Topic: NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory - page 6. (Read 9515 times)

I agree, but it would depend on the node. If it's an economic node, then it plays an important role. Because what secures Bitcoin? The Miners or the Full Nodes? It's a long debate, BUT if Bitcoin requires consensus to "define" what "Bitcoin" is, which is a system/protocol of key assignment and re-assignment of values, then what secures Bitcoin? The nodes. They enforce the rules.


That's with the presumption that every node would have access to above-average internet connection speeds.

Plus for the question, how many nodes are required to be "appropriately" decentralized. I believe there's no right number, BUT I could tell you that the MORE full nodes = MORE security assurances.

I'll add some context and i'll let you decide if i'm wrong or the page .
The whitepaper is written based on the premise that all nodes at that time were mining nodes , which the author of wiki doesn't take into account . There was no reason back then to have a "full node" as your node had high chances to earn rewards .
Satoshi points that at version 0.1.0 https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/commit/4184ab26345d19e87045ce7d9291e60e7d36e096
" To support the network by running a node, select: Options-> Generate Coins " . He doesn't just say support the network by just running the client .
It is also mentioned in the whitepaper , section 5 , what nodes do in the network . He didn't have another paragraph about what full nodes role is .
"Network" :
The steps to run the network are as follows:
1) New transactions are broadcast to all nodes.
2) Each node collects new transactions into a block.
3) Each node works on finding a difficult proof-of-work for its block.
4) When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block to all nodes.
5) Nodes accept the block only if all transactions in it are valid and not already spent.
6) Nodes express their acceptance of the block by working on creating the next block in the chain, using the hash of the accepted block as the previous hash

And then the wiki author get's into what he thinks is decentralisation and why it should be rejected .
"If Bitcoin were ruled by miners, then this would currently be quite terrible security-wise. As of 2017, less than 10 individuals command a majority of hashrate. This is probably far more centralized than even most fiat currencies, and completely defeats the main point of Bitcoin, which is to be decentralized money."
How many individual entities with their own personal interests command fiat money of their own countries so that makes bitcoin even more centralised than fiat system ? Fiat is centralised because there's not a consensus between different economic entities with personal interest . So nonsense again .
Let's move to "efficiency" . He says if you don't like what i've said so far then move to a chaumian ecash which is better by adding a taste of PoW . But bitcoin is the exact opposite of chaumian money . Not centralised , not just trust based , with a public auditable ledger . And PoW by whom ? Designated signers that "as long as a majority of signers are honest, the system remains secure . What do these signers have to lose ? Who decides if they are trusted ? What's the mechanism to punish the non trusted ? No mention , just believe what i say . His thought process is for laugh .

Let's move to legal issues . "If it is possible to say that some group of 10 or so miners control Bitcoin absolutely, then these miners may be viewed from a legal perspective as issuing a currency, transmitting money, etc., which are often highly regulated activities." . There's no such case as mining nodes do nothing other than adding and confirming transactions into blocks . They don't tranfer anything , they are just confirming change of ownership by timestamping it ( i guess you understand UTXO model far better than me ) . Fincen was specific https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/FIN-2014-R001.pdf .

So all that wiki author wants is just to demonise pools . Why ? Because it fits his narratives of what he wants bitcoin to be .

And just to sum up . Who do think that has more interest in bitcoin . Those who just run a "full node" and have spend 100 dollars or someone who has spend hundreds of millions and want to gain profit from it . Don't forget that an attack to the network just gives you the opportunity to double spend your own money , you can't steal other's . So would you as a pool risk to have
your block rejected by other pools ( and not "full nodes" ) as they would be the first in the network to see your invalid block ? And also lose the work committed to that block ? And face the chance to lose your trust and future income if you were a honest node so far ? An attempt of such a double spend would have to involve several millions . And who would accept all of those millions with just 1 conf or 0 conf ? No one .

So to my conclusion , the page is wrong in many fields .    


Compatible or incompatible for whom ? Pools/nodes that have economic interest or a user with a rapspi ?
I don't follow you on the rest , not techy enough .

Finally someone who is IT-savvy!

HmmMAA doesn't get it, he's not an IT guy... more like a (pseudo)philosopher.

If you think so, then what do you think about this page? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_is_not_ruled_by_miners
There are two options: this page is wrong, or you are wrong.

You can see minimal requirements for running Bitcoin Core. They are listed on the project page.

