Topic: NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory - page 14. (Read 9493 times)

Let's take aside the fact that NFTs are "junk", let's put our ideologies at the back seat, and try to look at the fact that the fees from financial transactions alone won't secure the network.

I think it's usually useless to debate motivations: either it's unambiguous, in which case there is no debate... or it's not and there will be no resolution.  Ultimately what matters is what people do, not what motivates them.  If something is explainable as confusion or benign greed, it's prudent to stick with that assumption until facts show otherwise both because it's more likely to be true but also because it has less collateral damage if you're wrong.

As far as the quote--  Your guess is as good as mine as to the intended tone, it's probably a mistake to assume much about it.  It can be extremely difficult to figure out the correct tone from text,  something I know all too well as someone who writes messages intended to sound playful but get received by many as a particularly forceful sermon.  

That said, It's easy to be popular with almost any identifiable clique:  Just yell the party lines louder than other people, hate on the right enemies, cheer on the right heros.  So much so that excessive popularity with an identifiable group can be a red-flag:  People who are genuine will usually have some unpopular opinions, they'll usually have better things to do with their time than sing from the hymn book all day long.   Bitcoin and the adjacent altcoin ecosystems have been full of bad actors using the popularity play book: Even early on many of the top rated OTC participants were scammers.  Plenty of loud twitter voices promoting Bitcoin turned out to only doing it to form a following to sell their scamcoin to... even Craig Wright totally suckered a big swath of large block bitcoiners[1] by saying what they wanted to hear. ([1] whom I disagreed with, but at least the general position was one a (confused) person could honestly adopt... not a con, but Wright managed to turn many people into con-co-conspirators by playing to their biases)

This isn't to say that disagreeable people are more trustworthy,  I think the compulsively disagreeable are even more likely to be bad actors.  There really just isn't a magic formula to figure out good motivations from bad.  But we don't have to-- unless you're shopping for a spouse you don't need to worry about judging people, just consider their actions and your responses.

Seems to me that I listened to a lot of podcasts in which Rodamor was at least one of the participants, and I would not claim to listen to or understand any of substantive meaning, yet I still know that there is a lot of podcast content that I mentioned to you and even provided a link to one of them in which Rodamor shared in hosting it, so that if you, yourself, had wanted to listen to Rodamor, then you could do that.  

To the extent to which that you were "asking questions" rather than making accusations in regards to Rodamor, to me, sometimes it seems that a certain amount of work, research looking into the matter and exploration is better to be made when throwing out certain seemingly FUD spreading theories about negative motives that anyone might have (especially if it seems possible to me that you likely had been getting some of your nonsense thoughts from questionable sources (or maybe you just come up with them on your own).. even if one of them might not have had been Greg.. hahahahaha - because the actual source (Rodamor's tweet) provided you ammunition to extrapolate nonsense, seemingly dumb and ill-explored thoughts from that relatively small piece of information)....

You're getting tricked by misinformation-- what I suspect is some intentional consensus cracking (especially since we know most if not all of the BRC-20 stuff is being funded by Ayre & related entities) though it might just be confusion.

This stuff doesn't have anything to do with taproot-- to prove this to yourself go start up node software from 2019 before the taproot bip was even proposed and observe that accepts this stuff just fine.

You could potentially attribute the attack to segwit in the sense that it increased the block size which made more room for junk but to the extent that your complaint is that fees have been driven up, the same attack would have worked prior to segwit.  It's also easy to see that people were embedding irrelevant data in Bitcoin long before segwit (fine example being the Bitcoin Whitepaper).

If you want to complain instead that the attack is bloating the blockchain on disk of archival nodes or that its increasing the data that must be transferred during IBD-- then it's fine to criticize segwit but otoh where the hell were you when there was extremely widespread demand for additional capacity? -- it's not like bloating up the chain is a surprising result: it's the reasonable and expected downside of increasing the capacity.

It's important when contemplating an attack to realize that the attackers have every reason to mislead about the nature of the attack and the enabling factors.

Another piece of measing narrative craft-- one I've seen rodarmor fall for, in fact describing his action as a kick in the teeth to bitcoin developers-- is the false claim that these ordinals translations are in any way charged lower fees by the network.  This isn't true.  The network doesn't set fees at all, they're established by the users competitively bidding for access to capacity.  Miners accept transactions in order of most fees per unit capacity down until the block is full.  Every transaction competes equally(*) and needs to pay based on the capacity it uses.

The deceptive discount claim dupes people for two reasons:  The first is because Bitcoin's block limit isn't measured in bytes, it's measured in weight.  But because the limit works on weight so do fee calculations.  If the limits was a limit on bytes (or the complaint was how much space archived nodes are using) but the fees miners demanded were irrationally calculated based on something else then it would be correct to say there was a discount, but there isn't.  The second is because segwit did in fact lower fees-- but it did so purely because it increased capacity resulting in a lower equilibrium fee rate. (Again, that's what people demanded.  Good job, you got what you wanted...)

If someone wants to say "because segwit, witness data like signature or witness-embeded garbage uses less capacity" -- then THAT would be true. Witness data using less capacity remains well justified: it should because it's prunable and doesn't have to be stored long term just to run a node at all.  Making this data use *more* capacity wouldn't diminish its effect on driving up transaction fees, it would *increase it*, because it would be using more capacity which could otherwise be used for other transactions.

