Topic: NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory - page 23. (Read 9195 times)

I forgot to comment on this till I saw Phil's reply.

I am pretty sure you understand how mining works, but just to shed some light on this subject, the difficulty adjustment is there to keep a pre-determined supply, everything else happens as a result and not a purpose.

When we say that the more the fees the more secured bitcoin is, we actually mean it, the "explain like I'm five" for this is to imagine that you want to secure a bank, you would hire everyone who is capable of using a gun, and the contract states that the rewards will be split between all those guards depending on how much the banks make every day.

The bank has a small garden at the bank, people pay some fees to enter it, so at around midnight, you collect all those fees, and split them between all those guards, when someday the bank makes only 100$ and you got 1000 guards outside, you will give each one of them 0.1$, what is going to happen the next day is that many of them will not show up, because the bus ride costs more than 0.1$ to 90% of them, so only 10% of them will show up the next day, and by the end of the day, each of them will receive 1$ which is good enough for the remaining 10 guards (difficulty drop), but not for the bank, because the bank now has only 100 men guarding it as opposed to 1000, it's more subject to attacks than it was a week ago when the bank made 1000$ a day and gave 1$ to each guard.

Keep in mind the garden is pretty small and can only accommodate a certain number of visitors, so visitors need to bid on the ticket prices to enter, what's ironic here is that you got some bank clients who want to hire an extra guard to stop people wearing blue from entering the garden despite the fact that they are willing to pay well and probably going to make the bank net 2000$ and end up hiring 2000 guards, they want only people wearing green inside the garden because they "assume" the blue color shirts will ruin the garden.

big snip. i am quoting nonce.

The problem of big miners leaving btc and still have a secure network is at stake.


The first 100 or so blocks of this 1% jump the btc diff was down 28%.

we made about 70 and should have made about 98 blocks.

I see this as almost mathematically impossible odds with the amount of gear in the network.

So
a) someone really big had a power refit
b) someone really big is testing out how easy it is to do a low hash attack on the network.
c) unreal impossible variance.
d) an unknown.

a and b and d are most likely but b is terrible and possible.

So down the road if forced scarcity of coins due to rapid ½ ings continues a real attack on the net work is easy to do.

as I mentioned before having three algos worth of gear and being able to switch around is not too hard.

And it will devalue btc.

So btc needs to figure how to attract mining.

Another thing that fits this is that of how good can a piece of gear be.

Ie pc then gpu then fpga then asic

asics s1, s2 , s3 , s4, s5,s7,s9,s11, s15,s17, s19

we are pretty much done with effectively making gear save power.

So mothballing s19, L7, gpu is kind of easy to do.

Over the next year having 1 mw of three different algos should be cheap

and a neg hashrate attack cheaper if the coin/block reward sucks.

btc would need to alter diff adjustments if a negative hash rate attack happens.

Time will tell how this unfolds Most likely after 2040 it will become more of an issue as scrypt will look better to miners then btc.

Illusionary majority.
People who think that just because they are in the same football team fan club they also share the same views and are shocked when someone is liking pizza and others are thinking is trash food, some are leftist and others right wings and some hate MMORPG games while some are in hentai stuff.

This is the same with Bitcoin, some assume that just because we're all here we have the same views on everything when it's clearly not the case, and when it comes to transactions fees versus value a lot will be shocked to see that the majority of this forum would love to see BTC going to 100k rather than having 1sat/b fees. Bitcoin is a bunch of data, is a tool, and it's free to use as you see fit, no matter how stupid that is.

The whole thing becomes even more ridiculous when we start talking about "spam" is since, for god's sake !!! a ton of us, the people that discuss this here are in either CM campaign or other mixing sigs. What do some tumblers do in order to obfuscate the traces?  A ton of transactions back in forth! Do you think that the guys who have already handled their DNA samples to Binance in order to pass KYC and have never seen a real wallet and don't have a clue what a seed phrase is would find these transactions, how do we call them, block worthy?

Since Mikeywith mentioned how some see NFTs, well I too believe NFTs are crap, and not just because they look like a fad and they really don't serve any major purpose at all, but also since it seems that your ownership of the said "art" is only valid on one chain and not another, much like your painting would be a Renoir in France, a Picasso in Spain and a useless painted piece of paper in Japan. But I still don't see why you should outright ban something just because you don't like it or you think it can cause a problem that would bring Bitcoin down.

