Topic: NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory - page 13. (Read 9195 times)

Yeah, i don't expect it'll be implemented on BTC. Although articles you mentioned doesn't mention how it reduce size of transaction which already confirmed (inside a block), unless i missed something.


So you don't consider a node as a peer in P2P/Bitcoin network? And as reminder, LN have routing feature where you're not directly connected to another node to send/receive Bitcoin.

That's utter nonsense.  Just because information is broadcasted instead of just sent to the peer, it doesn't mean it stops being peer-to-peer.  Neither technically, nor theoretically.  Bitcoin on-chain transactions are peer-to-peer because nobody can intervene in the transaction, simple as that.  Nobody but the two peers.

But how the whole system is actually designed shows that it's not just a network for "peer to peer electronic cash" is it?


Have you truly tried to understand how the protocol works and what its implications are? It's not a decentralized PayPal, that I can tell you. It's much much more.

And technically, Bitcoin onchain transactions are not peer to peer. They propagate to the whole network. Lightning transactions, that's peer to peer.

Probably it should be done in every block. Also, it should not be put directly into block data, but it should be just a commitment instead.

Because if the real commitment is:
Then you can easily mine a block with fake commitment, for example:
It is exactly the same problem as putting a fake sidechain commitment, and withdrawing coins from a sidechain to different addresses.
If you don't know the history, and you only know the UTXO set, then you don't know if "Dave 4.00 BTC" entry is fake or not. You have to locate that entry in some previous block, and validate it. Also, as you cannot trust the previous block either, you have to go to the previous block of the previous block. And by going recursively, you will end up in a situation, where to be 100% sure that all UTXOs are real, you have to verify everything from the Genesis Block.

obviously you propogate the utxo set forward. think of it like every 1000 blocks gets the entire utxo set put into it. what would you need older blocks for in that case? you'll probably say "for verification". verfication of what?

Not quite sure, but I think in MimbleWimble, full nodes eliminate most of transaction data overtime as they only store unspent outputs indefinitely. But I haven't read the potential disadvantages of this. By the way, it has already been implemented in Litecoin.

What does a hard fork have to do with that?

It reduces the blockchain size a lot.

So are you going to erase old blocks? What about people who haven't moved their funds during the last 10+ years?

MimbleWimble solves that, but BTC won't do a hard fork.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/what-is-mimblewimble-and-how-does-it-work
https://www.coinspeaker.com/guides/what-is-mimblewimble-blockchain/

Again: there's no way BTC will adopt this.

the only people it wouldn't sound good to is someone that is trying to use bitcoin to store jpegs. trust me it sounds good. the utxo set is what needs to be stored, not all the old transactions necessarily that's what i think anyway...

what's Mimble Wimble got to do with blockchain size?

How about people get tired of a huge blockchain that's terabytes in size?

That doesn't sound good, but you can have a look at MimbleWimble.

But still, there's no way BTC does a hard fork, unless something radical happens (SHA-256 collision, quantum computing etc.)

well, that all depends on how fast technology progresses in the areas of storage sizes of SSDs/HDDs and how powerful CPUs get. And how fast internet connection speeds can get. Even with all of that new tech, if prices stay high and keep them out of reach of normal people I mean who is going to pay $700 to get a 30TB HDD? just so they can store the blockchain?

That's why they say with larger block sizes bitcoin becomes less decentralized because not as many full nodes...but on the other hand, there does seems to be a serious problem that bitcoin can't scale and needs layer 2 solutions. if they come up with a way to throw away all the X oldest blocks periodically then that could guarantee the blockchain never gets bigger than a certain size and then you could have block sizes as big as you wanted.

Of course there is some truth in what Keiser says both in regards to fiats going to zero and also in terms of bitcoiners gaining more and more power with the passage of time, but he's also exaggerating (parody right) certain kinds of points. 