To the extent that some misguided idiots want to store data in the blockchain the fact that it uses less capacity than it would without segwit only helps mitigate the harm.

To the extent that high fees are from an attack intending to drive up fees it's irrelevant in any case: no matter how it works the attacker has to pay in the fees of the next best transaction they displace in each block they displace it.

(*) ignoring things like CPFP which make some transactions more profitable then their fees imply due to having high-fee children.

Depending on who you ask, Ordinals might also be labelled as shitcoins.

Since you said that you have listened to all of the episodes in his podcast, then you probably have heard him talk about his viewpoint?

If you bother check his GitHub page at https://github.com/casey/, it looks like he write some Rust library/software with decent amount of stars.

Little, but it's good enough to give rough idea what he does. Few example i found from quick search,
https://www.fastcompany.com/3058499/this-oculus-rift-engineer-taught-a-neural-network-to-create-80s-bbs-graffiti-art
https://stackoverflow.com/users/66450/casey-rodarmor
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/what-is-the-future-of-bitcoin-privacy
https://www.mobygames.com/person/114951/casey-rodarmor/

Obviously, but WHO is he, and what were his other contributions in Bitcoin, or open source?

Have you noticed that Google has very little information about him before Ordinals?

Of course, it is not easy to judge character of any of the people in the bitcoin space, and sometimes they might seem genuine, but really have evil motives... so sometimes any of us might go by our own hunches, and even though Rodamor is not completely famous, there is quite a bit of content out there of him participating in interviews, discussions, talking about himself and talking about his views of bitcoin and various bitcoin related matters, including arts and some of his distastes that has evolved regarding scams in the shitcoin space (especially ethereum).   I just happened to have had listened to most (if not all) of the Hell Podcast episodes after I had heard Rodamor in an interview in some other podcast  (probably around the end of 2022), and Rodamor is pretty well liked (and even trusted to be a genuine and good actor) by a lot of folks in the bitcoin maximalist circles, even though some of the bitcoin maximalists did not really like some of what he had done in regards to cardinals/inscriptions, but I think that Rodamor has been able to defend himself quite well in terms of working within the code and largely having decently good intentions in terms of trying to expand bitcoin's use cases.. and I am not even suggesting that I necessarily agree with him and/or all of the points that he makes.. and surely I have not been hearing (or seeing him) much in the past couple of months, including that I doubt that he had much involvement in the BRC20 developments...

I don't have any problem with your wanting to be skeptical of motives of some persons in the bitcoin space, including persons that you don't know very well in terms of having had not seen their content,

I think it's usually useless to debate motivations: either it's unambiguous, in which case there is no debate... or it's not and there will be no resolution.  

I know it's sometimes hard to interpret the tone behind a forum post. I assure you that I was asking for opinions with sincerity if truly there's some vindictiveness in that tweet. Because for me there's a softer way of phrasing it instead of "kick in the teeth", followed by, I'll stop saying it's misinformation, the wrong assumption.
I don't doubt his skills as a coder. I was merely curious what his previous contribitions were, because there's mostly nothing said about him before Ordinals when I do a search.

His opinion and what was he in favor during the scaling debate will truly say a lot about him. I'm not saying it will be good or bad, I'm not here to judge him. Merely curious.

I doubt that Casey Rodamor is even close to the "villian" that you are suggesting that he might be.. even if some of the later developments might have been to strive to evolve cardinals/inscriptions into various ways to attempt to attack bitcoin - whether physically and/or socially.   and your harping on his "kick in the teeth" post was already characterized by GMaxwell as a misunderstanding that Rodamor seemed to have had, rather than as if Rodamor was wanting to be "vindicitive" as you seem to want to read into the situation, Wind_FURY.

Rodamor seems to have a decent amount of skills to have had identified ways to get the cardinals/inscription thing going on bitcoin.. within the available rules.. I doubt that he would characterize himself as a new developer, but I recall that he had said that he had worked at Coinbase for a while, and he had said something about reviewing bitcoin code.. and may even participating in some of the discussions around development, which he likely would have to have some programming skills and abilities to know how the cardinal/inscriptions code would fit into being used in bitcoin, since he seems to have had been innovative in terms of the way that ordinals/inscriptions were introduced.. and that it was a kind of niche that no one had previously exploited (whether thinking about exploiting in a good or a bad way... which I am still not presuming ordinals/inscriptions to necessarily be bad even though there seems to be some later evidence that some of the BRC20 angle of the ordinals are being manipulated by Ayer/Wright - even if Greg (Gmaxwell) might not wanted to have wanted to use shittwat Wright's name within this discussion.

Rodamor had discussed cardinals and inscriptions on several bitcoin podcasts and gave reasons why to develop cardinals/inscriptions on bitcoin (and why not do it on shitcoins)... He had quite a few appearances on podcasts - especially right around the time that the cardinals/inscriptions went live in January/February 2023  (do you need me to provide some links? so you can actually listen to the ways that he discusses how he got into the ideas of cardinals/inscriptions), and he even has his own podcast (and has not had a new episode in the last few months)