

hashrate does not imply user adoption

also mining costs are not just a math of network hashrate/users asic has = share of btc reward

its also the btc price that affects profitability
when there is a halving the markets also reflect that change in market rate each cycle where the market price increases

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also mempool of unconfirms usually/previously under to a 300mb limit so 500mb of unconfirms is outside the norm and very high amount compared to the norm

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as for artemis saying im proposing anything
sorry but i cant. moderation god-mode egotists aka core devs have banned me out of all platforms that allow expressing ideas outside of the core roadmap plan they prefer

there are other people who have tried to propose stuff but they got their stuff removed too and not acknowledged

core roadmap does not want to byte limit opcodes to prevent future spam because they are going along with the narrative of:

"rejecting 'proof of publication' (their new buzzword for spam)
is Censorship"
even though "publications" are not lean payment data
and previous years bitcoin had consensus (consent aka permission requested) for tx formats to follow a certain format/length to reduce bloat and ensure only payment data got majority accepted into blocks

the core devs wanting to destroy bitcoin as a payment network and want to pretend bitcoin is and always was a publication network. are the exploiters of bitcoin
(peter todd is one of them who created the buzzword)

I'm also a miner, less than before but still clinging there so please don't use this "elitist" thingy.


Sorry but this is just daydreaming!
You guys always look at the hashrate and fail to understand that a bigger hashrate doesn't mean the network is more secure with the same increase it might not even be like that at all.
Back in 2021 the hashrate was 150Exa, a 100TH/s miner was selling for 10k, now the hashrate is at 300exa, and Bitmain is selling 190th/s at 3500$. When was the network more secure? Back then when you needed $10 billion in gear or now when you need $5 billion worth of them?

Make mining unprofitable now and bankrupt all miners, you will see S19 selling at scrap metal value and the hashrate at 5 Exash, you would feel safe knowing a farm that goes though bankruptcy would have enough power in its dusty warehouse to single-handle attack a chain over a month period?


Except that the opposite is happening in reality:


And I'm willing to bet that a search on the forum between "I'm not stupid to spend my coins like that pizza guy when I can be a millionaire tomorrow by holding" and "I'm using bitcoin for my daily expenses" would have a  100:1 ratio.

new version of core allows people to pay less than 1sat per byte
(sats/kb is more used now thus without the spam, fee's would be A HECK OF ALOT CHEAPER)

the ordinal meme crap is using it to pay under 1sat per byte. while the promoted propaganda is for everyone else to pay more then 1sat/byte

so while the smart/insider people pay less and bloat up blocks. the normal users who dont have the inside scoop end up paying more.. which make "average" fee look normal... but real result is those normal users just wanting to make normal payment are paying more while annoying spammers pay less

EG simple math demo:
if 3.7mb is paying 0.5sat/byte (1 tx of spam meme)
and 0.3 is paying 20sats/byte (500 normal payments of premium fee)

the block appears the average is under 2sat per byte

1850000 1 spam total
6000000 500 payments total
7850000 combined
/4000000 bytes
=1.9625 sats per byte

This is ironic, since we ended with 4mb blocks but with spam instead of actual transactions. Yet, franky1 and others are doing some proposals that should be considered. Rules were relaxed which allowed the abuse, now that its been demonstrated, those should be restored to deter the spammers so they rather go elsewhere.

Soon we are going to see a repeat of Jan 2018, or can even be worse. The altcoiners will be happy to drive down the price as much as they can, people can actually lose confidence harming the project in the long term.

Unlike what a certain elitist miner said elsewhere, ridiculing normal people that are actually trying to use bitcoin for basic needs, harming of normal transactions for the sake of enriching the few can only lead to value drop for the people who have come to this project intending to pay and be paid with it. That elitist wants bitcoin as electronic cash to be destroyed so he can profit a few years more. Its like when a business starts becoming unprofitable from being obsolete but the companies demand the State to intervene so they don't go bankrupt.

