Topic: NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory - page 24. (Read 9532 times)

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.

Oh ok then it's even worse, taking 2017 out of the equation means the number of transactions per day/month had no real growth from 2015 to 2023.


Indeed, I am not arguing that it's using your credit card is cheaper than sending a transaction on bitcoin (although most of the time it is), the point is, that a tiny transaction is going to sit on the blockchain forever, despite the fact that many people would label it as "useless".


Not sure why you quoted tromp on that, it was actually me who wrote that and yes, as a miner I can confirm that I will be very happy to see transaction fees skyrocket, but miners do care about the well-being of bitcoin probably more than anyone else, miners have so much lose, they put billions of dollars at stake, build infrastructure, hire people, go through the legal process, having to fight against those who think Bitcoin is useless and is wasting energy resources, Bitcoin is worth nothing without miners securing it, not sure why many people want to label miners as "devils".

In fact, Bitcoin users should make sure that miners are always "happy" even if they dislike them or hate them, they are keeping your money safe and the fees you pay are not charity work it's for the work they provide, if you are not happy about it, start mining your own bitcoin and code your software to reject what you think of as "spam" and save Bitcoin from the devils.

But no, most people don't contribute anything to bitcoin, they don't mine bitcoin, they don't code shit, don't even run a full node, they just want to buy cheap bitcoin, send it for free to their hardware wallet, wait for the price to increase, send it back to the exchange for 1sat/vbyte and sell it to fiat and still want to boss around people telling them how to use the blockchain.



Ya bro, sharpen your miners, looks like the NFT market is going to bring you back to business, you are getting back your devil title soon.

But don't you believe that no "arbitrary data", whatever they may be, should be the same? Because once Ordinals become very VERY popular, and once many of those "creators" of shitNFTs are done, and leave their projects, the Bitcoin blockchain will become a garbage dump for "dick pics and fart sounds", and all other shitNFTs, making IDB harder and harder.

We were talking about adoption and it can not be analyzed in such a tiny window.

But since you asked you are ignoring a couple of things. First of all hashrate has been rising even when the fees were low. So making arguments trying to say miners are only here for the fees is just dumb.
Secondly the fees in the window you chose were rising (and falling) because we had the most volatile market in that window. Price went from trying to break $42k+ in Jan to crashing down to $28k and then rise back up to ATH at $65k in April.
Obviously with such huge price swings comes loads of more transactions hence higher fees.
You are also ignoring the fact that afterwards fees came down back to 1 sat/vb and hashrate continued growing by a lot despite the price coming down too!

You are forgetting that SHA256-ASIC and Scrypt-ASIC are different and you can't use one for the other. In simple terms bitcoin's hashrate can not "slide" to shitcoins like LTC and Doge.
If we go with your logic the hashrate should slide into another SHA256 coin!

About the transaction fee part, that's only going to eat up your finances if you are sending transactions in large volumes like an exchange such as Binance would do.

For the average person, paying 1sat/byte makes no difference from paying 10sats/byte because the USD denomination of the latter is just $0.50 or somewhere around that.

That is still much less than any VAT, taxes, card loading fees, 3rd party commission fees, etc. that you can get charged with with fiat money.

i knew miners didn't give a damn about what bitcoin is used for as long as they can collect their fee. they would be happy to see transaction fees skyrocketing if the blocks can still stay full.

don't you see that's the problem though? you can show them alternatives but they don't care. they just want larger transaction fees in their back pocket. anything that does that for them is welcomed with open arms. apparently. that shouldn't really be suprising to us though. that's how the world works. people with money are the ones that doors get opened for and welcomed in...people without the money they get the cold shoulder.

Let me ask you about the jan 2021 to april 2021 fee pattern.

and by that before china killed off the bull run by 1/2ing the bull run.

fees were very high and miners were whaling .

then the hash crash came along with better LN coverage and fees have yet to recover.

Mark my words if ordinal and nft fade and fees don’t rise.

scrypt will flourish since doge does not half.

mining will slide to Ltc/Doge if fees continue the way they are.


I wish I was 25-35 it would be easy move to play. As this will al unfold in the years around 2056.

I don't know how to respond to that!!! You are bringing up the main reason why bitcoin was created (payment) and you argue that it could be considered arbitrary too which makes no sense otherwise why do we even bother with bitcoin in first place. lol

You are making a wrong conclusion based on false data. In 2017 bitcoin was experiencing the biggest spam attack of its entire history (biggest until today too). The number of transactions then can not your baseline.
In reality if you check the stats rarely released by payment processors, check out number of merchants that are accepting bitcoin each year, countries adopting bitcoin as legal currency, legal tender, reserve currency, for international trade and a lot more you can clearly see that usage of bitcoin as a currency has been increasing by a lot.