This is the problem. Validation takes a lot of time. I can run two nodes on localhost, and let one empty node to be synchronized from another one. Guess how long it would take? Most of the time will be spent on validation. Downloading will be instant, because data on localhost are transferred with maximum available speed, that can be simulated by your computer. They can be even on the same disk! If validation would be simpler, you could have it as fast, as just making a copy of some folder! But for some reason, it can take a lot of hours. Which means, bandwidth is not the biggest issue.

Of course full nodes. The more independent full nodes you have, the more decentralized the whole system is. And obviously, they should be owned by independent people, and controlled from independent machines. Which brings us back to the first quote: if you think that miners can "vote", and full nodes can "only observe", then what kind of decentralization is present in your model?

So, my definition of decentralization is quite simple: you count all full nodes, and you count, how many of them are owned by independent people. The more such nodes you can find in the wild, the higher the whole decentralization is. If you don't like this definition, then give a better one, because you cannot beat something with nothing.

If you express it by the number of independent nodes, as stated in my previous sentences, then it is quite simple: a network with 100 independent nodes is 10x more decentralized than a network with 10 independent nodes. Machines can be better or worse, but if you take only a single parameter called "decentralization", then the number of independent parties can be used to conclude, what it is. Which means, three Byzantine generals are 3x less decentralized than nine generals.

Of course, because in my definition I mentioned about the number of independent nodes. Which means, 10000 nodes won't help, if they are owned by a single entity. And because you can never prove, that any two nodes are independent, it is hard to measure. But you can judge by their behavior, just observe the nodes you connect with, and make your own conclusions, based on what you can observe in the wild.

Having a huge hashrate is not enough to rule the world. You can have quite impressive hashrate, but you will have no impact on BTC, if you mine BCH. Which means, you have to produce blocks, that are accepted by the users. Which also means, you don't have to be the miner to "vote". Why? Because miners alone, could for example decide, that they want 50 BTC forever, and that halvings should be disabled. If they theoretically could do that, then tell me, why it is not the case? The answer is simple: because it is all about connections between users, miners, developers, and all other people involved in Bitcoin. As I linked at the very beginning of this post, "Bitcoin is not ruled by miners".

A lot of people value backward compatibility more than you can imagine. We still use IPv4, even if IPv6 was deployed. We started from ASCII, and UTF-16 was created before UTF-8, but finally, UTF-8 seems to be winning side. Because of backward compatibility. And I can tell you more: in the context of Bitcoin, we started from P2PK, and now, P2TR is more similar to P2PK than to P2SH. We have just public keys with commitments. Because this is backward-compatible. And we could end up with a single address type, that is P2PK, and attach everything else through commitments, if the whole system would support that from the very beginning! And when it comes to hash functions, even collisions for SHA-1 didn't stop people from using it, and instead they created "hardened SHA-1", which is still used by "git". Guess what: because it is backward-compatible!

The world is "unupgradable", and the sooner you accept it, the easier your life will be. Because then, you will understand, why some countries have quite advanced banking, and why in some other places, you can still use cheques. If you have nothing, then your new system could be built from scratch, without any serious limitations. But if something is already there, then upgrading it is very hard. Extremely hard, so you will lose a lot of customers, if you will break backward-compatibility.

The system is not about "the weakest" or "the worst". It is about "compatible" vs "incompatible". You could have terabyte blocks, here and now. But please, compress your terabyte-sized blocks, and include some proofs, to not force absolutely everyone to process that. Make it as a commitment. Guess what: the block header has 80 bytes. Does it mean that you can process 80 bytes per 10 minutes? No, you can process a lot more. And the same is true here: just commit your terabyte-sized network to the existing 4 MB witness, and you are good to go. Also, by tweaking public keys, you won't need any additional on-chain bytes to form a commitment. Taproot can show you that: you have 256-bit public key, no matter, how big Ordinals are behind a single address. And in the same way, the network can process much more than 4 MB per 10 minutes, without any hard-fork or soft-fork, if you know, how to make a commitment.

I totally agree that bitcoin is not democratic , that's why i put quotes . In bitcoin you only vote with your associated hashpower as a mining pool . Full nodes don't vote/play part in consensus . They are just observers of the outcome ( block creation ) that mining nodes do . I think we agree on that ?


