Topic: NFTs in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ordinal Theory - page 7. (Read 9163 times)

Totally agree with @DooMAD here. Above all, the completely dumb BRC-20 protocol is what I think what will cause many people to lose money. That's why I'd started this thread about BRC-20 some months ago - just had to revive it because bagholders and scammers seem to get hope again to get rich selling completely worthless tokens.

That token zoo ... RATS, CATS, LIONS, FOXS, BEES ... lol. Would anybody buy a token in 2024, 25 or 26 because "it was from the first BEES BRC-20 collection in 2023" ? I don't know if this zoo is part of a game or so, but it seems terribly unnecessary and, yes, scammy. (Take into account that BRC-20 are not classic NFTs with an unique graphic image stored, i.e. an artistically designed bee, or so!)

I have already written in the BRC-20 thread I linked above that I find it very "interesting" that some sites specialized in tracking BRC-20 tokens don't offer charts which are longer than a day, at most a week or so (see example at brc-20.io). So the public which accesses these sites doesn't see how much these tokens have already lost since the BRC-20 heyday in May. A couple of these tokens are listed on general sites like Coingecko and thus can be tracked over longer periods but that seems to be a small minority.

While I think that using the protocol in a way it allows it isn't unethical per se only because it's clogging the blockchain (agreeing here with @Wind_FURY), I believe it's legitimate to warn potential buyers about these practices.

Absolutely.  But, the other thing they're doing, is the same thing as perpetuating the ICO grift of exploiting gullible people with empty promises of greatness and selling them crap.  It's mainly a swindle and I'd feel irresponsible if we weren't highlighting that.  They're free do do it, but it's decidedly unethical. 

They're always looking at new and novel ways of repackaging junk to sell to people who don't know any better.  Banks actually do this too.  So it's another bad habit that's been copied from the legacy financial system.

It's an inconvenience for users who want to send small amounts of Bitcoins, but I personally don't mind it anymore to be honest. They're merely using the network in a way that we don't approve of.

The protocol is working as designed and following the consensus rules, with the fee market, with the unstoppable/censorship-resistant transactions. Who are we to say that they can't use the network in the way they want?

Plus it's true, it's not sustainable AND Bitcoin has limited supply. They're wasting those precious coins.

It's not sustainable.  Although idiots are plentiful in this world, there's still not an unlimited supply of them.  You can only fool people so many times before it stops working.  Sooner or later they'll run out of suckers who will buy this crap and then they'll have wasted all their money uploading garbage.

Just have patience.  It'll die down again soon enough.

I'm using
https://ordiscan.com/inscriptions to check the newest s*** that is dumping in the mempool.
There is also ord.io, better to explore collections and individual art:
https://www.ord.io/35356901

But yeah, they've started again minting like crazy and surprisingly paying more than usual for it, it's weekend,  we're getting blocks mined faster than usual at 6% rate and still transactions are over 30sat/vb in every block.
40sat/b for...RATS!
https://mempool.space/address/bc1qqmnufsvqj4scmhp7luf5vrcw9ekr4njnvh6l3p





 

I've been looking at this when I want to know what is up with the current state of Ordinals:

https://dune.com/dgtl_assets/bitcoin-ordinals-analysis

You can see that there's been a resurgence in BRC-20 activity:



(ignore the box around "video", it was an unfortunate misclick)

I haven't looked into it but I bet its because some new ticker, like $POOP or something, just dropped and people are minting it... God knows why.

The vast, overwhelming majority of all inscriptions are for BRC-20 mints. What's funny is Rodarmor doesn't even like BRC-20. It's pure junk done in just about the most bloat-ful and least elegant way possible.

We don't. Why? Because there are some people, who believe that blocking Ordinals is censorship. And they started sending their real transactions, with small Ordinals, just to detect, which nodes ban them. Also, on the other side of the scale, there are people banning Taproot entirely, because it is easier for them to use some deprecated version of Bitcoin Core, than to properly remove support only for Ordinals. Which is also the reason why some of my nodes postponed some upgrades from Segwit v0 to Taproot (another reason is 02/03 prefix, which can sometimes cause weird bugs, and I have to dig deeper into it to port it correctly).

