Topic: NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory - page 30. (Read 9515 times)

But my opinion isn't in favor of "absolute freedom" in which there is freedom to intervene into other people's freedom.

What's trash for you isn't necessarily for everyone else. As long as they pay for their "trash", I don't have a problem. The network can handle any amount of trash as long as the sender pays for it. Again, I'm not in favor of absolute freedom, but of the freedom to spend your money in whatever manner you want.

The original purpose is, in my opinion, subjective, and so is this Ordinal thing. Someone might argue those NFTs are part of the Bitcoin economy, and they'll be right in some way. However, what's unquestionably true is that one principle of the Bitcoin network; censorship resistance, which is in question if you start preventing these transactions.

I don't understand what's this. Monero documentation? How's that related?

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As for the storing and distribution of illegal data: I'm not a lawyer, so I can't make a point.

We can't and shouldn't demand for miners to control the type of data stored on-chain / to censor anything. It is their job to just mine blocks and nothing more or less than that.
Also, blaming anyone doesn't help us right now. We should think about solutions, instead.

Interesting opinion. I personally believe people should be allowed to spend their money on whatever they like, too, as long as they are not spending their money to (figuratively) throw trash into my back yard.
This principle also makes more sense if you broaden it to 'freedom'. Absolute freedom, where everyone is allowed to do anything they want, is a pretty bad idea, because they will be allowed to kill you without repercussions. Freedom should stop wherever it inhibits someone else's freedom. Likewise, I think the 'freedom to use the Bitcoin blockchain / script' should stop wherever it starts inhibiting the original purpose and usability of Bitcoin.

Is that so? https://monerodocs.org/ Only monetary transactions are possible. Technically possible.

That's not the point, though. As soon as you possess and distribute illegal content, you can and should be liable for that. No matter if your node actually part of an awesome decentralized digital currency. It's not about the node or the network, it's about the fact that those bytes are on your disk and you are even distributing them to others.

That's different. In Tor, you never see the cleartext data (it is encrypted in at least one, usually more, layers of encryption), and you don't store it permanently, either. You could be liable for aiding in the distribution of certain materials, but that can be definitely debated in court since you shouldn't be punished (at least not to the full scale) if you don't know about the file contents.

Since the data is not encrypted and decoding software ('Ordinals project') exists and is freely accessible, it is not compared to the encrypted Tor data. In most countries, 'Ignorantia legis non excusat' is part of the law. 'Unaware' of the data is very much different to 'unable' to know the transmitted data. And, again, data storage.

That's correct. This is what makes NFTs so useless. Not only don't they stop anyone from downloading your NFT picture, you will also have a very hard time trying to use that NFT as a legal document in court, if you try to sue that person.

But "they care". They care that it will have more value than the value they have bought it for. Greed is what makes the market work, with each person incentivized by their actions, whether buying or selling. I'm not debating you, I'm merely telling you, and actually everyone, that perhaps we shouldn't miscalculate the present situation. Plus I can't prove it, but I believe there are "Bitcoiners", who want to see it fail. Their statements are made because of their "Anti-Maximalist" motivations, not necessarily they truly believe that Ordinals is a net-positive for the network. They might have fell from the path, and lost it.

"Should" is a strong word. I'm of the opinion that if we've reached consensus for something to be possible and valid, we shouldn't intervene and introduce sorts of censorship, because there is no other manner to intervene. You either dictate what users can do with their money or you don't. But "should"? No, in my opinion. We shouldn't spend money on trash, individually, sure, but we shouldn't introduce censorship to accomplish that collectively.

Unfortunately, from a technical perspective, every transaction moving money is a currency transaction. If you decide to call one type of transaction non-currency, you introduce censorship.

Maybe it is. Maybe downloading blocks of illegal content makes you a criminal. But maybe treating an entire peer-to-peer network as illegal because some decide to use it for illegal purposes is a flawed argument to begin with. No user running a full node should be considered involved into this, just as no Tor user should be considered partner with someone, just because he routed illegal information without him knowing. Just as a miner approving a transaction without being aware it's an illegal one. Full nodes don't advertise themselves as porn sites, so they shouldn't be treated as illicit.