If current fees are unsustainable, let's look at numbers, 45.57 BTC in fees in 24 hours, less than 1 Million, this includes transactions that are not ordinals and have outbid them, so if a way less than $1 mil a day attack, or the amount of money a bunch of CEOs get paid in a day is enough to cripple the network, then how is this system going to survive a fight with all those both imaginary and real adversaries?

That's true, but hopefully, there would be an easy way out of this at the software-level.


Makes perfect sense, but still, LN takes away from BTC, the original version of Bitcoin was for everything to sit ON the blockchain, not for a dozen transactions to happen elsewhere and then store only the final settlement on the blockchain, nonetheless, LN is a great idea, people will use it to transact faster and cheaper, now with NFTs being stored on the blockchain it doesn't mean the normal transactions can't happen, it just means people need to pay more and compete because this is a free market.

Not saying all these arguments against NFTs are invalid, but the common logic here is that people don't want blocks to be full because they want to be able to transact at close to 0 fee, from your individual point of view, if fees are high, how does it matter if it's because people buying some stupid NFTs or paying for their coffee and tea as far as the fees you have to pay? it doesn't matter, does it? you are still forced to compete against other transactions regardless of their purposes.

I mean if we were to stick to this logic, then eventually when people start using BTC for daily payments, some people will be mad and accuse them of congesting the blockchain and increasing fees and that they must use LN or use their credit cards and leave the blockchain alone.

This whole idea of "I want transactions to be cheap and blocks to empty so I can transact for cheap whenever I want" is just stupid at best because it doesn't matter what the other transactions are about, people are still going to be pissed because they have to pay a higher fee, this is one attribute of communism where a group of people think they can (or even need) to tell the rest of the people how to do certain things like how they should spend their money, and it's all based on self-interest.

with all due respect to everyone here, I am sure the vast majority of people talking shit about NFTs do it because they want to be able to transact for free, most of them don't even own a node to be concerned about the extra capacity they need to provide or anything like that, it's just solely based on the principle of "I want the blockchain to work in my favor, I need to eliminate competition", sticking to that logic, we will have the same debate in the future, of people who use BTC to buy coffee vs those who use it buy tea, the coffee group will be trying to censor the tea group because they think they coffee is more important than tea (I agree with that tho ).

See I know this is NFT vs Transactions, but it's the principle of rejection and elimination that is there to stay if we would allow it, the coffee vs tea debate is just an extreme exaggeration, but I am sure you get the point.

Now furthermore, if the NFT market makes it to the point where it actually makes all blocks full, and fees sky high, those users themselves will have to solve that "issue", it's not just you people that want cheap transactions, everyone else does, even if they pay 2k for some funny jpeg, they would want to store it for 1$ instead of 20$, it's not like those folks have an unlimited supply of money and will keep raising fees to infinity.

They will need to figure out some shit, just like they did with ETH, and look at all the projects built to solve that issue, tens of billions of dollars were injected into the ETH ecosystem, all kinds of different layers and protocols, which all add to the value of ETH as a whole, without all those NFTs, Metaverse and whatnot, ETH wouldn't have grown this large, so why not give these folks a shot with BTC, see what they can build, and eventually the fee/blocksize issue will be figured out one way or the other.

By that logic , if a large portion of the population decided to use the network ( BTC ) and the mempool was congested the low fee transactions should be banned ? From my point of view the real reason behind the argument is that people running nodes don't want to invest a single cent more than they already have .  

There's no need: Ordinals will save us the effort and self-destruct. We (royal we) can just hope it will happen sooner rather than later. We'll just run out of fools who are buying NFTs.


Probably because LN doesn't interfere with Bitcoin. LN transactions don't flood the mempool? Is it too difficult to understand?  

Good counter-argument. I do think though that it is much harder to tell who is sending money to whom (even harder if we got L1 privacy, which I also advocate for) than to tell whether a document is classified or not or whether it is for a different reason illegal and immoral to store and distribute a certain file.

Someone sending BTC from a Chinese IP could actually be an American citizen being on vacation in China, i.e. the money transfer may be from one American citizen to another and have nothing to do with China even though the IP may suggest so. Some addresses are tied to people through KYC and centralized exchanges, but this information is neither publicly available, nor is it realistic that nodes keep track of such data, so it is completely out of the picture.