There are transitions and battles along the way (and even currently), and surely bitcoin is for friends and for enemies and can be used in any way that people want within the parameters of current consensus rules, and if they are able to convince (in order to gain consensus) to change the rules to their advantage, then bitcoin can be used in other ways too - yet with the passage of time, we have witnessed that bitcoin is becoming more and more difficult to change - at least in terms of some of the more steadfast principles, yet there have been ways that softforks have been created and adopted and there have been ways that people have learned to build systems within the existing rules, whether upon second layer or seemingly first layer with the ordinals and inscriptions and other ways that innovations have come from already existing rules.

There is no need to appeal to the white paper or to what Satoshi thought or what he might have thought, even though surely the way that Satoshi put bitcoin into play did set up some ground expectations - and some of those set ups continue to be true, yet people still can use bitcoin how they like, whether they believe it to be a way to store value or ways to transfer (transact) value or even other ways, and we do not even need to agree regarding how many bitcoin that we believe that we need to store (stack up) as compared to other things that we might invest into, and still it does seem that with the passage of time value is going to continue to gravitate into bitcoin, even if we do not necessarily agree how bitcoin can be used or should be used, and some folks will advantage more than others in terms of the extent to which they stacked sats and invested their time and energies into bitcoin, and figured out how to balance their spending of lesser valued assets first.. such as fiat and other investments that they might make that still might retain value (perhaps some of that utility value and some of that resale value.. and some assets have expenses involved with them....)

We cannot live inside of a bitcoin, even though we can buy property with some or all of our bitcoin.. and we can buy property with fiat too.. but then where are we going to store our value and in what proportions?  How about equities, commodities or the creation of a business?  That's up to each of us, no?

Even with bitcoin, we might find that we have various ways that we might be able to transact with it, and sometimes it might be cumbersome to figure out how to use (and who accepts it and in what form) - or we might not know how to put our bitcoin into wallets that we might be able to control the transaction fees (coin control and other mechanisms), and if we are trying to use lightning network to save fees, we might have some difficulties with wallets that might have difficulties during stress periods (such as some of the troubles that Muun found itself in during the earlier parts of this year.. I am not sure if they fixed their issues because I do not use their wallet),

...and it is NOT necessarily easy to learn these things - including that we might also have had been getting attacked by Blackrock (and like status quo financial entities teaming up with government institutions.. maybe not an exact coordination, but some kind of coordination seeming to be going on) in the coming years, if Black Rock's ETF (or whatever) product gets approved and they start to purchase a lot of BTC on behalf of their clients, but their clients don't even have abilities to control "their" coins that Blackrock is holding... Then we have already seen how some of those big institutions (we might see it with Greyscale and GBTC) retain various ways that they had been able to lock up bitcoin and to control bitcoin (at least the ones they locked up) that might not exactly had been consensual from the clients who might not have had know what kind of a product that they are getting into.

Sometimes we might not even realize the ways that bitcoin is being attacked - and the mere fact that the chain is being used by NFT aficionados causes use cases on bitcoin and causes on chain fees to rise, but still seems to be within current rules and does not even seem to be creating any kind of emergency to fix (even though some bitcoiners act like there is an emergency, and perhaps the creation of an emergency is a kind of an attack) - even though at the same time, we cannot always know the extent to which bitcoin fees are going to adjust in ways that still incentivizes use and incentivizes miners to mine it.. currently and into the future..

It surely is good to be having on chain bitcoin use cases (such as ordinals/inscriptions), even if we might not agree with some of the newly created use cases, and even if some of them might be attacks that in their current state don't seem likely to be successful.. if there are efforts to make bitcoin weaker, just like Blackrock is not necessarily going to be successful in its attacks on bitcoin, but no one can really stop Blackrock and the government to team up to try to attack bitcoin and to attempt to cause more paper bitcoin and to lure people into paper bitcoin..

I have me doubts about Blackrock's abilities to control bitcoin, even though  they seem to be wanting to try to do that if they get their ETF, and in in the short term, we are going to witness various differences of opinion and different ways of trying to use bitcoin whether we are referring to Blackrock and the government or if we are referring to Ordinals/inscriptions that some of us might not agree with those uses of bitcoin, but there may be difficulties in terms of stopping any of these people from coming to their own interpretations regarding how they would like to use bitcoin and whether Satoshi approved or not. 

