Topic: NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory - page 27. (Read 9515 times)

Check out pCloud. You pay it once 200 EUR, you get 500 GB "lifetime" storage. You pay an extra 200 EUR, you get 2 TB.

I don't understand much the need for lifetime cloud service. I don't trust any of those companies' lifespan to begin with. Leaving my files saved somewhere outside my place for 10 years doesn't provide the same confidence, whether it's a trillion dollar company like Apple keeping them, or a pCloud. If you want to keep your files "forever", buy a hard drive, and make backups every once in a while.

Bitcoin is not a cloud storage service so when people use it for that, it is an attack. Specially when it is not just one or two cases of people storing some small arbitrary data on bitcoin blockchain but an increasing threat to the future of bitcoin as a peer-to-peer digital cash.

there's people that paid $60 or more to upload their bitcoin "nft" so i wouldn't say $11.72 is too bad of a price to store 300kb on bitcoin. it really is forever. you can't store all your gigabytes on it but maybe just the most important data that doesn't change that you can't afford to lose...that's how i see it anyway.


i would say "attacking" bitcoin is a rather harsh word for storing some piece of important data on the blockchain that you do because it's important to not lose it. the intention would not be to attack bitcoin. or hurt bitcoin. so maybe you should bring it down a notch...

now if you're creating thousands of nfts that have one single word in them like some idiot is and has been doing then yeah, that's probably worth calling a spam attack.

Obviously!
Spam attackers never care about these things. They are only attacking bitcoin for their own benefit, like 2017 where creators of some of the shitcoins talking about "flippening" were funding part of the spam attack against bitcoin.
This is why such attacks should be prevented as much as possible.

Let's be honest, 99.9% of users think like this: Ordinals == NFTs == easy money. Therefore they will upload cartoon monkeys and try to sell them, that's it.

I can guarantee you there are more people with solid backup solutions in place (even just one reputable cloud storage provider is realistically good enough) than Ordinals users who use that technology to back up their data. Just companies alone should easily be in the millions.

I don't use Google cloud, but that's besides the point.. do you believe people have not been doing backups for more than 14 years?
For what it's worth, Amazon S3 exists since 2006 ^[1], Dropbox exists for 14 years ^[2] and Google Cloud exists for 12 years now. ^[3] These are all still operational today and older than inscriptions, NFTs and in part older than Bitcoin itself.
Cloud storage in general exists since all the way back since the 80s and 90s ^[4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Storage
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_storage#History

In no way shape or form did I mention anything about data corruption.

Besides the fact that we will all be dead by the time the block subsidy reaches 0, and that it does not justify putting Bitcoin at risk now for a problem that we won't have for another 100 years, what is suddenly wrong about paying miners through payment transaction fees?
Why can't we just work on Bitcoin adoption as a payment method for the next 100 years? If it becomes a widely accepted currency, it will get congested anyway. No need to add more fuel to the fire. We will need off-chain scaling solutions anyway, just due to the enormous number of transactions; people are more worried about the blockchain getting too full than there not being enough demand to pay miners. That's why Lightning has been developed for the last few years.
Now you come around and claim the problem is the other way round..

Actually you can store any data with Ordinals. Even the example of an inscriptions use plain text[4].


Even for few hundred kilobytes it could be pricey. For example, with 200 KB data (50 vKB/50000 vB due to witness discount) and 1 sat/vB, you'll need to pay at least 50K satoshi (about $11.72). For comparison Microsoft 365 offer 100GB storage only for $19.99/year[1] and Tutanota (email provider) offer 1GB storage for 12 EUR/year[2]. And if it's not personal data (e.g. your phone number), you can even upload it to Internet Archive for free[3].

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/onedrive/compare-onedrive-plans
[2] https://tutanota.com/pricing
[3] https://help.archive.org/help/uploading-a-basic-guide/
[4] https://docs.ordinals.com/inscriptions.html

AES-256 is considered pretty secure. I wouldn't just choose any random encryption algorithm though.

that's a problem for who? not me, not if i'm the one doing the storing.

because bitcoin demands that of you.

now if you ask me do i agree with bitcoin being turned into a decentralized file storage medium? i don't know. i want bitcoin to survive so i want miners to be able to justify their activities even once the block subsidy becomes 0. but i don't want bitcoin to become something it wasn't meant to be either. especially if that has a harmful effect on people just wanting to "send bitcoin"  

There is nothing wrong with AES-256 or any encryption algorithm and that is not even the argument. In fact by changing the argument to the safety of such an action you are hiding the main problem which is about "storing your personal data" in the blockchain. Why should I store your data on my computer (ie full node storing the blockchain)?

wrong. people also store text data on the blockchain using ordinals. at the moment, most of it appears to be readable and not encrypted but do expect that to change. also, you can't know that someone is not using some form of steganography in their images.

maybe. but i'm not sure how many of those people have a solid backup plan overall. probably most of them just think if they are uploading to the cloud they are good to go.

bitcoin has been around for about 13 or 14 years now. how long have you been storing your data onto google's cloud?  

i didn't say it was better for all forms of data storage. obviously if you have gigabyte sized things to back up then bitcoin might be a bit pricey for that. but if you only need to store a few hundred kilobytes from time to time and that data does not need to change then, well, there's bitcoin. you seem to be suggesting that ordinals might have some bug that would corrupt the data being stored. well if that was the case then the blockchain would not be immutable and bitcoin would be worthless.

that IS a good point. miners need to get paid and someone has to pay them. they don't give a damn who. and most bitcoin users don't give a damn about the block subsidy going to 0 and how that would affect miners either.  

why does it go without saying? what's wrong with AES-256? you're the one that makes the claim but then you later say you won't discuss it.  