Any regular block explorer can give you the witness. But if you want a specific one, then read BIP for Ordinals: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1408

Or simply visit https://ordinals.com/ that is linked there.

It is not surprising at all. Instead of Ordinals, we should improve commitments. Then, Silent Payments would progress much further than they did, and instead of "Ordinals explorers", we would have "scanners" that would show you a lot of things from the past, including the whole whitepaper, wrapped in a multisig, that was created in ancient times, when even OP_RETURN was not so popular as today.

But what happened instead? Guess what: there were some people on bitcointalk, who tried to push the whitepaper again in a different format, just because the old one was incompatible with Ordinals. Is it good for network congestion? Could it improve acceptance and adoption? See, what is the problem? Silent payments can improve privacy. Scanners can improve fetching data from the blockchain, if they are already there, but if their format is different than some people wanted. But no, we have partially-tested Ordinals instead.

So, what will happen now? Well, I will still take Silent Payments and Commitments path, even if it is against the majority. Because I want to improve performance, compress data, and quickly deal with some repeated patterns, even if others won't do that. But of course, as garlonicon put in his signature, releasing a production version is hard. So I wonder, which of my projects will reach "stable" state first. Because I don't want to add another half-baked network into the whole mess. As long as it is not ready, I can only talk about it in my free time (and get some feedback), and write code in my working time.

The network is currently congested again, but nothing has truly changed in terms of Bitcoin acceptance and adoption. How do we find out if the transactions are real, actual transactions of value/for finance instead of Ordinals transactions?

Bitcoin Stack Exchange says to,


But I'm not a very technical pleb. Haha. What I'm asking is what websites/webapps that gives/shows us transaction data from Ordinals, like perhaps a "blockchain explorer" for Ordinals transactions? Thanks!

Well, you can create zero satoshi, and move it (doing that is non-standard, but definitely possible, and happened on mainnet, see transaction c1e0db6368a43f5589352ed44aa1ff9af33410e4a9fd9be0f6ac42d9e4117151). Then, a new Ordinal is created out of thin air, which means you can inflate Ordinal numbers "ad infinitum" if you use the old implementation. Which is somewhat compatible with UTXO model, because there are no consensus limits, when it comes to the number of UTXOs you can create.

But I wonder, what about destroying coins? Because if you have Ordinal number N, and it is zero satoshi, then you can simply destroy it by not creating any new UTXO. What will happen then? I don't know, it needs to be tested, but I can see two options:
1. That Ordinal number is destroyed, which means you can artificially insert numbers, and remove them later.
2. It stays where it is, the only thing that changes is ownership. But then, it is a very interesting question, how that ownership is changed. Is it sent to miners? If so, then people could not only own Ordinals, but "cursed Ordinals" as well, without knowing about it.

Edit: Maybe I should explain, what does it mean "not creating any new UTXO". This picture should help:
Then, the question is: if Bob owned some "cursed Ordinal", then who owns it after such transaction?
1. Nobody, it is permanently destroyed.
2. A miner, who mined this transaction.
3. Someone else? Charlie?

From the way I understood the numbering system, it's merely something that came from Casey Rodarmor's mind saying that "based on mining sequence, these are the numbers assigned to each Satoshi, and these numbers are constant even after wallet transfers", and that's why he called it the "Ordinals Theory". It's not real, and the "system" could be changed according to Casey's whims.


I believe not? Ordinals is a numbering scheme based on the mining sequence of each Satoshi.

You're correct. I simply use term that most people use.


You're right, should've re-read the protocol specification[1] earlier. It's rather ugly to store the data on address and multisig public key though.

[1] https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/Documentation/blob/master/Developers/protocol_specification.md

Proof of Burn refers to how XCP was created. During the burn period in Jan 2014, peeps who sent BTC to the "burn address" were rewarded with a proportional amount of XCP. And most Counterparty transaction data is stored in OP_RETURN, but occasionally it is also stored in other fields and multisig txs.


