Topic: NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory - page 32. (Read 9163 times)

People already do some of that, see https://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html.


For better or worse, obtaining and decoding/re-assemble arbitrary data from Bitcoin blockchain is quite difficult for most person, so i expect government would focus on different leak method which is more accessible.


There's no need to create new side-chain. RSK and Liquid could do that. In fact, i would recommend those people to use RSK which is decentralized and secure thanks to merge mining with BTC network.

Some of the standard rules are meant as "soft discouragement" to encourage people to seek better solutions that don't harm Bitcoin (like the OP_RETURN limit). For example the NFT guys could easily create a side-chain that is secure by merged-mining which would in turn provide a much better market (incentive) for miners to make money while securing that side-chain without "attacking" bitcoin.

Sure, as I said, if we assume a maximally free market, that would / should be the outcome.
I just personally don't think that this is right. I believe the availability of a reliable, decentralized, worldwide payment network and digital currency is much more important to civilization than NFTs.

While I don't hate the idea of NFTs, the problem is that they're just glorified contracts that nobody can / does enforce. If someone plagiarizes some digital art you own, no matter whether your proof of ownership is 'traditional' (buyer receipt or proof you made it yourself) or whether that proof is an NFT on some blockchain, you will still need to denounce / report the user who technically stole it and still need authority of some kind to take down the copy.
Imagine movie studios minted an NFT of their movies and then hoped that would stop piracy. Of course it wouldn't. That makes NFTs mostly pointless; there's little to no benefit to traditional contracts.

So, allowing Bitcoin as a payment network to be taken over for the sake of something that's basically pointless, because there is nobody to enforce it, is very silly in my opinion.

WOW, this is perfect, I read that we can add videos into the blockchain by this thing! Amazing, just imagine sending child porn, government secrets as NFTs.

So if it's bad don't try to change the rules, which is a hard thing to do, instead try to figure out a way to fight back.
e.g., Next thing you know someone will create series of forbidden NFTs and governments will go after every node/ miner/ block explorer to "manage the situation".

Dibs on OnlyFans.com as NFT. 😂

There is orders of magnitude difference between "why spam the blockchain, when there are more effective ways" and "stop spamming the blockchain, it does us harm". Of course and there are less expensive solutions to have NFTs on-chain, but you (or at least, the Bitcoin protocol) don't ever force somebody do something for their good. There is also a less inefficient manner to burn coins; yet people send them to 1111111111111111111114oLvT2. Hell, a great percentage of the Bitcoin userbase still uses Legacy addresses.

I'm not suggesting that we should disable every single limit most clients have by default, but I'm just curious to know when we consented that line. Because as far as I know, developers drew a line in non-standardness and users followed later on without much debate. For example, what's the explanation behind the limit of OP_RETURN at 80 bytes by default?

Furthermore, standardness being what safeguards the system is flawed in the first place. Consensus rules protect from whatever. There's nothing stopping a group of miners from setting up a market, or just sharing their node URI, with NFT users, wherein they bypass the non-standard rule of dumping transactions with Ordinals etc., normally having their transactions included into blocks. And that's even worse, because now regular users don't see how much filled the mempool is, and the fee they select will not correspond accurately.

In fact there is pretty much only incentive for miners to disable most non-standard rules.

If there is demand for expensive NFT transactions, shouldn't the users have the freedom to make them?

I also lean towards the "keep it payment-related" side, but the way I see it, if NFTs become commonly used on the Bitcoin blockchain -- and I mean long-term, not just as a fad -- that, to me, is a completely valid use case, even if I personally don't see much in it.

Maybe it's my rose colored glasses, but I still believe that colored coins / NFTs will eventually find meaningful use cases -- arguably colored coins already have, in the form of stablecoins and even ICOs, if they weren't so scam-ridden. And while NFTs are in my opinion currently little more than a philosophical exercise, exploring the ownership of intangibles, I do think they might become the building blocks of something bigger once the hype around digital collectibles has subsided. That doesn't mean that the Bitcoin blockchain is the right place for this, but if a few rich kids are willing to pay premium for the clout of owning an NFT on the OG Blockchain, so be it. Might be annoying in the short term, but like I said, I have doubts that it will stick. In the end there's only money in NFTs as long as someone else is willing to pay for it.

Sure, the blockchain doesn't care, but in a maximally free situation, the NFT people would 'win' in the sense that it may only be worth paying high transaction fees (due to high demand for these JPEGs) to send around either expensive NFTs or large Bitcoin transactions. It may not be worth it / profitable anymore to use Bitcoin as an everyday currency.
Don't underestimate the NFT market; while we think it is ludicrous and stupid, there is a lot of money in it. Money that may make the Bitcoin blockchain unusable in favor of becoming a platform for JPEGs.

So I do understand both sides, but lean towards the 'keep it payment-related' side. We already have payment networks on Bitcoin that are easier and more scalable to extend (e.g. for adding JPEGs). Besides reducing blockchain usage by their very existence, instead of increasing blockchain usage (which is precisely 'NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain' are doing).
We should encourage reducing blockchain usage if possible, so this stuff here seems like a massive step-back.

@BlackHatCoiner raises good points but we should draw the line between being censorship resistant and having no limits and allowing everything. As a matter of fact, Bitcoin is filled with limitations. Limits in consensus rules such as number of allowed sigops, block size (weight), max op count, etc. and a lot of standard rules on top of that such as size of OP_RETURN.
All of these limitations are designed to keep the system healthy and we should fight to keep it that way.

So, as you can see, there is no need to spam the blockchain, when there are better options.

The Bitcoin blockchain doesn't recognize incentives and types of spam attacks in this matter. Nor do humans know with 100% certainty. There is spam, and whether it is used to fulfill the owners of some shitcoin or not, the same damage is done. If the Bitcoin network allows for specific types of transactions, then idiots who push their shitcoins are also welcomed to broadcast their transactions if they're okay with the rules.