Mining is destined to become unprofitable, that is what the halving is for. 90% is already minted and will logarithmically pay less and less to mine. This doesn't make it any cheaper to do a 51% attack, quite the opposite; you can have the same security with less miners as designed since the benefit will be less than the cost of the attack itself. See, the fact that mining is less profitable, means its even more expensive to perform the attack even with less miners, so its fine.

But this is no reason to push for the destruction of the original intent of this project. Yeah they had "fun" mining and some became filthy rich (and now think they are above everybody else "plebs"). Well its time to retire if you can't manage the current costs where you are, others will take the torch and keep mining long after that elitist gives up, so there is no need to do anything in this regard. Certainly not invite spammers in to give "value". See, this type of elitist never believed in Bitcoin, so they think this is "needed" (since to them Bitcoin values nothing). No its not. The value of Bitcoin is being p2p electronic cash for the world, not a spam archive sold at a premium.

The more Bitcoin is adopted, the more transactions, and higher fees but destined to transactions, not spam. El Salvador is giving the example, its not "asset" its electronic cash to be used like it has been in the entire world without the State, banks of any third party entities such as exchanges.

Of course there is a bunch of interests converging here against Bitcoin, what do they care as long as they get profit? So where does it end?

new version of core allows sats per KB
meaning the average fee can be under 1sat per byte now.. thus means average fee should be cheaper since a couple months ago .. which ordinal bloat is using(paying under 1sat/byte)

however users doing normal payments(not updated) are still paying in whole X sat/byte allotments
thus normal payments are paying more.. while new bloats are paying far less

there are some bloat memes paying nothing at all

..
yep a couple months ago the new core version changed its fee mechanism to be less sats per byte by allowing measures of sats per kb

if you look at the fee chart the fees went down.. then this ordinal meme crap happened and fees went up

so comparing now to 4 months ago it looks like nothing much has changed..
when in reality fees's went down by alot then up due to this saga of promoting that users should pay more

Neah, it's not crazy! Or better saying it, not yet!
And the fees are not that bad either, the last block that was mined, 779946, confirmed 15sat/b transactions, that's way cheaper than what we had in 2018 when you couldn't get in the next block even at 10 times that

Just look at this:
https://mempool.space/block/0000000000000000000e9fbc462c2e196f19da54eec678e701a0648cce63d29b

The difference here is that ordinals can't afford to pay those fees, not when you're inscribing crap that will not get you more than 10$, so there won't be any fee race that will drive the prices to such levels.

Just an update

The mempool is now getting towards 500 MBs of unconfirmed transactions, and it isn't even one of those times when the market is crazy and people are in panic moving BTC back and forth.



This is crazy already! I have never seen the mempool at 500 MB, Maybe I wasn't just observant in the past. Imagine what will happen during a serious bull run or dump!

And those who said that transaction fees will keep low because people will not join the fee race, Just look at the fee rate right now, and it's just getting started @tbct_mt2 @ 

idiots say people and protocols cant identify spam. and a fee mechanism of 'punish everyone' by making every pay more is the only option
.. they are wrong

spam is identifiable,
repeatedly spending value every block = spam
adding in memes into a financial network = spam
having a crap tonne of outputs with sat-dust amounts = spam

its those types of transactions that should have fee multipliers in them. not everyone in general
and yes if they can make legacy end up costing 4x more.. then yes they can punish certain transactions more than others

Everyone's warranted to their own say, in any case I see this issue with Bitcoin Ordinals as having both good and bad sides to it.

For instance, since this spams the mempool and jacks the transaction price high, at least in the future coz the effects aren't that much apparent nowadays, this will cause huge problems for the growth of the network and the industry itself, might even cause a huge collapse as more and more people switch to a different network that is not as congested as bitcoin could be in the future.

There's also the story of the past where a certain challenge (which I forgot the details of really) urged the whole network to improve upon itself and better cater to the general public, I can see this being the more apparent outcome in this situation but the former could still pose some truth, especially nowadays.