If we talk about voting, then people not backing up their systems to the blockchain clearly win.
(1) Nobody uses Ordinals to store actual data, only pictures that they mainly hope to sell the rights to for some sweet cash
(2) There are millions, if not billions, of people, who 'vote' to store their data on systems actually made (and thus far better suited) for data storage.

It may not sound simple to someone who does not need or do proper backups, but this is how everyone serious about their data backs it up and it is very well tried and tested. It is also pretty simple in practice, because - again, these methods have been around for a while - there is tons of tooling (i.e. GUI and service providers) around it. That's not really the case for Ordinals or NFTs.

I'm not sure what you find so funny about this. Again, you are comparing a new NFT hype thing to the industry standard of data storage and archiving and claiming that the former is better and easier than the latter. It makes no sense. This sounds a bit more funny than my realistic (pessimistic?) statements.

I don't see the flaw in the NFT/Ordinals design.

It's inherent in bitcoin's design, that incentivizes miners to include anything expressible in bitcoin script for a large enough fee.

You're not forced to store any data you don't want (just set pruning), but you do need to verify it as a full (i.e. fully verifying) node, just like you must verify all the tons of silly satoshi dice transactions made in the past.

If bitcoin is ever to survive in the future where block subsidy is insignificant, then you want any use of the blockchain that people can think of and are willing to pay fees for. Only a competitive fee market can pay for long term security.

Your question shows the flaw in the NFT and Ordinals design. The fact that everyone is forced into storing data that they do not want and should not even be part of the blockchain.
But to answer your question, that's actually a good thing because there is no reason for a file that nobody uses to continue being hosted.

P.S. It goes without saying that storing your personal information including seed (encrypted on not) on bitcoin blockchain is silly and is not worth discussing

I have doubt about the number (over 175K people), but what do you consider or not consider as "personal data"? For example, i don't consider image NFT (such as Bored Ape) or fart sound as personal data. How many of those people actually intend to store arbitrary data rather than looking for profit?


That's definitely possible. But IMO it's very unlikely to happen for major cloud storage service such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

I wouldn't say that. There are genuine use-cases for NFTs in areas such as the music industry which should blossom over the coming years. The hype, yes, was way out of proportion to what it deserved and to this day I struggle to find out why....I personally think the most likely answer was money laundering, which additoinally roped innocent people into the volumes that the laundering was generating in the NFT space [1] [2]. I wouldn't call it the "ultimate cryptocurrency scam" though.

Ordinals on bitcoin, being designed to write on-chain....I still struggle to wrap my head around how it will benefit the ecosystem and how it isn't just a cool side-feature that happens to maximize miner revenue.

you don't have to be convinced. over 175,000 people have already voted with confidence about storing their "personal data" on the bitcoin blockchain. they don't need to back it up. it's there always present.

this is not the simplest system. and i'm not even sure it is the best. not anymore. not with blockchain data storage becoming an option, not necessarily for huge files but for small files it definitely is.

or NOT. they might just walk away oneday with no advance warning.

you do realize how ridiculous that sounds: checking if bitcoin still exists ? 

no one would bet against bitcoin not lasting the next 50 years because they would have to pay out FOR SURE. FOR SURE.

thanks for the laughs.

I guess we're going to end up going in circles, but I'm still not convinced that uploading your personal data somewhere is the best way to preserve that data. It's not a coincidence that the simplest system is usually the best; in this case:

• Buy or build a local data storage setup with redundancy
• Set up an off-site backup location with regular backups (upload encrypted)
• Pay for a dedicated storage hosting service (upload encrypted)

You can add redundancy in each of those layers, e.g. multiple cloud storage providers, multiple off-site locations and such. A setup like this will basically guarantee fast data availability, both for upload and download. And as long as you pay your monthly expenses, you can use it as much as you like. Meanwhile using Ordinals, you'd pay for each upload, so you may get lazy and do fewer backups, the mempool could be congested, so you delay your backup until the weekend, ... and then we all know what tends to happen.

Of course, you will have to keep an eye on your cloud storage provider: if it sends you emails that it is going bankrupt, choose a new one and set up your 3rd level backups again. But you would need to keep an eye on whether Bitcoin still exists, too, if you used the blockchain to back up your data. It has been mentioned before: nothing is guaranteed to still exist in 20, 30, 50 years..

isn't that the problem though? your personal data is only going to be relevant to you. so not alot of people are going to see the need to "seed" your encrypted passwords file for example. so it drops off the network. forever!

someone's personal data that they encrypt and try and upload to bittorrent probably will not be of use to anyone else so it won't last very long unless they keep seeding it forever...

Torrent is actually a good example since "peers" actually store the data themselves and share it with others. It also stays alive as long as the file is relevant and there is demand for it. Which is a much better solution to storing something "forever".

Plus, you still have to store the private keys for those 30 shitcoins somewhere. Along with any passwords needed to decode the data. So you have to have a data storage plan for that too.

Testnet3 has more than 10 years, I wouldn't call it "come and go", it is older than many altcoins. Even signet is not enough to encourage people to switch into another test network. You could say this if there would be a chance to reset it, and to move into testnet4, but currently we are far from that.