And besides that, what would the introduction of censorship do to avoid this? As far as I can tell, nothing. Saying that "you can't do this kind of transactions", because a few use it for illicit purpose, doesn't mean those few won't find another way to accomplish it indirectly, again on-chain.

Blaming the miners for what? Following profit?

And I'm just saying that the "rights" don't belong to you by the law. You can create an image, have the copyright, but no laws describe transfer of ownership via blockchain. So it's essentially unofficial rights, AKA community rights.

Your statements are based on the false assumption that people care about uniqueness of a token they buy (they don't even care about their utility). People who buy tokens are buying them to make profit from their pump, wishful thinking of course but they don't care if the duplicate of the same thing existed in the same chain let alone existing on another as long as that little hope for profit exited.

Well since I first noticed this discussion elsewhere, I thought I'd quote my post here as well

I think this filtering is a great idea, overall I still think the main focus should be sound money over jpeg scams that do nothing for us as sound money.

Fee market or not. Don't follow the pack... Be a leader.

Currently, it is possible to spam the blockchain by using "OP_FALSE OP_IF OP_ENDIF". All nodes have to store that kind of scripts. It is possible to filter some transactions on mempool level, however, that kind of filtering can be avoided by relaying spammy transactions directly to the miners.

In practice, those kind of scripts are just huge OP_NOPs. Because of that, I started to think if we could somehow prune it. Of course, in case of upgrading the Script, it is possible to choose a format, where such opcodes will cancel out, and could be taken out of the Script, without invalidating signatures. But when it comes to what we have today, the whole script is needed, because it is checked when validating transaction hash, and current signatures are based on those hashes.

However, when we consider hashing any data, typical hash functions like SHA-256 are based on splitting the message into smaller chunks, and processing them linearly, one-by-one. And here comes some room for improvement: optional pruning of chunks in the middle, while keeping the first and the last chunk. Also, in a typical hash function, the last chunk contains the size of the message, so it can be also used to check if provided full message has enough chunks in the middle.

So, if that spam will keep growing, I think about going into semi-pruned mode: not switching from witness to non-witness mode (because requirements for OP_RETURN can be also lifted, and because then additional witness verification is needed), but pruning large OP_NOPs instead, while preserving internal state of SHA-256 after the first chunk, and before the last chunk.

It can at least lead to every single node operator being vulnerable to being framed for supporting illegal data, because these things are not as complex as financial crime. It is black and white as to whether or not you are downloading this data via your full node.

Don't you think server operators will be more likely to ban Bitcoin now that this kind of data could be flowing over their network as well?

There are a lot of new temporary complications that could arise and could hurt BTC from Ordinals...not to mention that it was introduced after inception by 15 years. Imagine the feedback to developers if this potential issue explodes into headlines or in the ears of the adversary?

No, these things won't kill it, but it sure as hell will hurt it...right at a time when Bitcoin is mostly getting over the "financial crime" slander that has been thrown at it since its infancy. I think people understand that part of it can't be controlled and that it's by-nature that Bitcoin is financial sovereignty for better and for worse...are BTC devs really trying to claim the title "Bitcoin is also Art, for better and for worse" at this point in time? The battle that Bitcoin was supposed to be fighting since its inception is not even over yet.

I'm blaming the miners. Seems that they will benefit the most from this whether it hurts bitcoin or doesn't. They'd be fully aware of the potential pitfalls too.

Yes, there is a cross-roads when someone creates an NFT of someone else's off-chain creation and claims it as their own. That is a copyright issue. That's not at all what I'm referring to when I talk about rights.

When you mint an original NFT with an original creation, it does not matter who mints the same/duplicate NFT after you. The blockchain has written that you were the first to create this content (at least on the blockchain) and from that point forward, the rights to the creation are transfer-able on-chain and all NFTs that try to copy your original will be verifiably useless/fakes.

Rights also have nothing to do with the community either. Rights are strictly between the creator and the blockchain (when the creation is original, as described above).

Plus spamming as a network attack to cause for fees to surge would discourage the use for Bitcoin's actual utility that could cause the weakening/breaking-down of political strongholds, and that's a permissionless, censorship-resistant network for hard money.