Meanwhile I think it is realistic to demand people not store and distribute certain data; as it is legally regulated and enforced in most parts of the world. Just think of image / file hosters who get and need to comply with takedown requests.

I agree; I even think there were discussions in the past, when Bitcoin was first starting to get treated / considered as a store of value. The difference though is that it does not hurt / hinder people trying to do transactions (use it in its intended way).

Interesting perspective. To me, it perfectly fits the principles, because Lightning helps Bitcoin be a global payment method by scaling it and increasing the throughput. It reduces mempool congestion while allowing for more payments, meanwhile Ordinals increase the congestion and do not scale Bitcoin in the process. Lightning is P2P e-cash too, just in a slightly different way.

Ok that's another valid point against Ordinal, and I enjoy hearing different opinions that I think are valid, however, there is a counter-argument to this, you take the same legal risks running a full node and not banning a dozen of addresses and countries (one large U.S based mining pool already does that), if your node/miner happened to process illegal transactions it's probably the same thing as storing a legal file on your node's server.


If that's the case then almost everyone is abusing the system by treating bitcoin as a store of value and not a means of payment, also, I didn't see the same folks complaining about Ordinals now complaint about LN, where does LN fit into the root principles of Bitcoin? why do we need a second layer, why not have every payment on the blockchain? turning BTC from P2P e-cash to a mere "final settlement layer" is also an abuse using your logic.

I obviously love the idea of LN, and despite why it doesn't fit perfectly in the original purpose of BTC, it actually does provide a great utility, it uses the blockchain to achieve something of value, Ordinals might be capable of doing the same, or it could be just a short-lived hype that would die sooner than most people think, I won't be bothered to see it fade on its own after proving it has no real value, but not by banning it before seeing what it can/can't do.

You bring up some good points, mikey. I'm honestly mostly worried about storing people's potential illegal files and serving them like a webserver to the public. The moral and legal aspects of it, both.

I mean, we do need miners to secure Bitcoin and make it the highly safe, secure payment method that it is now.
It's just that there needs to be a balance. If there is no money to be made from mining & they leave Bitcoin, the security of the network may suffer (someone could scoop up the old mining hardware and attack Bitcoin).
However if we allow people to use Bitcoin as a playground for 'everything freedom' for the sake of the highest possible fees, we will experience what Ethereum experienced a few years ago when developers jumped on the 'world computer' bandwagon and coded games e.g. chess, where every single move was an individual transaction (!!), collectable cat games (birth of NFTs?) and similar.

If anyone reading is rather new to Bitcoin and doesn't know what I'm talking about:
Indeed, I am highly in favor of reducing someone's number of on-chain payments, especially low-value ones, and create a handful of Lightning channels once, instead. All for the sake of keeping the load on the blockchain low, IBD time fast, decentralization high and mempool congestion & on-chain fees manageable.

Actually, what I stated were public facts and logic, not personal opinions. If you can point out a flaw in my logic, please go ahead. Developers not anticipating Ordinals does not really answer my post at all.

This is an opinion, on the other hand. There is no hard proof that the existence of some cloud provider's company in 50 years is more guaranteed than Bitcoin nodes still running. I personally believe Bitcoin will stick around much longer, too, but I cannot prove it.
What we can agree on is that both are n=1, so redundancy is key. Anything more is subjective opinions.

Every 210,000 blocks. If you propose to just create 50BTC or 6.25BTC per block until 21M cap is reached, there are some reasons against that, e.g. that the limit will be reached quicker and we will still have the issue with what to do when there is no reward at all, just over 100 years earlier than with satoshi's model.

Shouldn't difficulty adjustments take care of that, though? I.e. big miners go offline, difficulty goes down, home mining gets profitable again, and mining continues on.

Interestingly, when you pool-mine, you don't even need to run your own node. You can be somewhat parasitic in that sense.
Meanwhile us stupid altruistic node operators, may face the consequences of storing and publishing such data on the clear web.

Flawed comparison. Bitcointalk does not stand in favor of censorship resistance at posting. Moderators of bitcointalk aren't obliged to allow anyone who pays for a post to not have it removed forever. Bots and spammers don't pay fractions of bitcoin to comment. The Bitcoin network does grant you these rights.

There appears to be greater demand now for some transactions though. Just because you don't personally recognize value it means they should not happen? Also, I don't think anyone ever claimed we should tell how miners do their job for other such non-standard scripts.