But, that's bitcoin. Regular users should acknowledge this first, and move on. The network's state isn't dictated by anyone. If someone can tolerate the premium fee, he's welcomed to float the chain with NFTs. We endorse censorship resistance.

Besides, there is a nearly infinite number of manners to create altcoins using the Bitcoin blockchain. You can't prevent them all.

We have spam attack then we have spam attack with an incentive. This is the later.

In a spam attack when someone is pushing garbage into the blockchain (as it is a "freedom protocol") the fee market kicks in and increases the cost for them. They won't have the incentive to continue pushing the garbage to the blockchain.
When there is incentive (meaning a useless token with actual price that they can sell for real money to cover the cost of the spam attack) then the fee market is only harming the real regular uses trying to send bitcoin around since the attacker is earning money to spam the network.

This is not the OP_RETURN discussions at all. This is that altcoin that used to be "mined" by pushing its hash into bitcoin chain. As long as it was being pumped, they spammed the hell out of bitcoin blockchain and as soon as it got dumped the spam died too.

AFAIK it was from back when people were starting to use scriptpub to push arbitrary data with any size to the blockchain. That created chain block and chainstate bloat (the node had to load all that unspedable data to memory). Then they introduced OP_RETURN and its rules as a "prunable output" to be used when you want to push arbitrary data to the chain.

This is my take: I don't get the bad part. All I know is that blocks contain information. Whether that's financial or arbitrary is none of my business. Each byte comes at the same cost, regardless of how it's used. I noticed a lot of toxic response to this Ordinal theory, especially from some Twitter accounts like this one. Some Bitcoiners appear to impose their morality upon how the protocol should be used. Do I need to remind that we're talking about a freedom protocol here?

What were the OP_RETURN wars about? Making large OP_RETURN scripts non-standard? How so? What's the problem?

When it comes to blockchain bloat this is mostly a rehash of the OP_Return discussion we had in 2013/14. The projects back then did bring something new to the table by enabling things like Tether and early proto-NFTs. Their impact can't be understated, regardless of whether one likes these projects or not.

Either way, my worry is limited. On-chain minting of oversized NFTs isn't really sustainable given a strict enough blocksize limit.



Yes, it's going to be interesting to see whether there will be a "fix" for this, assuming it becomes necessary. If this becomes a problem it will not be easy to get the miners on board though, as it is in their interest to have the blocks as full as possible, regardless of whether they are filled with monetary transactions or other data.

Or the importance of designing your blockchain so that transactions can include no more free data than what fits in a past lockheight (between 2 and 3 bytes).

To be fair though, the developers had nothing to do with this.

When they made Taproot, they clearly did not have NFTs in mind as one of the possible use cases for it. "A framework for smart contracts" is the closest they've ever gotten to reasoning for Taproot during the many years of debating it in the mailing list, and even that did not quite take off properly - since things like DLCs are still niche.

This is terrible news for Bitcoin is bitcoin just following the pack of shitcoins now by allowing NFT's and data on-chain... 

Bitcoin was supposed to be money nothing more nothing less this won't end well for Bitcoin in my view this will lead to the death of hardcore supported not being able to run nodes.

Do we really want to be BSV 2.0  I highly doubt that. Fee market or not bitcoin chain is NOT for shitty JPEGs

Really disappointed to see this happening to bitcoin we have clearly lost our way.

Perhaps. We've seen people tried to to store weather data[1] or 2GB of multiple duplicate image on BSV network.


Yeah, i learned existence of Luxor from this stunt.


People doesn't seem to mind pay the transaction when the size to is only few hundred bytes[3] to few KB[4] though.

[1] https://thenextweb.com/news/bitcoin-satoshi-vision-bsv-activity-transactions-weather-cryptocurrency-blockchain
[2] https://twitter.com/bsvdata/status/1427866510035324936
[3] https://ordinals.com/inscription/6fb976ab49dcec017f1e201e84395983204ae1a7c2abf7ced0a85d692e442799i0
[4] https://ordinals.com/inscription/3c6e07036a94946250919a83a94b0f06fb2c6dc91925e493fe6cc5f46509d049i0

Oof. Imagine we'd get rid of blocksize restrictions like some folks would have us had a couple years ago. Someone would have probably added the Lord of the Rings extended edition by now. If not via Taproot, then by using some other means.

Either way, nice stunt, I guess? Just goes to show the importance of a healthy fee market though.

Yesterday someone decide to create an NFT[1] which has size 3915537 bytes with 0 tx fee[2]. I can't believe pool Luxor (which mine that transaction) would rather mint an NFT rather than earning more Bitcoin from tx fee. They even made tweet about it[3], where the response isn't positive.

[1] https://ordinals.com/inscription/0301e0480b374b32851a9462db29dc19fe830a7f7d7a88b81612b9d42099c0aei0
[2] https://mempool.space/tx/0301e0480b374b32851a9462db29dc19fe830a7f7d7a88b81612b9d42099c0ae
[3] https://twitter.com/LuxorTechTeam/status/1620921129287430144

1. If you have P2SH, then standardness rules apply. You cannot just "OP_PUSH OP_DROP" in your script, because it will be non-standard, so only miners could do that.
2. If you want to stick with standard transactions, then you need to express your data as public keys, use trap addresses, or use OP_RETURN. In Segwit, you can also push more data as a witness, but then you need some custom P2WSH, which is standard, and for that reason people can misuse that.

So yes, you can put any data in your transaction, but if you don't use witness, then it is more expensive, or even non-standard. Also, in practice you don't need to push everything into your transaction, you can just create a commitment, and send your message in some cheaper and more private way, as vjudeu said.