You can't get rid of the spam, Bitcoin network can't distinguish spam from non-spam, the mechanism to combat that is the fee market. If people are willing to pay high fees for some stupid NFT use case, there's nothing we can do. If the community decided to make a hard fork and remove the unintentional NFT feature, that would create more problems than it solves, because it doesn't fundamentally address the fee market, and spam can return in other forms.

Nothing, we just pay more and I might start mining again with all those juicy fees! 
If the fees stay high it means there is still usage, so people keep paying, just as how it happens with ETH, it will be bad for the ones doing transactions on the chain but at the same time it will have a positive effect on pushing more LN adoption. One more positive fact is that it is driving franky1 mad, as seen above!


Highly unlikely to see any change, after the block size war nobody will try to open that can of worms again, especially since it would mean actually acknowledging a bit of what big blockers were saying is true. The only other thing is to ban ordinals, but that opens another box, this time it's Pandora's turn. So, the users will have to adapt or at least wait till the hype will die, which I assume will be faster than most expect.

As I had already said in another thread, the issue of NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain will be short-lived but above all I don't understand why people have begun to notice only now that these images can be recorded, if you analyze the past blocks you will realize that in the blockchain it was saved a little bit of everything including the images.

There is yet no known method for discouraging this spam without introducing censorship other than the transaction fee. So no improvements. You just have to accept that these are perfectly valid and currency-based transactions, unless you want Bitcoin to switch to a pro-censorship network.

How can you distinguish spam on a protocol level to punish it?

My two satoshis! NFTs are just bullshit and makes no sense at all. Just a bunch of spammers in disguise of creators, trying to play games on digital contents.


I don't see any possibility for now. But if this becomes a madness, then it needs to be eliminated. But unfortunately that's not how the decentralised network works. A serious amount of efforts need to be taken before getting this done. I will still request to wait and watch for couple of days.

So we have a collection of entities interested in spamming Bitcoin, that are now observing how its possible to do so in a sustainable way... Since there is a market willing to pay for the spam in detriment of genuine transactions...

Altcoins want to do this. Altcoin enthusiasts believe in promises of altcoin developers that they are building very potential chains.

After people pour into a new potential chain, it will be over loaded and congested, then become halted or dead like Solana  

Ethereum in 2017 tried to say it too but in 2018 bull run of Ethereum and in 2020, 2021 of Defi 2.0, GameFi, Metaverse, transaction fees on Ethereum chain are for the rich, not for normal crypto users like us.

If the fees rise, what will force the person to use the main network while the possibility of using the lightning network? Or any solutions for the second layer? Just like it happened with polygon.
The problem of fees is considered a problem by increasing the alert, which is the real transactions that must be conducted on the network, and therefore the more users increase, the more this problem appears, but its solution will be by developing more and more solutions. As for spam, it is temporary and linked to a specific trend such as NFT, and it is not sustainable growth.

This is not a long term solution though and it would bring many inconveniences to people who want to make transactions daily. You cannot use a currency for every day use if you have to wait for the weekends to use it. I think something needs to be done about ordinals and maybe making lightening network mandatory is the best solution.

Can we make a new fork and stop ordinals from congesting the blockchain by not allowing the data to be posted?

in my opinion, the new utility made people just test what it is and how it works, and hence such interest and spam on the network. Sooner or later it will calm down, the volume of this type of transactions will drop by 99% and everything will return to normal, because as you yourself pointed out "just another bullshit"

High fees will also push such transactions to other chains (like BSC).

But we should know that low segwit adoption was not the casuse of mempool congestion at the time. The first mempool congestion at the time was after bitcoin halving, when more people started to buy bitcoin that resulted to mempool congestion. The second was when Chinese government banned bitcoin mining to the extent that mining hash rate reconded in china at the time went down to zero, over 60% of the bitcoin hash rates were from Chinese miners, this resulted in reduction of mining hash rates and increase in block mined time getting beyond 10 minutes most often and this resulted in mempool congestion until the mining difficulty was adjusted.