The article is based on one argument . That bigger blocks will create problem to propagation and decentralisation . What it should do is first define propagation and decentralisation .
Propagation with nodes that are on what bandwidth ? And with what specs ?
The average download speed globally is more than 50 Mbps and upload is close to 30 ( source https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/average-internet-speed-around-the-world ) .  Let's see how fast a 1 MB block is downloaded with 50 Mbps ( that's a speed an average user has currently ) . We will use https://www.omnicalculator.com/other/download-time .
So for 50 Mbps the time to download 1 MB blocks is under 1 sec ( website says 0 sec ) .
For 10 MB blocks download time is again under 1 sec ( website says 0 ) .
For 100 MB blocks download time is 2 sec .
Time to propagate these blocks to it's connected nodes will probably be the double . All that process is under 10 seconds for 100 MB blocks .
Offcourse nodes need time to validate blocks . If i try to do it with hand it will take much time , if i try with rapspi that's the most common for btc it will be faster , and if i do it with high end machines it will be really fast . The problem is that the author doesn't consider the third option at all . So does most of the btc community . The belief is that even a user with a low specs machine and an awful bandwidth should be able to validate transactions . And all the other users should suffer high fees , accept adoption limits , wait for years for L2 solutions that doesn't work etc because someone who might never use or use occasionally the network wants to validate it's own transactions .

Now let's get to decentralisation . Who defines what is decentralisation ? And how much decentralised or centralised a network is ? Common question i make , can a 5 nodes network be decentralised and a 10000 nodes network be centralised ?
Decentralisation doesn't come from the number of nodes . Decentralisation comes from the economic incentives participants have . Being an active node offers to that , and that's achieved only through PoW .
At some part the article says that soft forks are inclusive while hard forks are exclusive . Why ? Because he thinks so . That's the whole article , his opinion without any scientific facts .
Soft forks ( easy path ) makes certain that no one is out of the network , even if he doesn't update . Who do you think would be interested more than anyone to stay on the network ? Those who profit from it , not by speculation on prices but from providing real services . Miners would do it . Listening nodes that can profit would do it . But , we want to protect the most lazy , the most cheapskate user and i don't know what else definition i can give " because decentralisation " .
Decentralisation is not a new concept . Tocqueville wrote his book " Democracy in America " close to 1830 . In that book he writes about the importance of participation , voluntary structures , local government and more . If all these were done by following what the most weak person wanted then there couldn't be decentralisation ( and that's why current "democracy" sucks ) . This would be a race to the bottom as everyone should follow what the worst person wants and usually the worst person wants to do nothing and have anything . Bitcoin is a race to the top . If you want to be a participant in the network that provides work you have to learn to cooperate . Look how pools were created . You have to be honest . Look how many dishonest pools dissapeared . You gotta learn to trust . Look how miners get paid for their shares because pools earned their trust .
Listening nodes would be more expensive , yes . But that doesn't mean that there can be collaborative nodes . In an environment such as btc has become where no one trusts anyone that is a no option . And the fun part is that this forum has a trust evaluation system . And taking that a little further the one of the key elements in finance , trade and much more is trust .  
That article mentions about the internet rules and if you change the rules you create a new network , so no one would ever do a hard fork to change it's rules . Imagine an internet that only 7 users per second could use it . There would be no online commerce . There would be no fast innovation as information/knowledge would be limited . And i can't even think what else wouldn't be possible . In summary that author provides examples without any reasonable facts behind . He just express his opinion which is pure nonsense .

I am not the person you quoted, but if you want to enter scaling debate again, then well, I can add some details.

It depends if you add compression into your equations or not. Pure 1 MB, without any compression, is not enough. 4 MB witness we have today, without any compression, is also not enough, because you can see congested mempool as well, and that situation is far from perfect. However, if you can imagine 1 GB blocks, that could be compressed down to 1 MB, then would you agree on such thing? You didn't expect that kind of question from me, do you?

You mean hard fork? If you want to know, what would happen, if we would have a hard fork, then you can follow BCH community. Because guess what: if BTC community would agree on some hard fork, then some other group could split from us, and take the place, where BTC currently is. Why? Because it is not only about increasing the size of the block, but also about the way you do that. Imagine, how better could BCH behave, if they would never break backward compatibility with BTC, and if all of their transactions would be first confirmed on their own network, and later confirmed in BTC network as well, if there would be no replay protection. In that scenario, 1 BCH would be worth 1 BTC, exactly as it is the case in Lightning Network, or sidechains like RSK. So, the question is: would you prefer BCH path or RSK path? Which one sounds more promising? What about a sidechain with increased block size, that would be Merge Mined with Bitcoin? Would you accept that, if it could be as strongly pegged into BTC, as Lightning Network is?