A nice practical thought for blockchain use  over  purity  blockchain use thought..

Miners are practical and already have more than enough gear to do  weird shit to algos. In general they simply are looking to turn profit.

Which is why there are multiple algos to mine. Not just one.

Nonsense. Ordinals is an unforeseen use of the system, just as open timestamps is. Neither has to be prevented to ensure bitcoin's survival.

Due to the eventually disappearing block subsidy, bitcoin's long term survival is dependent on full blocks creating a fee market, so one clear purpose of bitcoin is to support all uses which help to fill blocks.

It's pretty simple, Ordinals is an abuse of the system and abuse has to be prevented to ensure the systems survival. Every tool or a system is created for a clear purpose and when you use it for anything else, that is abuse. For example you could convert a movie to hex and use a bot to post the hex string in a series of comments on bitcointalk. That is abuse and those responsible for bitcointalk will prevent that by banning you. It's the same with Bitcoin but with a different approach used for a decentralized system when someone uses this peer-to-peer digital cash for something else like as a cloud storage.

As I've said many times before this is not the first time we are facing such dilemma, we have been fighting abuse for a very long time mostly through standard rules, from the time people abused the lack of validation for scriptpubs of outputs to store junk in the blockchain which was prevented by standard rules to the spam attacks that is prevented by fee market. Every time there are people who argue against that fight at the time and disappear after the fight succeeds and Bitcoin's future is ensured.

The same "we" that rejects you perfectly valid transaction if it contains arbitrary data in its scriptpub. Something that has been going on for years and nobody ever complained that it is against "Bitcoin spirit".

seems reasonable but why not just get rid of the halvings completely. and have a fixed block reward. yes that is inflationary but people are losing bitcoin all the time too so it probably has no affect.

but no one wants slower block times. 7 transactions per second is slow enough 

it's a self-regulating system. if fees become too small then the hash rate goes down less competition for miners until it reaches a new equilibrium i guess. of course the downside is that it lowers the security of the network due to lower total hashrate. but as long as a 51% attack doesn't happen it really doesn't present a problem right?

as long as they don't mind storing jpegs of monkeys and the occasional naked person on their hard drives then yeah. with bigger fees they can expect a bigger commitment to bitcoin in terms of data storage and also competition from more miners entering the space to capitalized on the increased transaction fees.

Well you are close.

BTC was desperate to scale.

Tried a few ideas and while LN does scale it cuts fees.


LTC+Doge came up with two  problems solved.

Scaling due to much faster blocks for both Coins and secondly the the ½ issue is blended by having one coin  do a ½ ing and one coin not half.

I have proposed slower block times and ½ ings for btc most don’t see this as a good idea.

Make the 2024 ½ happen then stretch the 2028 to 2030.

we would be able to do this by changing from one block in 10 minutes to 1 block in 15 minutes.

Same 21million coins just spread longer.

Most people do not understand the issue of fees being too small that miners will say fuck it and switch to other algos.

 well the value of these coins are based on power burned = wealth created.

As a guy with a lot of solar power burning and mining. I want a coin that makes $$ per watt.

part of my long plan is wait for a downturn in Scrypt which will allow me to have equal gear in btc,ltc/doge,gpus

I have enough btc asics and enough gpus but am just a bit short of scrypt asics.

I routinely switch algos if it pays to do so.

It is tough but  btc needs to get it grew like mad due to ½ ing speed but with maturity slowing the ½ will keep miners mining it.

 2024.     3.125
2028.     1.5625.   or 2030 1.5625
2032.    0.78125. or 2036 0.78125
2036     0.390625 or 2042 0.390625
2040.    0.1953125 or 2048 0.1953125
2044.    0.097656 or 2054 0.097656

the 6 year ½ will help miners stick with btc and not shift to scrypt

To me I think NFTs and Ordinals could help Btc stay attractive to miners.

most of what you are saying there is your opinion. but lets talk facts. none of the developers anticipated ordinals. enough said.

not in the same way that pcloud is a single point of failure though. for the bitcoin blockchain to go away, it would almost require the internet to go away. if that happened, what good would your data be anyway? 

so you're saying satoshi didn't design bitcoin properly because this halving thing doesn't work? i still have yet to hear a reasonable explanation for why the block reward needs to be halved every 4 years or however often it is...unless bitcoin goes up in price to counteract the halving then miner income is in jeopardy unless transaction fees can pick up the slack which won't happen unless new use cases open up like this ordinals. is that what you were thinking?

do you mine most likely not.