The "spam" won't be just a another costly attack anymore, it's actually incentivized spamming because the attackers will get some profit from those people who actually value dick pics and fart sounds in the blockchain.

That's the real question.
I'd say we should continue fighting to keep the network healthy. Whether it is to protect it against hostile takeovers or bsv and bcash like attacks or spam attacks. It definitely won't stay healthy on its own if we ignore it.

Does this mean that we should do everything that is technically possible, though? Or that because something was always possible, it is automatically good / right?

No, I don't think so. Bitcoin has been subjected as money laundering tool, criminal money, ponzi / pyramid / whatever, etc., and against all odds it's more powerful than ever. Banning Bitcoin doesn't even pass the laugh test anymore. Secondly, you could always store illegal content on-chain, Ordinals could always be implemented. It isn't a brand new feature.

Rights according to the community. There's absolutely no legislation that treats hashes of images of rocks as property. Also, whatever bad happens to Ethereum, we know they'll tackle it with a hard fork. It is not censorship resistant.

This is a very valid point and this in itself could be a major driver that leads to the censorship of Bitcoin globally once bad actors begin to utilize ordinal inscriptions for this purpose.

I feel that Ordinals were a big mistake. I see the point in NFTs on chains like Ethereum, where the media isn't actually written to the chain but rather the rights to it are. Ordinals written directly on-chain on the other hand seems like it has not been thought through and potentially could be a huge shot in the foot for BTC.

I would love to read more about there being any fail-safes for this kind of scenario. I doubt there are though.

The legal concern that arises is: what happens if the Bitcoin blockchain is filled up with illegal stuff (e.g., child porn), like in the BSV blockchain? Sharing the blockchain with any node requests it is no different to seeding a torrent (well, not a lot different at least). But seeding an illegal torrent holds you accountable. And you can't decide to not share a part of the blockchain, because nodes need all of it to firstly make sure they have the correct state.

How do you envision node operators 'cleaning up' the blockchain? 51% attacks and reorganizing blocks? You must be delusional. This is a proof-of-work blockchain. There is no moderation except consensus rules.

What was shown to me (not 'disgusting' per se, but off-putting & quickly making me realize it is the BSV blockchain, immediately closing the webpage and clearing all caches) was almost 2 weeks ago. This blockchain is so full of spam that you probably see completely different stuff every day. Furthermore, it is definitely possible that this frontend is doing some filtering. Doesn't change the fact that the BSV blockchain does contain horrible stuff that you cannot delete and will have to store, if you want to run a full BSV node. I don't want this happening to Bitcoin.

There is no central authority for Bitcoin.

That's just one front-end. You're free to build your own node and keep everything uncensored as long as you don't care about operating illegally within your legal jurisdiction. Most websites like this one will have a reporting tool for removing illegal material. It's completely impractical not to have one unless you live in one of the few countries that allow any media content.

The blockchain as a whole operates without jurisdiction, but not individual node operators.

If you want to show Ordinal inscriptions, then do it. If you want to prune the witness signatures, then do it. That's the beauty of being able to choose how to run your node.

So, what you are saying is that they can censor, cleanup whatever they want? That doesn't look good. Having a central authority to dictate what is good and what is not, however the mentioned disgusting pictures exist, they just don't show it aka censor selectively.

I checked it out. Where are the "disgusting" pictures? This is completely safe to show my mom and grandma.

I went through the first 3000 pictures (website is really slow for browsing). It's just literal wholesome family photos. Half of the pictures are family photos. The other half are boring vacation photos and food photos. They're just using it like a really boring Instagram or Facebook album.

If there were "disgusting" photos as you suggested, they've been reported and cleaned up a long time ago.

I'm not debating if they're "actual demand" or not, but just illustrating the fact that if there's "demand" for Ordinal-NFT, then there's going to be users/developers who would be very happy to be incentivized to provide the supply. As the demand surges, users would be fighting to be first in the "Fee-Wars", surging the fees, mem-pools will be full, and the network will be congested. Big blockers would probably be happy to "seed" the demand as an attack to the network.