Lets fact check your assumption.
3675 blocks had "barely any transactions" and a small size between 2015-01-01 and 2017-03-09 (a rough 2 year window).
632 blocks had "barely any transactions" and a small size between 2021-01-01 and 2023-03-09 (a rough 2 year window).
That's an 82% reduction!

I intentionally chose 2015 to 2017 because the end date is approximately when the spam attack gets worse and also the huge bull run and the bubble has not yet started. The window from 2017 to 2019 isn't that better though (~1400 ie. ~55% reduction) which proves my point about increasing adoption as a payment network.

No. You can't even begin to compare using bitcoin for payment (whether for a cup of coffee or a house) and using bitcoin as a cloud storage.

Miners are already "extracting fees" they don't need Ordinals for that unless you mean spam attacks like 2017 which artificially inflate the fee is a "good thing"!

If that's what you want then there is a much simpler way without filling bitcoin with garbage and making it unusable which is to use a side-chain. There is already a couple of projects out there like RootStock that actually create real smart contracts and transfer actual tokens around instead of the fake thing in Ordinals that has no value.

yeah like no one wants andy warhol campbell soup limited prints

art is nuts always has been nuts. like it or not nft art is here to say.

here is one for over $500

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Andy-Warhol-Print-Campbell-s-Soup-I-Hand-Signed-COA/185787927773?


Most do not see the value of nft on the btc block chain.

I do as they mean more fees.

More fees mean more miners and more hardware = vital energy for btc.

I can tell you mining scrypt with a LTC-Doge machine will appeal to more miners than btc.

Unless NFTS can keep fees more reasonable in the higher number sense.

Frankly we used to get lots of 1 ,2 3, even 4 coins in fees.

when has anyone seen that for a btc block a year or maybe 2 years.

I see a bit of extortion happening here Mikey, should I power back (of wait, first buy back) a few of my miners to try to offset this? 
Not going to quote the entire passage but since the discussion brought up fees and a number of transactions this is a telling graph:


For those that tell miners to survive on fees but at the same time want only 1sat/b fees in the chain this is how the reward from block and fee ratio looks like, a flat line closer a lot of time to 0 more than to 1%. If you want to secure the network you can't expect miners to pay the bills for 300 exahash with 200k a day.


Yeah, history repeats itself:
Do you think SatoshiDice is blockchain spam? Drop their TX's - Solution inside

Exactly, which is why I don't understand why many people would reject any change to the protocol or even a new use case for the blockchain, people opposed Segwit, LN, Taproot, Stratum V2 and etc, the majority of those things are now alive and still running, why? because more people wanted them than not, up to this point many people say that Segwit coins are not Bitcoin, did that change a thing? no.

Do I like NFTs? hell no, will I be happy paying ten times the fees because my transaction has to beat some ugly Ape image? of course not, but I am also not happy having to download a 6000 sats transaction because uncle joe wants to see if his wallet works fine and can receive Bitcoin before he goes ahead and transfer the remaining 12k sats, do I have the right to censor uncle joe just because it bothers me? probably not.

To me VALUE is key, the majority of people who oppose bitcoin say that it uses a huge amount of unnecessary energy, thus raising the electricity cost for those who need it to keep their house warm, so the conclusion is (Bitcoin is evil and we should ban it) this is exactly the same logic that states "Storing ordinals on the blockchain makes the other normal transactions more expensive and we have to ban it".

People seem to ignore the fact that Bitcoin mining extract value, the demand for what they think is "wasted energy" creates more jobs, pays more tax, and overall benefits the economy in general, even if you have to pay $120 a month as opposed to $100 without the miners' demand, the value that has been made in the process is going to circulate back into the economy for a greater good, we can apply the same logic to these NFTs, let's just assume everyone who trades NFTs is a "retard", so 1 million "retards" buy Bitcoin and increase its value by x%, that x% is very likely to offset the extra fees you need to pay when competing against those "retards", anything that adds any sort of value to the economics of any project is good as long as it isn't a serious threat against its existence.

Are there any serious threats on Bitcoin with Ordinals/NFTs? anything vital? or it's just "No, I don't like them, kick them out of here"!

Are you being serious right now? The Bitcoin developers are not some kind of 'evil corporation' who we need to 'teach lessons' by threatening to destroy 'their product'; you don't seem to grasp this is an open-source project, where we as the users already have the power, especially through the decentralized nature of nodes as seen in UASF.
We are all Bitcoin, there is no 'us against them'. We should aim to get the best outcome for it together and not by fighting each other or threatening Bitcoin's destruction.