So, what is your conclusion? What should be done here and now? If you propose a hard-fork, I have bad news: then you can enter any altcoin, and see, what will happen next. If you propose a soft-fork, then I have another bad news: Paul Sztorc proposed sidechains as a soft-fork, and his proposal was not good enough to be merged into Bitcoin Core codebase. If you propose a no-fork, or some second layer, like Lightning Network, then I have good news: this is the path BTC community decided to take. But also, in this specific case, I can write more about "tasting your own medicine". Because my prediction is that no-forks will happen more frequently in the future, no matter if they will be better or worse designed. Which means, developers will have to deal with the fact, that they will no longer be the only ones controlling the code. Because guess what: they cannot stop the Ordinals here and now. If they could, they would do that, but they know the possible consequences, so they let them exist, because this is not the worst thing that could happen. If you want to know, what is worse, then read about "UTXO flood". People are trying to prepare for that, I can see some changes in code, that can confirm it, and some experienced users even said it explicitly on bitcointalk.

To sum up, I don't think it should be called "block size debate" in the present times, because it was turned more into "compression debate" or "scaling debate". For example, in the past you couldn't get that much posts about "ossification" or "small transactions". But today? Try looking up the former or the latter, you could be surprised, how many discussions there were, which didn't even touch the size of the block. Also because it is not the main limitation. UTXO limit is far more serious than block size limit, because it doesn't exist (yet). But if people will keep creating more things similar to Ordinals, then some people may start pushing for "UTXO size limit", and that kind of soft-fork could succeed, probably faster than sidechains, because people already started adding UTXO-related code into the Bitcoin Core codebase (see "assume utxo").

Pardon me ser, but Bitcoin is NOT a Democracy where there its participants vote for something to be activated. It's a Proof Of Work system that requires nodes to do "the work" and solve "math problems" to mine blocks/verify transactions.

Although in your definition, organizing for a proposal to be heard, IS part of the Democratic process.


It's my thread, and I won't consider it a derailement if it's a debate where we could learn from each other. Please enter into a greater detail.

Umm ... to what "concept" are you referring? To off-chain methods?

 
I agree partially here.

Partially, because Bitcoin's value proposition doesn't depend only from its market cap and security, but also on the "value of use" the network has for certain user groups. If we've a service which brings value in bubbles, like Ordinals, but harms the "value of use" of other user groups, like those who don't care about NFTs and only want to transact BTC, then the general impact on Bitcoin's value proposition can be negative. If Ordinals instead was something that is here to stay and will form part of the value proposition of the chain (like it does occur in Ethereum, but it isn't safe to assume that for Bitcoin, it still could be only a short-lived fad!) then I would agree with you that its impact overall is positive, even if one user group will see its interests (cheaper or at least more predictable fees) harmed.

In general I think these both tendencies tends to a sort of equilibrium: if the Ordinals fad is short-lived and bubblish, then its long-term negative impact on the "Bitcoin as a currency/payment means" users will be limited, but it could force them into off-chain solutions if it continues to congest the blockchain.

Anyway, I don't blame the miners for Ordinals and the congestion. The Bitcoin rules entitle them to extract as much profit (fees etc.) as they can from the transactions. And I'm against any initiative which calls miners to censor certain transactions.

@stompix: Your point about priority is correct. However, I continue to think the general attractivity to use Bitcoin for payments should be correlated with the percentage of the average transaction volume which goes to fees. Low- and high-priority situations should occur all the time, i.e. the "average grade of priority" of all users - if we can call that this way - should be very similar over time, with some exceptions (e.g. crashes or extreme FOMO). And there should be always a kind of "hard cap": if fees make up 50% of the transacted value for example, only in extreme cases you would use a Bitcoin transaction.

Of course the market cap equation is not always exact, but it should be a reasonable indicator, although usage habits can modify that equation substantially. If, for example, the "hodlers" ratio increases in detriment of the "as-a-currency" users, then the equation "fee cap"/"market cap" could be much lower, as a high hodler ratio could mean less transactions (in relation to market cap) and thus less circulation velocity than in an alternative scenario with more "payment" transactions.