Satoshi is no longer here.. (at least in terms of a live interacting being) since 2010, if you had not noticed.  The rules are the rules and people can interpret them how they like or try to break bitcoin if they like, and we will see if incentives continue to make bitcoin stronger and more resilient or if there might be ways that bitcoin changes or becomes weaker... I don't see any reason to bet on it's becoming weaker, even if some people might be using bitcoin in ways that don't seem to be within original intentions of Satoshi or anyone else, to the extent that part even matters.

Maybe in the future we could have an omnipotent & unbiased A(G)I (not ChatGPT) and ask it what's the best solution to scale Bitcoin...

But even an AI won't be able to change BTC's consensus rules... well, unless it's an uber advanced SkyNet-like AI that has captured the computation devices of the entire world.

Then maybe it could rewrite the rules itself in the most efficient manner, but the humanity would face an existential crisis (far bigger problem than destroying BTC).

Human beings will never agree on changing BTC's consensus rules, so arguing seems pointless IMHO.

That is the law of demand and supply of block capacity directly speaking.

I have already told you. It's the same drawback as to why enhancing the privacy on the protocol might not be worth it: maintaining conservative approach. Mess around with backwards compatibility, do reckless experiments for the sake of progression, and you just have a new toy in the grand computer software collection that ultimately failed.

Just to clarify, so you don't ask me again: The extra storage that the node operators will need to possess isn't the issue per se. The issue lies in the notion of breaking backwards compatibility to enjoy some short-term relaxation, despite the immeasurable mountain of evidence that suggests otherwise in a provably successful conservative approach.

Backwards compatible software means to run two instances of it, and ensure that both can seamlessly communicate and interact with each other. When prior-version and post-version nodes have a mismatch in their chain, it indicates that something has broken along the way.

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By the way, I see you keep mentioning global adoption. You do know it can't work without second layers unless the chain weights a VISA data center, right?

If i'm not mistaken the whitepaper mentions bitcoin as a peer to peer electronic cash . And how have you come up to the conclusion that bitcoin can weaken and breakdown political strongholds ? By buying senators like Max Keiser said ? That's what bitcoin has become ? A means to create another caste to rule the world ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bh3ObPjcFE&t=52s
I think that you are the one that have a different definition and understanding of what bitcoin is . Try read the whitepaper to understand why bitcoin was invented .

I'd like you to point me to any post that satoshi makes such a political statement .

Required! Man, this sounds like the bank telling me to pay the 10$ card maintenance or fuck off!
Still haven't told me the major drawback of rising the block size to 4MB or 8 MB.
What element or property of Bitcoin would be in danger and what is the major threat?


I hope Satoshi is still alive otherwise he would be the first human to die twice, the second from rolling in his grave!
But again, how will 4MB blocks stop Bitcoin from being censorship resilient and borderless?


We were talking about backwards compatibility! You're talking about old nodes rejecting new blocks!
Every single new node will still see the old chain as valid, that's backward when the new system can operate with the older one!


[1] Bitcoin Transactions last 24h   428,070
[2] Dogecoin Transactions last 24h 478,009
[3] Ethereum Transactions last 24h 1,063,142

I copy-pasted your numbers so I might have got the ranking messed up   But anyhow, having more transactions in a day is irrelevant to global adoption, right? What matters is the market cap!!! /s How stupid of me!

People are already working on that. Maybe not as much as it should, but they do. Until then, you're required to pay an extra buck. The inherent nature of things should make it clear that achieving universal satisfaction is impossible. It is unrealistic to expect a payment network to be simultaneously free-of-charge, uncensored, decentralized, and immutable, without any drawbacks that I cannot even think of.

There are tradeoffs we deal with. If you prioritize transaction cost, use banks. If you prioritize anonymity, use physical cash. If you prioritize the ability to send money via the Internet, in an censorship resilient and borderless fashion use Bitcoin.