"good enough" for whom.. since when?
you do know that a third of the worlds hourly minimum wage is below a tx fee currently.. right?

do you really think that paying an hour of labour to move money is "good enough"
im british. but even i can see outside of my local expectation and think about international concerns of an international currency

anyway. lets see if things really have got better or worse since segwit..


2016(pre segwit) the average btc was ~$450
meaning 0.00000100 was  $0.00045
so an average 2in 2out tx (374byte) at 100 sat/byte =$0.1683

2022(pre ordinal) the average btc was ~$17000
meaning 0.00000005 was  $0.00085
meaning 0.00000010 was  $0.0017
 the average transaction size was 650bytes
at 5sat/byte was $0.5525
at 10sat/byte was $1.105

the data/stats for 2022 show the average transaction cost for 2022 was more like $1.17
not 55c nor 17cents
..
as for saying
"just pay more join the fee war"
"just wait longer, upto a couple days for confirm"
"just wait for weekends to make a payment"

are all silly delay, excuses to not get the fee's sorted and the transactions per block sorted. by instead saying "yea dont use bitcoin as much or be prepared to wait or pay more"

those silly excuses are not good to tell people to do in a payment system

especially when its ethos is a payment system for the unbanked whereby the unbanked population see $1 as many hours of minimum wage

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the solution is not "pay more".. "wait longer".. "use another network"

the solution is:
leaner transactions
fee mechanism that punishes the spammers not the lean/genuine spenders
remove the byte-miscounting cludge and open the 4mb for genuine payment data not dead 'weight'

result is more genuine transaction payments per block. meaning people pay less per tx but more get access per block

Yeah, the powers that be are sabotaging Bitcoin to make you flee to a parallel blockchain or a more centralized "workaround", rather than genuine Bitcoin. Their plan seems to be going fine, they found a vulnerability and are exploiting it...

tbct_mt2 when you say "people join the fee rate", you seem to skip the fact that its the wallets doing it automatically. If some exchange wants to move coins around from a cold wallet or whatever, a domino effect spreads "automatically" thanks to this "guess the network fee" algorithm. Rarely people know to disable the guessing and go with a manually set tx fee, they will just blame it on Bitcoin being "expensive/useless".

So now that spam is pegging the mempool to the max, what will happen the next time such event occurs? What when the next Ordinals comes and joins the spamming because its more lucrative for them to sell spam than do Bitcoin transactions? Of course recommending "other" methods of payment, soon the Bitcoin blockchain will be dedicated to this since they are willing to pay more than mere transactions would.

No doubt to the benefit of altcoiners, etc; that want to bury Bitcoin.

Challenge is helpful for growth.

In 2017, the dust attack and spam on network helps us to have a better capacity of Bitcoin network to handle transactions today.
In 2023, the Ordinals attack can force Bitcoin developers and community to build new solution and reach to a new consensus to make a better capacity for it. It's good, not harmful in long term.

Waiting transactions in mempools are low transaction fee rates. People don't join fee race too much as I see. Fee rates are about 10 sat/vbyte are good enough and if you can wait for weekends, you can use lower fee rates like 3 to 5 sat/vbyte.

https://mempool.space/

It is different than 2 or 3 years ago with low Segwit adoption, people joined fee rate race and use very high rates like 50 sat/vbyte or 100 sat/vbyte.

No for now, maybe it would be possible with other accepted proposals in the future.

Make use if lightning network.
Wait for the weekends to see lower mempool congestion and lower fee most probably.

That is all I could think of right now.

Overview:

Source

My general opinion about NFTs still remains the same, just another bullshit way of getting money from gullible noobs by "creators"

Now the issue is these NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain have started to spam the Bitcoin network. The mempool usage is moving towards 300 MB consequently spiking the transactions fees



What happens if the spam stays on for months or even a year plus (Well, we know what happened to Ethereum)?

Will there be a case where the community decides to improve the Bitcoin network to get rid of the spam?