I already said to use multiple backups. Do note that if you use the blockchain as your single backup, it will be a single point of failure, as well.

I already asked, but got no answer, maybe you got one now; the gist was: Is something usually considered 'okay' because it is technically possible or because people established and agreed on what is 'okay / good' and what is not?


Actually, every computer virus in existence was 'technically possible', so therefore those attacks were all legitimate and morally & ethically good? Would you go as far as saying that infecting machines can be their new intended use case, because it is technically possible through bugs, the same way you claim it may be a legitimate use to store JPEGs on the blockchain, because it is technically possible ^{[through a bug(?)]}?

Lightning Network? 


Store of value... you have any problem with that? I don't see this as a problem...


No, why? It's not difficult at all - using the oldest and most mature blockchain to store kitty pics is retarded. It's a fact.


I love dancing and I want to dance right in front of a ticket gate on a subway during rush hour. I don't care people who want to pass can't do it and they start to queue behind me but I don't care cause this is art and my way to self-express and it's cool. I can even film it and stream it to tiktok or IG and earn some money! 


"hey they are spamming the blockchain" looks reasonable enough to me. The question is: how many people want it? What % of all Bitcoin users? 

Maybe you haven't, but many others had, and no, people using bitcoin for payment have not been increasing, it's actually the opposite, there were more transactions in 2016 and 2017 than were in the last 3 years, take a look at the transaction count, to be very generous and not call this a downtrend, it's flat at best.

Do you know what is actually in an uptrend? it's the number of BTC going out of circulation buried in the "hodlers" wallets for god knows how long, if you were to check the average block size for the past 3 years, it would be closer to 50% than to a 100%, there are days where blocks barely had any transactions, the worldwide percentage of people using bitcoin to transact rounded to the nearest whole number is exactly zero, and it will only get worse over time, the more valuable BTC become the less people will transact it.



Someone could make the same argument about someone else making a transaction for a cup of coffee, a few sats worth a transaction that is going to sit on thousands of hard drives forever, it's pretty difficult to define what is useless and what's not.


They do add value to the users who want to own those sats that point to something of value to them, furthermore, they add value for miners to extract as fees.


This sounds a lot more like a reasonable argument against Ordinals, a much better one than "hey they are spamming the blockchain". the counter-argument to this however has been discussed, these NFTs have a huge market, probably worth a dozen times more than the average joe paying 1 sat per byte to transfer his 0.01BTC, the value extracted by those interested in these things could very well pass the value of the users who shares your view, of course, it could also be the other way around, we don't know what we don't know, but I would not mind sucking all the value from all those altcoins into BTC, if that's what the people want -- why not?

As opposed to arbitrary payment data that is pushed to the blockchain once to stay there forever?
Like all those silly satoshidice bets? Or the transfers of the NFTs? Or all the "test" transactions that people do to feel more secure about the "real" transaction?

In the end nobody can decide what is arbitrary or not. Only fees can. The higher the fees, the higher the barrier for frivolous use, and thus the less arbitrary.

Users will always find a way to relay their txs to miners more than willing to earn those higher fees.
There's nothing you can do to stop that, only try to make it a little less convenient by imposing standard-ness rules. But with high enough fees, there will always be middleman like ordinals.com to make that process as convenient as can be.

If you want less "arbitrary" data, allow all uses of the blockchain to compete and the fees to be raised. Which has to happen anyway if bitcoin is to maintain any long term security.

Money is store of value and bitcoin was supposed to become money hence a store of value from day one. If you say it is already a store of value them it means bitcoin has succeeded in becoming money.

Bitcoin was never supposed to be perfect but the average block time is not the reason for it.

We haven't established that bitcoin has shifted away from its principles. The number of people using bitcoin for payment has always been increasing regardless of how many "investors" exist who don't. That means bitcoin has never shifted away from those principles to begin with.
Besides it still doesn't justify spamming the blockchain with useless data and use it as personal cloud storage.

We can't because these are not "tokens", they are not even smart contracts, they do not transfer anything to anyone, they also don't add any value to the blockchain. These are arbitrary data that is pushed to the blockchain once to stay there forever, pointlessly increasing the chain size.

This argument has been made ever since block reward was 50BTC and now it is 6.25BTC and yet the hashrate is at an all time high and increasing.
Now look at it this way, in another possible scenario when the spammers will have had filled each block with "cryptokitties" and increased the fees the rest of the bitcoiners would abandon bitcoin and dump their coins which would crash the price. In which case the miners would be the first to see the consequences. The token hype dies like it died in 2018 and bitcoin wouldn't even be used for that anymore.