Prior-version nodes will reject the new blocks, while post-version nodes will continue normally. That is the definition of a hard fork.

So you're going to dismiss all that research, and assert that there isn't a scaling solution other than tinkering with the block size limit?

And apparently[1][2][3] even fewer are so naive, to use what dismisses all that research of how Bitcoin is proposed to work.

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/
[2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-sv/
[3]

Value isn't the same as usability, gold is valuable but you don't see people sending gold via pigeons to Amazon.
A lot depends on what you think Bitcoin was supposed to fix, and Bitcoin making 100x gains might not be the only thing some thought it's a good idea, maybe some thought of it as an alternative to other things. When the continuous growth will flatten what will be the attractivity if not cheaper borderless uncensored usage?


Nodes only have to validate blocks on the rules since the moment of the change, since there is no running chain with more work that has invalid blocks by the previous rules that become valid right now where would the problem be? Reducing the size would trigger incompatibility, all the previously mined blocks would still be valid under an 8 or 16 MB rule.


Hundreds of academic research mean nothing when you have to put food on the table, just as nobody gives a crap about the world ending in a climate catastrophe when the only way to go to work is by driving a wheeled furnace, or whatever the name of vw models is right now! Few care about academic research when they have to pay 100sat/b or wait for one month till the fees go down!

I don't know how the hell you arrived at the conclusion that just because Litecoin offers more transaction capacity and hasn't been able to go global automatically means Bitcoin shouldn't do that if it wants to go global! Let's do the opposite then, put a limit of 1kb and a block every month, that should lead to universal adoption!
But ok, I can't wait for 2040 when I have a 512 terrabyte smartphone, I can live stream in 1024 over 100Tbs but the blocks will still be the same cause 1MB of memory block size will be enough for anybody!


We've taken a piss so many times on the original design that even a dump now won't be noticed! 

OK, I misunderstood your other post. In reply to that, I can't disagree with your viewpoint. But the design decisions made by Satoshi is what we have. Were there some things that he should have made different? Perhaps, like having a tail emission or something to continue incentivizing the miners in times of low block space demand. But that's a debate for another topic.

Terrorist attack? Lol. You mean that the immutable, decentralized, censorship-resistant, borderless Internet currency suddenly lost all its value because you had to pay an extra dollar as fee? Is that all the value you see? Abrupt fee raise, and suddenly worthless?

If you broadcast an 8 MB sized block at the moment you'll have it rejected, because anything beyond 4 MB is invalid. Validating previous invalid rules requires a hard fork. A hard fork means to break backwards compatibility. (unless you find a way to do this with soft fork; in that case, I'm all ears)

I told you the concern. You simply don't believe it's worth paying an extra dollar (in the short term) to maintain the current conservative status quo as it stands.

If hundreds of pages of academic research, thousands of hours dedicated to discussions, envisioning, and coding of second layer solutions, and the numerous forks of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Litecoin that failed to make progress by simply increasing the block size limit arbitrarily – if all of these do not provide evidence that global adoption cannot be achieved by tinkering with the block size, then I am at a loss for words.

Are we both talking about the trillion project that was under terrorist attack and faced extinction when confronted by some jpg meme?
Also, how is increasing the blocksize breaking backward compatibility?


But what is really the concern then?
Cause we see, the only real concern was that for nearly a month it was so damn expensive to make a tx on the blockchain that many users ended up saying it's better not to use Bitcoin for a while and switch to some shitcoin. If hundreds of pages of people screaming about high fees is not a concern bigger than the price of 1TB of storage, then I must have a completely different view of what "global adoption" and  "usage" mean and also I probably lack the imagination needed how this global adoption will happen with under 500k tx a day. Or 0.15% of the population of the US.


This community here that has posted the graph on Bitcoin adoption vs others a million times on this forum!


Miners protect the network because they get the block reward, when there will be no block reward they will rely on fees, right now, we had an instance where the fees from the transactions were the same as the block reward, in that block the median fee was around 20$.
So to get the same level of protection for the network in the future as we have now, that will have to be at least the average, 24/7, forever!