Topic: NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory - page 3. (Read 9532 times)

Clearly posting video files in TapScript is not intended behavior, but tokens are not going away.

I think the solution is clear: OP_BN128_ADD, OP_BN128_MUL, OP_BN128_CHECKPAIRING
If there was an easy, efficient way to verify zero knowlege proofs on BTC, the ordinals can migrate to zk-powered layer 2s which still have the full effective security of Bitcoin (instead of transactions being directly verified on bitcoin, the transactions are proved, and then the proof is verified on Bitcoin, so by induction...).

There are efficient, secure SNARKs with constant size proofs of ~100bytes meaning that verifying 100,000 BRC-20 token transactions could be bundled into a single transaction on BTC which has the footprint of a single multisig uxto.


In the meantime, a shameless plug-- L2Ordinals is trying to get projects to adopt using zkp ordinals to decrease the footprint of ordinal based tokens on Bitcoin (bring the footprint down from lots of txs to a few ZKP txs of a hundred bytes each).

Supporting succinct zero knowlege proofs in the long term is the only way I see this ending without alienating a large group of the community/increased drama.

Here's what I consider an anathema:

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/08/04/bsv-suffers-51-attack-report/
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2019/05/24/bitcoin-cash-miners-undo-attackers-transactions-with-51-attack/

I once tried syncing with the BSV network.  I stopped the moment I realized I would run out of space before it reaches the chain tip.  I have had more than a terabyte of free space.  Yeah, I consider it an anathema.  

(I am not endorsing BSV in any way, I was just testing their software.  Later, even block explorers stopped supporting it, so I guess it really is too much of a trouble)


Miners would only be discouraged to mine transactions which pay more if they are non-standard.  But now it is too late.  Ordinals are standard.  And now they are discouraged from installing softrware which re-treats them as non-standard, because they know they will lose a ton of money.

He did, but he's now gone, and just because "one path" as you interpreted was how Satoshi wanted the way things to work, doesn't mean it's what's best for the longevity and the sustainability of the network. As I posted, he's not a "god" and with all due respect, he can also be wrong.


No, I'm OK with Bitcoin. It's enough for a pleb like me. It's widely accepted everywhere in crypto and it's easy to buy them if I need to because it's available in literally all exchanges. Plus I avoid forked altcoins that claim they're the "real Bitcoin", or people who claim to be Satoshi.


I was taking you seriously until you said that.

I've looked a bit closer into Luke's Bitcoin Knots changes.

The probably most relevant change this pull request which changes the -datacarriersize policy. If a node limits the maximum amount of data (like it's the case by default), it puts the "Ordinal-style" transactions which "obfuscate" data behind OP_FALSE and OP_IF on the same terms than OP_RETURN transactions. If I interpret right this would limit these "arbitrary data" items to 80 bytes, just like OP_RETURN data items, for the transaction to be relayed by default.

In general, this is a policy I could approve because it's "technologically neutral", much in contrast to earlier attempts to "patch" Bitcoin to "solve" the problem which "filtered" only Ordinals-type inscriptions by hard-coding them into the client.

However, it wouldn't help much against the BRC-20 issue. It seems in these the size of the "content", which is probably identic with "arbitrary data" (although I'm not sure if the MIME type and other metadata has to be added, but that are also only a few bytes), is only between 50 and 60 bytes*, see this BRC-20 transaction for an example. It would help against big NFTs but these aren't the reason for the current congestion. However, even in this case, they could switch to the method used in Doginals for the bigger NFTs.

I also think that Peter Todd is right in the comments that this could lead to smaller miners' competitiveness getting reduced, although one could say the same thing if the problem was with big OP_RETURN data items.

There are two more changes relevant for Ordinals/Inscriptions:

As far as I understand this only would be used by miners.

The question here is: would miners use it or not? Would miners that use it have disadvantages regarding those not using it? Would they lose money replacing Ordinals-style transactions with "normal" transactions which pay less fees? I guess the answer is yes and thus not much miners would use this - if not, I'd be grateful for an explanation

I think here the same thing applies to the -datacarriersize change. It's not something I would oppose but it wouldn't help to fight the BRC-20 spam as the sizes of these are much smaller.


*This doesn't mean that BRC-20 isn't terribly inefficient. A protobuf-based format could store the same values in less than 20 bytes, I guess. And the problem with the "2 transactions per transfer", which results in >110 bytes of overhead, remains.