About "enforceability" of LN or other offchain solutions: While in BTC these techniques are still not being used that much, on Ethereum, which has a long history of high transaction fees, offchain and partly offchain solutions like rollups are booming. This could be a scenario which also could be plausible for Bitcoin if the congestion due to Ordinals stays high for a long time (I personally don't believe that, as I consider BRC-20 a very bad standard for tokens, as I've written here several times).

here we go

block.      fee
816941 - 1.83
816040 - 2.11
816039 - 2.37
816038 - 2.56
816037 - 2.29
816036 - 2.10
816035 - 2.54
816034 - 2.41
816033 - 2.36
816032 - 2.35
816031 - 2.26
816030 - 2.30
816029 - 2.37
816028 - 2.76
816027 - 2.99
816026 - 2.54
816025 - 2.57
816024 - 2.87
816023 - 3.01
816022 - 3.04
816021 - 3.26
816020 - 2.43
816019 - 2.72
816018 - 2.89
816017 - 2.96
816016 - 3.20
816015 - 2.50
815014 - 2.42
816013 - 2.01
816012 - 2.21
816011 - 2.42
816010 - 1.90
816009 - 2.08
816008 - 2.00
816007 - 2.17
816006 - 2.22
816005 - 1.43
816004 - 2.06
816003 - 2.03
816002 - 1.69
816001 - 1.31
816000 - 1.76
815999 - 1.09
825998 - 1.31
815997 - 1.30
815996 - 1.47
815995 - 1.41
815994 - 1.71
815993 - 1.57
815992 - 1.81
815991 - 1.46
815990 - 1.28.

51 blocks at 2 btc a block vs .25 so 88 extra coins in fees a very rough estimate.



lets see how long this can be done likely under 4 days or 560 blocks

the high fees go back to 815867 so

816042
815867
      175 blocks for fees in the 1 - 3 btc a block

so maybe 1.75 coins a block vs maybe .25  is 1.5 x 175 blocks or 225-250 extra in fees.

this will not last a long time 3-5 days max.

Just as you do that, I can give you a completely different example from personal experience, as I paid once 60sat/b on a $20  worth of BTC transaction because my hosting bill with namecheap was about to expire and right now I have ~0.1 BTC waiting to move from one wallet to another since 3 days ago and I'm not bumping the fee again cause I already did it once but I miscalculated Viabtc fees, so no, I'm not going to pay more, nada! Yeah, I'm going to be a cheap bastard in this case!

It's the perceived priority that matters, not the %, it's how much people want that, and as long as they are willing to pay enough the fees won't go down! And even if we go by the %, then we're heading to another clog anyhow because if I remember all those tales of adoption as remittance, Bitcoin coffee buyers would have to compete to around 100 million workers that would send their money cheaply via BTC at home, the average Joe paying $4, $10, 25$ would not be able to do a thing, right?


The cap is actually in the speed of transfer because money velocity is fucked up because of that!
As the remittance example above, if Bitcoin is just used as a way of transferring wealth the market cap doesn't matter,  if somebody wants to transfer 1 billion he buys one billion sends the BTC he does the flip goes back to fiat, and the fee in it becomes irrelevant to the amount of temporary value in the market cap added.

Now, you do realize that if we had a x10 capacity in the network these fees wouldn't be high, so how do we transfer this into the market cap equation, if the transfer capacity would be capable of transferring each satoshi in an individual tx once a day, so either 2.1 quadrillions or 21 quadrillions the fee won't vary that much, right?


But how do we enforce this solution?
Because if users don't want to do that, there is no way to force them, and if we already use that solution....not a nice thing to say, but...why should we care about others wasting money?


Wait till you realize Foundry has like 40% of the votes and you're not eligible to vote!  

Bitcoin is not a democracy.


You believe that Ethereum even has any chance against BTC?  They truly have issues with how many of their shitcoins that they issued at the start, and now they have further issues with their various forums of POS corruption.  It's a big ass rube goldberg machine of various scams built upon scams, and sure, no problem, there some dumb fucks and dumb money that seem to either want to build upon ethereum or to get involved in ethereum in various ways, and so yeah they are going to need a lot of luck to keep that scammy and confusing apparatus sucking in capital out of an appearance of having value.