The real question is "when". I'd say the growth will stop in at least another 2 decades and by then market has grown big enough and matured enough that there will no longer be big drops and small drops like 2% is not going to affect the hashrate enough to be considered a problem.

Besides if you think something like "token scam" is needed to keep bitcoin alive in the future, there is no need to add it now! You are basically saying that just because something may happen in the far away future we should ruin bitcoin today while it is working fine and has no problems!

Those were some nice thoughts and it's nice to hear from someone that is a miner on this issue. To me the thing that is the most troubling is that this nft functionality is just kind of an accident. If it would have gone through some type of standardization and voting process like a BIP and people weighed in on the pros and cons and everyone had a fair chance to put in their 2 cents worth and a community vote turned up that the majority wanted the functionality then you can't really say anything about that. But it kind of just got thrust upon us and there was no vote or anything.

Also this goes without saying but if it would have gone through some type of standardization process they might have been able to come up with something more suitable and technically more sound than this "ordinals" solution. Franky has pointed out how there's really not a ownership that gets transferred more like you have to follow a chain of transactions back to some original transaction so not ideal. But i don't know all those details...

But bitcoin is no longer a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" as far as the majority of people are concerned it became more like a "store of value", there are fundamental aspects of Bitcoin that keep it from being a perfect "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" like the average block time and the value instability, it's not useless in that regard, but it's far from perfect, which is the reason why things like Lightning Network came to existence.

In fact, it's almost impossible for bitcoin to become what i was intended for, that's not anybody's fault, Bitcoin turned out to be too good to be spent, and since "bad money drives out good." it's safe to assume that BTC will work better as a store of value than anything else.

Now that we shifted way too far from any "principles", it's probably a good idea to reconsider who are the real users of BTC? you can argue that the real users are those who just use the blockchain for regular transfers, to many others, the real users are the ones who contribute value to the blockchain, at this point, the exact definition of "spam" is going to be lost.

I never liked NFTs, never believed they had any value to me, even the ones that sell for 100k I personally wouldn't pay a penny to buy them, but that's just me, however, maybe we can consider these Oridnals as an added value to the blockchain, at least from the security side of things.

I could be biased as a bitcoin miner, but do hear me out, what gives bitcoin any value to start with, what is more important to bitcoin, my miners or me wanting to keep the system NFT-free? it's without a doubt that my miners are more important, they secure the network, and my thoughts on what should be on the blockchain have exactly no value.

I hope we all agree that the more valuable bitcoin is -- the more it is secured, there is a direct correlation between (how much value the miners can extract from the blockchain) and (how secured the blockchain is), the more value -- the better for BTC.

As of today, that might not be so crucial, but at some point in the future, the block rewards will hardly keep "enough" miners online, to them, it doesn't matter if they are getting paid by someone transacting value or sending some arbitrary data, as long as all "users" are competing and paying high fees -- miners will stay online.

We were discussing the hashrate trend in the mining section a few days ago, and it does seem like there is enough room for more growth given the average worldwide power rate, but that growth can't be sustained, at one point the network will be saturated and no further growth can happen, when we arrive at that equilibrium, every drop in BTC price will result in a drop in the hashrate and thus a drop in the overall security of the whole system, and all of this could happen while the block rewards are at 6.25 BTC, when those are halved a few times over the years, we are going to need BTC to be worth a few millions of dollars to keep it as secured as it is today.

eventually, BTC's price will have to settle at a very narrow range just like anything of a value does over time when it grows large enough, every halving that occurs then will have a major impact on BTC's security, that "lost value" needs to come from somewhere, if it can't come from the average user who transfers ones a month paying 1 sat/vbyte, it has to come from elsewhere, be it someone paying 100 sats to transact or to store their naked picture is somehow irrelevant to the miners and the security they provide for the system.

I also understand that the average user who doesn't mine BTC, doesn't consider the hashrate to be the #1 aspect of value to BTC, and isn't into all of this NFT stuff wants to be able to transact at the cheapest possible, so ya, it's pretty difficult for anyone to convince anyone else as to what's best for BTC!
 

i'm of the opinion that anytime some new functionality is introduced that this functionality should be well defined and not allow for any unintended or unforeseen use cases. and if those happen then, it needs to be tightened up the belt buckle needs to be strapped up a bit tighter...should have been done in the first place but since you can't go back in time, you have to fix it by applying a patch.