Its a terminology thing that has been around for almost 10 years now... You can't actually remove (circulating) BTC from the total supply, but by sending it to an address for which nobody knows the private key, it is just as good as "burned."

In 2018 or so, Counterparty implemented a "destroy" feature where tokens could be completely removed from circulation. Thus the distinction of the two terms, "burn" and "destroy."


Bitcoin will have much bigger problems if/when this ever happens.

I would rather say "Proof of Trap", because coins are not "burned". They are "trapped" on address 1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr, that is unlikely to be spent, but mathematically, there should exist around 2^96 matching public keys. Just nobody knows them, as long as RIPEMD-160 is not broken.

However, if that hash function will ever be broken in the future, then guess what: those coins will move. When it comes to the real Proof of Burn, it should use OP_RETURN, or even better, it could be done by miners, by taking less coinbase reward. That last approach is the most space-efficient, because it is all about changing some uint64 into smaller value, so there is no additional output needed, as it is the case in OP_RETURN, where you can explicitly say "I had to create this txid:vout explicitly to burn those coins".

i'm not sure i fully understand the technical issue that caused the numbering system to go wrong but the numbering system was kind of a fundamental way of identifying a particular ordinal most people probably thought of it as identifying their particular ordinal 100%. casey should have been smart enough to anticipate something like this though. if he designed it from the ground up...but i guess maybe he wasn't smart enough. and an unforeseen bug crept in. a shame they don't have a program that can catch those kinds of bugs.
 
so how exactly is an ordinal identified now if not by inscription #. and are inscription #s still static or can they change with time? 

Doesn't Counterparty use address/proof of burn though? It seems Runes a bit better since it use OP_RETURN instead which doesn't bloat total UTXO.


On technical level, it's weird to see Ethscriptions become popular since it doesn't even use ERC-721 (or similar ERC). Bitcoin doesn't support NFT/token by itself, while Ethereum user create it's own specification when it's already supported by the coin.

Probably, but Bitcoin also stumbled during its early days of development too, so perhaps it couldn't truly be considered a "disaster". Other developers could also learn from it, OR if Ordinals dies, Casey Rodarmor showed that developers don't need permission to build and develop something on top of Bitcoin. He just went to work and built something.
 
Plus another good thing about Ordinals or CounterParty being built on top of Bitcoin is as long as the Bitcoin network is running, you could download a client, input your keys, and your "artifacts" of dick pics and fart sounds will still be there.

sounds like a disaster for ordinals. a good example of poor planning in software engineering if you can call it software engineering at all. its more like a hack with some type of bug.

That's precisely the point I was making, Casey Rodarmor's "6 types of rarity" came from a "hand book" that was merely made up from his own mind. It's not backed/secured by anything except the belief that it's real and therefore it must have value.

I found a blog that gives an ELI-5 about the numbering-system, why Casey wants to change it to a more unstable numbering system, and the drama.

https://trustmachines.co/blog/proposed-changes-to-the-bitcoin-ordinals-numbering-system/

Yeah this is all pretty dumb, but even he kind of admitted it by stating it was designed from a "worse is better" approach. He is basically re-creating Counterparty (XCP), but minus proper infrastructure and 9+ years of development. Its especially irritating because he called XCP a "shitcoin" earlier this year, but now he is trying to make a shitcoin factory on Bitcoin.

Ordinals sure was a weird thing. Mempool suggests the fad seems to have been completed now. Time to move on to Ethscriptions, lol.


I did see a couple of inscriptions minted on "uncommon sats" go for sale on OpenSea. This is made possible through a wrapping service called Emblem Vault that vaults an NFT on the bitcoin network and produces an Ethereum NFT, for the purpose of trading on markets like OpenSea. Only the NFT owner has access to the private key on the Bitcoin side of things. I looked for the sales on OpenSea but for the life of me I can't find them.

Has anyone read Rodarmor blog about Runes (https://rodarmor.com/blog/runes/) which describe different ways to create NFT with less bloat?


Yeah, so far most people don't about this "artificial scarcity". Otherwise, we might see miner/pool offer "uncommon" and "rare" rarity satoshi.

---

There's no need for bet or guess when it's already stated on the docs.