Sure we have some raising of fees right now, yet we are going to need to see  how long the back up lasts, and then relatively higher fees.  if we have to spend $100 for an onchain transaction, then yeah we likely should be trying to send items that have more value. .maybe $1k or more.. or maybe even $10k or more if we want 1% fees. It could be that some folks are inspired to look more into lightning network and other forms of transacting.. so some folks might not want to use their BTC in times like these, and they may well be happy to have had created some other options for themselves.. hopefully not shitcoins, but sometimes even shitcoins can end up serving purposes during their higher clogging times if someone is wanting to send lower value transactions and not pay the current fee rate.

No need for me to organise anything , that will be a "democratic" decision of the btc community . If community thinks that the fee problem will disappear in a magic way then it doesn't see the future coming . As soon as BitVM starts to gain traction and DeFi enters the market a couple of thousand dollars per transaction will be the norm for a long time . It happened in eth with faster blocks , i can't even imagine the magnitude in btc .

As per the article , most of the things it mentions are nonsense . I would enter into greater detail but i would derail the thread entirely . In short , if you think that 1 MB limit is sensible in our times , then i don't know what to say . Even Back in 2016 was pro increasing the blocksize . Lopp too . If their "proposal" was accepted , blocksize today would be 16 MB at least . Community was pro a fee market and now takes a taste of it's own medicine .

I believe you need to learn more about how the network actually works and what's actually making everything stick together. Pardon me, I don't want to offend you, but what actually is making the network stick together is its incentive structure. The miners are not greedy, they're merely doing their jobs because they're incentivized to. Don't post something like it's a philosophical debate because it's all merely technical. And technically, everything we see right now is, - Bitcoin is actually working as designed.


Returning to the Scaling Debate now, are we? OK, then go organize and make a proposal to hard fork to bigger blocks.

OR read this blog, https://medium.com/hackernoon/moores-observation-35f7b25e5773

Okay, so why not implement that concept now?


This is a perfectly valid point, when looking it zoomed-in at first glance it would give you this exact impression, but then regardless of how bad/low we think of these NFTs they are a utility that adds value to BTC in general, and the increased fees are just collateral damage, the same collateral damage that would happen when more and more people start to use BTC for "normal" transactions.

Let's think of all the collectibles in the world, the coin collectibles market is estimated to be worth over 30 billion dollars this year alone, it's all but an imaginary value created by the collectors that the rest of the world doesn't recognize, I personally don't think that some random coin which worth no more than 1 cent scrap value deserves to produce a value of $1000, but sure thing is, those collectors couldn't care less about what I think and this 30B becomes a real value injected into the economy and would benefit the economy of any country that plays a role in it.

For obvious reasons, if you want to use the mail to send a gift to your friend and the mail service happens to be limited and slow, you would have to "wait" or "outbid" those collectors, it would be pretty unrealistic to blame the mail company for it, as it is to blame those collectors and say no the mail service was not intended to be used by these folks to send worthless rusty coins.

That is why you can't really blame the miners for being greedy, besides, it also adds to the security of BTC, the more "value" transacted (regardless of what we think of that value) the more the hash power the economic of BTC can handle.



+1, which is why I don't think that Ordinals and BRC-20 as a concept should be "banned", but rather be used as an incentive to find new and improve current real working solutions that would solve the invadable problems that we will have to face sometime in the future anyway, I don't see that they created a brand new unknown issue -- they simply brought the same issue a little too early.

If everyone would just count on the fees to stay in the 1-2 sat range forever and don't want to contribute or even use/test other methods -- they would face the same faith regardless of the cause, be it NFTs or simply other "normal" users using the blockchain more often.

In general terms I agree with your post, but I think there is a difference between blockchain congestion due to "everyday use" and blockchain congestion due to NFTs.

When we pay things, then we won't use Bitcoin (at least not on-chain) if the fees are higher than a certain percentage of the value transferred. For me, for example, I already think about not using BTC if the fee is higher than 2-3% of what I transfer, and prefer generally times where it's lower than 1-1,5%. This means there is a natural "cap" to the fee for "normal" transfers - and it's normally correlated to Bitcoin's market cap, because this is the total value we as a community can transfer.

However for tokens and NFTs this equation isn't the same: the NFTs or tokens can have a much higher price than the real value in BTC which is transfered. This means that: the more value residing in NFTs and tokens, the higher the potential fees of Bitcoin become, independently of Bitcoin's market cap. The potential fee is thus correlated not only to Bitcoin's, but also the market cap of all tokens and NFTs together, and in token bubbles it can rise much higher like we saw in the last months. Bitcoin is thus affected now by a similar problem than Ethereum, which suffers high fees from a long time ago.