Satoshi was not just a developer , he was an architect . He pointed the way things should work . Don't compare core with him . It's like a civil engineer providing designs of how a building should be made , and each brick layer do whatever he thinks is better because after all civil engineers don't build bricks .
If you disagree on that kindly provide me info of what groundbreaking projects as bitcoin has each member of core made so far .


They do , its just that most people in crypto have followed what vitalik , cz etc said and consider other chains than btc as scam . Funny though that cz , richard heart and even vitalik are now officialy the scammers .
Take as an example your self . Have you ever tried if bch , bsv or xec works ? Or do you consider anathema to even transact in those chains ?

Thank you , you too . They already have . Ethereum can currently run as a sidechain on bsv and i think xec . In fact all chains can due to it's TC ability .
May the best chain win , competition is the best thing in this world .

In the context that Satoshi is a developer, not a "god", and Bitcoin is an open source project, not a church - Currently the developers who are in charge have made design-decisions on the network to value decentralization and security first, and transaction throughput second.


OK, then shouldn't the big blockers start marketing their forked chains for Ordinals users? Shouldn't they demo their networks that it could handle all the demand for blocks? Why keep criticizing the Bitcoin Core Developers and making it a philosophical debate?

BCash and BCash SV chains are better, OK, all Ordinals users should use them.


OK, good luck. I hope they build it better than Ethereum.

My apologies , i'm not a native english speaker and i thought the context was the same . Had to ask chatgpt :

    Priced Out: This implies that the user is unable to afford or participate due to the high fees, making the transaction network inaccessible.
    Pushed Out: This suggests a force or external factor (in this case, high fees) that is causing the user to be excluded or compelled to leave the network.

I diasgree that the network was designed this way . On the contrary , satoshi said that when demand starts to rise , users should not run nodes and start using spv's . The core's mentality that miners and pools are bad is the one that made people want to give the ability to everyone to run a node with very low specs . A proverb in my country says " you can't paint easter eggs with farts " .
And for the possible argument that there's no high demand for transactions , so no need for increase in blocksize of base layer to keep fees down , look at how many tens of thousands of projects exist because btc can't handle all those transactions or users don't use it due to high fees .

Actually they build , much more than just nft's and in extremely higher volume . Maybe you should check it out , things happening in btc now were started years ago in other sha-256 chains .

I didn't say pushed out, I said priced out. I believe there's an obvious difference. It is as the network was designed, to be robust. Plus by keeping the costs of running a full node low, the costs are pushed to the users. I wouldn't say that it isn't annoying for plebs like me though.


Why don't they build on the "Bitcoin" with big blocks? That would be "more efficient" and more sustainable, no?

Sidechain is barely used while LN still require on-chain TX to open/close channel, so unfortunate ones is more likely to stop using Bitcoin or use Bitcoin only for bigger TX. And IMO things such as DeFi or NFT should be done on Bitcoin sidechain instead.


Although even if the author change the format, all BRC-20 software need to perform update on their back-end and wallet software.

True, there are more people thinking in a similar way. For example here: https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/sc-vision/

But of course, expensive on-chain transactions doesn't mean, that each transaction should represent a single user. If you have any kind of transaction joining (sidechain-based or not), then there could be thousands of users, behind a single, joined transaction, batched in a trustless way.

Of course, but BRC-20 folks could simply change the protocol, or change directly to a competing token format, like Casey's proposed "Runes", or even old ones like coloured coins, Omni and Counterparty. As long as the token creator is still around, he can simply swap them for the new format (they're essentially centralized). It would simply lead to an arms race and in the end nothing would have been improved. So I strongly oppose Luke's approach, even if I won't win a popularity contest in this thread with this stance

My opinion is that the only effective strategy against the BRC-20 spam is pointing out, in all communities, that BRC-20 tokens are probably the most useless (and thus, worthless in the long term) assets ever created. These days this may seem different, but I don't give them much life after this bounce. Those who buy at current prices into tokens like ORDI are ... well, at least going for an extreme risk.

(Fun fact: after the success of ORDI, a token called NALS was created and is doing quite well. That shows very well the value proposition of BRC-20 tokens. )

Here I agree.

I prefer dunkin donuts.