I have tremendously cheap power.

But not infinite amounts of it.

So If I have 100000 watts of power

and I have

 100000 watts of paid scrypt asics
 100000 watts of paid sha asics
 100000 watts of paid gpus


I care about $ per watt no more no less

so kill off fees for BTC and keep doing the ½'s and it will be  in trouble under 40 years.

since Scrypt = a non ½ ing coin doge and a ½ ing coin LTC it will never run out of reward coins for miners.

If you think I am the only guy with 3 types of paid off gear and 0 debt with the option to pick what I want to mine you are wrong.

I am simply pointing out:
  Crypto was based on power makes wealth

not my idea it was satoshi's

I only wish I were 25-30 and planing for my retirement at 55-60

vs 66. 

This plays out so simple

get dirt cheap power = yes
get 3-4 types of paid off miners = yes
switch to best algo to mine = yes

Now BTC has a shot to fix the issue with NFTs and ordinals  and guess what shortsighted people don't see what I see.

Damn I wish I could live long time like 106 just to see me be right.

Meanwhile I do 3 separate algos and shift around to match my cheap power.

when I buy I do buy BTC as I hope the NFT+Ordinal world saves btc.

Who's "we"?

I'm sorry that I'm responding without reading the last page with devotion, but it's just frustrating observing established experts going against the Bitcoin spirit without noticing. There is no "we" in transactions. I don't expect the majority of you to approve my transaction from an ethic standard when I make it. Nor do I expect you to feel I have circumvented your space. I don't even expect you'll attend to talk about it. The only thing I expect is that it will be done in 10 minutes.

You know you can't have both the most freedom preserving currency in the world and simultaneously dictate miners how to do their business or which transactions pass the collective approval.

Alas, but even your chart isn't showing any "full blocks", block 748918 which was mined long before these Oridnals has a size of 2.77MB, in fact, in theory, if all transactions were just witness data blocks should be 4MB, but given segwit adoption, blocks should be AT LEAST 2MB for us to call them "full", in the chart you posted, most blocks are close to 1MB than to 2MB, so closer to 50% than to 100% as per the first assumption I made prior to diving into all of this.

This shows that there is a lot of room to be filled, people are not using it, and someone else now is, which is why we started to have nearly full blocks now.

Oh and by the way, here is another chart from Blockchair that shows the transaction trend and how it has been in a downtrend and fewer and fewer transactions are happening on the blockchain from 2019 to date.



Anyway, my question to you, and I hope you answer reasonably, aside from the fact that you think this is "useless data" stored on the blockchain, what other reasons do you have to support the exclusion for Ordinals? let's just assume everyone who agreed with you gathered together and you are going to start lobbying to ban Ordinals, you are going to have to convince mining pools, exchanges, the devs, nodes operators, and a few others, what proposal do you have for them and how are you going to convince those people to ban Ordinals?

Up to this point, and after a few discussions with different people, if I were to start lobbying against Ordinals, the only single valid point that I would use would be the point that you pointed out here.


While this is a great argument to start with, I am afraid it isn't enough, we are going to need to find more "value" in banning those "spammers", if not, people will just nag about it for a few weeks and then let it slide forever, or until it dies on its own.

When you use a broken tool you'll get broken results. The chart is most probably the result of running an old client that is no longer "full" node (is ignoring SegWit so they have been receiving "stripped blocks" that are smaller).

Here is a better chart from blockchair showing a similar but technically very different picture.
The difference between peak and bottom in your wrong chart is big (about 250 kb) whereas in reality the average size in that peak was around 1.25 MB as seen in the picture below and the average size in the bottom plateau in your chart is actually around 1.15 MB which is only slightly lower (8% diff versus 30%) and blocks are still considered full on average.


The final peak is the result of Ordinals attack which is another indication of your chart being wrong since it doesn't show that at all.

Even the lowest average block size (in 2021) is 1007 KB (~1MB) not ~620 KB that your wrong chart shows.

That doesn't mean we should indulge miners. They also enjoyed and most probably funded the 2017 spam attack.

LN is not a side-chain, it is a second layer.