In this thread (months ago ...) or in the other Ordinals threads I have proposed some solutions which would not be a naive "blocking" of BRC-20, for example a discount for OP_RETURN which would make it again the cheapest way to store data, but only up to a certain limit. However, for BRC-20 this would not make that much sense because in the case of BRC-20 it's not the amount of data which is problematic, but the amount of transactions (and the fact that BRC-20 transactions are more expensive already than Counterparty/Omni txes, the closest competitors, and much more expensive than for modern emergent standards like Taro/RGB/OmniBOLT). At least this would put BRC-20 in a even more unadvantageous position than OP_RETURN based standards which are more efficient with data.

I think the only long term solution is 1) increase LN adoption and 2) learn from Ethereum and introduce rollups (like Optimism) and sidechains. There are already some interesting projects like Nomic working but they are all quite centralized, but if someone manages to fork and adapt them to a decentralized standard, I'd be happy to use them.

"legitimate" is rather subjective, technically everyone who transacts on the blockchain is a legitimate user otherwise -- their transactions would not be approved into a block, but what I want to know is, are you upset because other people use the blockchain in a different way that you use it -- or you are upset because fees are high?

If it's the fact that fees are high, then what happens when people start to actually use BTC for everyday life? like buying coffee, tea, paying tolls, or parking tickets, which would also take fees sky high, what is the complaint going to be then? why are these jerks paying for a cup of coffee with BTC raising my fees to send BTC?

Now I'd like to make clear that I am a miner myself, but I am small fish in a big pond, in fact, I am more affected by the fees than any extra profit I could potentially make, but for those large miners why do you think they should care about anybody's feelings? mining is just a business, if someone disagrees with the the way miners handle their business -- they could start their mining operations and include only the category of transactions they want, probably for free, in other words, leave decent money on the table.

See, I am not endorsing any of these stupid NFTs, I think they are completely worthless and I wouldn't buy the most expensive NFT for 10 Sat, but the general effect of this is value being created and transferred around, do I think these guys are stupid? I do, but I can't deny the value they add to the ecosystem, so maybe instead of fighting them -- we could strive to make Bitcoin cheaper to transact for everyone.

Even if we were all to agree to block this BRC-20 transaction -- the main problem won't be solved, it would just be pushed into the future, at one point, even what you call "regular normal" users will fight over the right and wrong transactions.

The problem you mention isn't created by the design of the network but from the democratic decision to not increase the blocksize and have a fee market  . You can blame UASF if you want , it's more appropriate . If full nodes in btc made a decision to spend more money for data storage and bandwidth that problem wouldn't exist in that scale .
You use the term greedy . They are entities investing for profit , is that so strange ? And not expecting profit by just holding coins , but providing security to the network while continuously investing to stay in the game  . Isn't that the purpose of PoW ?
Satoshi thought exactly of that , how to make greed work for the whole . If community changed the rules of the game then community should take the blame .
 

The way I see it, satoshi recognised that greed would exist regardless, so why not leverage that greed to provide the incentive to secure the blockchain?  It's the whole reason we have a network in the first place.  It wouldn't be possible otherwise.  Have to take the downsides with the upsides.

With the current situation, having the ability to insert garbage into the blockchain, and then having greedy miners that don't care whether legitimate Bitcoin users are suffering or not from increased fees, then on top of that having different opinions about censorship etc, it seems such systems where any change is dependent on consensus is proving to be a failure, unless they wake up to see the consequences of not stopping these garbage transactions. BUT GREED, YOU KNOW?

As a normal ONLY BITCOIN user, when I see how banks/central dictators( dictators controlling central banks) are taking advantage of us, I can think of miners the same, so should we consider them to be the same only with different names? I guess Satoshi never thought about this, where ever is money, greed follows, whether it be governments, or miners.

The demand for having their transactions first and the health of the network = VERY GOOD, but it's not the kind of usage that we're looking for. Instead of censorship-resistant, unstoppable money, we have dick pics, fart sounds, and JSON files - they call "tokens".

Plus there' another Bitcoin app that actually stores data inside actual blocks, not merely in the data structures where signatures are stored.

Bitcoin Stamps, https://github.com/mikeinspace/stamps/blob/main/BitcoinStamps.md