I remember watching a debate with Saifedean Ammous, where the other person said that BTC was too slow and too expensive compared to the legacy payment methods, he did touch on a very important point that BTC transactions are final settlements, they should not be compared with your average credit card or Paypal payments because those are not final, and he makes a lot of sense because if you were to make a wire transfer from the U.S to Tanzania, the final settlement between your bank and the other person's bank and the dozen parties involved could take days if not weeks, and it's no where near cheap.

The same thing actually applies when you pay using your credit card, the shop gets its balance increased right away but for the value to be settled between the banks, the payment provider, and all parties involved it's going to take a lot and cost a lot, especially for cross-border transactions.

So on-chain transactions should be compared with central bank-level settlements since they are the textbook definition of final settlements, so it makes sense that they are expensive and somewhat slow, despite beating the legacy system in that regard, now, I for one would like to see fees increase because more people, companies or even banks are using BTC to settle transactions and not because of some worthless ' it's what I think about Ordinals' data stored on the blockchain.

However, it's only common sense for fees to go up with time, I mean if BTC was used by 1% of the population, nobody would get away with those 2 sat/Vbyte transactions even without Ordinals, I strongly believe the Brc-20 hype will fade and will be just history -- but it will still be a tough war for those  "let's do whatever it takes to keep my fee at 2 sats/ Vbyte" because sometime in the future they would be contesting against each other when Ordis are gone, many people will find something to blame for the high fees, I can't wait for things like "All these stupid folks spamming the blockchain to buy Starbucks coffee that tastes like shit", and ya, I would have to agree with them because Starbucks coffee really does taste like shit.

No one is pushed out of using the network . Anyone has the right to increase the fee to a level that will make his transaction enter into the next block . Isn't that the purpose of the fee market , to make blockchain space as much valuable as possible ? Well , mission accomplished . To be honest , i see current fee market at a low level . As soon as more protocols start to create defi's etc on btc , fees will increase in thousands of dollars for a single tx .
The unfortunate ones will be those that will have to exit from LN for whatever reason and those stacking sats . A new era is coming .

BRC-20 transaction patterns could be identified regardless of their size, so a complete "block" is technically possible, Luke probably knows this, and wouldn't be risking dropping "normal" transactions for false positives. however, what Luke is trying to do now is add an opt-out feature to make your node reject Ordinals.  Bitcoin allows all inscriptions by default, adding a new option to reject Ordinals-like transactions won't fix it, I mean even if the new core version comes with that opt-out enabled by default, people can still disable it, correct me if I am wrong.

Reading into Luke's comments here and there regarding this "ban" he does refer to it as "spam filtration" and he seems to be counting on the fact that most people including miners would activate the change, I find it very hard to believe that mining pools will opt-in for a new upgrade that makes them lose proft.

Finally ORDI crashed 20%, maybe the 65$ were really the top. SATS and others are already falling for some days. But we had such crashes before, so I'm afraid they could try another pump.


Conspiracy theory: it's the miners who orchestrate the ORDI pump to not only lure people in and try to profit from the pump-and-dump, but also for them to inscribe new tokens and rise the fees.  


Unfortunately, this would not fix the "bug", as I have explained multiple times. BRC-20 transactions, which are causing the congestion, aren't bigger than normal transactions with a handful of inputs/outputs (they have about 400-500 vByte plus another 110+ vByte for the commit transaction). They are an inefficient protocol with several WTF decisions (like storing data as text, and needing two transactions for a transfer), but not even that is the problem, the problem is their amount due to the "minting" hype. Big inscriptions, which should be dropped from the mempool by Luke Jr's version, aren't the problem anymore.

That gives bad actors the opportunity to build a months/years long sustainable ecosystem to price many users out from using the network. The "protocol" of Ordinals by itself is not the attack, but it could be used as an attack vector. It's going to be an annoying few months until the hype goes down, but it might not be the end of that. It goes, then it comes back.

That aside, Luke Dash Jr. released a new version of Bitcoin Knots, "fixing" the bug called Ordinals.


Anti-Ordinals users should start running that.

That's why miners wouldn't want big blocks.

If the situation continues miners will have their best christmas ever . Looks like the hype isn't cooling down , ordi is now at more than 50000 times the money cost to inscribe . That gives a lot of ammo to the inscribers to continue .