Topic: (Ordinals) BRC-20 needs to be removed - page 15. (Read 7771 times)

It would be backward-incompatible.

And all of those blocks would be ignored by old nodes.

Yes, because if you follow some invalid chain, then you can no longer be sure, that other rules are not broken as well. There are many things, which can be used to trick SPV nodes, which will not be followed by full nodes.

You don't need an infinite supply, to do what you want to do. Just change the proportions. Instead of producing additional coins, just make a consensus rule to take single satoshis from users. Then, it will be a soft-fork. For example: if for each transaction, it would be mandatory to send 100% coins as fees, it would be a valid soft-fork. Because it is all about proportions, and not about having 21 million coins in particular.

The current inflation is not "negligible", if you count, how many altcoins are there. And almost all of them can be used, to bypass 21 million coins limit. Which also means, that we already have enough coins. And burning them is quite popular on many chains, not because there are not enough coins, but rather because they produced too much earlier.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.63454673

Thoughts?

It doesn't matter if it's finite. Quoting from [1]:

It doesn’t take much to change a finite supply into an infinite one. Bitcoin’s block reward drops from 1 satoshi to 0 satoshi somewhere in the year 2140, completing a supply of approximately 21 million bitcoin. What if that final drop never happened?

Bitcoin would continue emitting a 1 satoshi block reward in perpetuity, yielding an infinite supply. It would eventually reach 21 million + 1 bitcoin. Let’s see when that happens. We need to wait an additional 100 million blocks, which takes approximately 10⁸/6/24/365 = 1902 years.

Would that make make Bitcoin any less hard a currency? I don’t think anyone would be willing to argue that. So what makes a currency hard, if not a capped supply? I think the answer is obvious. Eventual negligible inflation is what makes for hard currency. It is what distinguishes cryptocurrencies from fiat.

[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-supply-1169a188d153

It is very easy. For example, you can just start regtest, and then you can print a lot of "monopoly money". And if you disable the halving, then you can have unlimited money, created out of thin air. Or you can just lift the protection from Value Overflow Incident, and then use that overflow bug, to produce as many coins as you want.

It doesn't matter if it is 21 million. What matters most, is that the amount is finite, so it doesn't lose value like fiat currencies. But of course, there are many altcoins, producing coins like crazy, and they can also be successful, because people are used to fiat-like systems, and they are also used to pump-and-dump speculation.

Anyone can do that. You can start even from regtest difficulty, if you want, and just let it adjust to your network. Which means, instead of making separate chain for any test network, it is possible to mine valid Bitcoin blocks at the same time. And I wonder, why for example signet or testnet3 is not designed like that. Because it is technically possible, and by checking the chainwork of some networks, I can see for example some testnet3 miners, producing a valid mainnet block from time to time.

Ok I understand it depends on the side chain construction.  But how to create your own tokens out of thin air?  How was the upuse of 21 million tokens and what are their benefits?
Yes you are right that mining bitcoin blocks requires something readily available.  It is valid through other networks.  And it's the only P2Pool that can or has done that.

Somewhat, because yes, it would be the case initially. But every sometimes, when someone will need to do a regular Bitcoin payment, then that person will have the chance to confirm the whole sidechain, and to commit to that, so since then, it will be timestamped on Bitcoin.

Which means, there would be several steps:

1. Unconfirmed sidechain transaction.
2. Confirmed on sidechain only.
3. Committed into Bitcoin (with zero additional on-chain bytes, along with all pending commitments).

They will lose it anyway, if they will abuse nodes more than today, because then, people will have an incentive to apply "Reclaim Disk Space" from the whitepaper, also to the Initial Blockchain Download.

They could "own" some Ordinals, by confirming those "tokens". Even more than that: it is possible to make a system, where mining could be the only way to create new Ordinal.

There are better ways than Ordinals to increase fees.

OK, then the sidechain would be something like a cheap ledger for Ordinals instead of storing them in a "bank vault", which is the Bitcoin blockchain. Did I understand that right?

I believe that Ordinals' main value proposition is the fact that those dick pics and fart sounds reside in the Bitcoin blockchain. They might lose their perceived value if they're "not an actual part" of Bitcoin.


But from the miners' viewpoint, it's not the same. They're not getting any incentives from the Ordinals sidechain at all, and it would be better for them if Ordinals remain in the Bitcoin blockchain because of the higher fees. Fees which are slowly becoming the main source of miner incentive after every halving.

I hate to break this to you, but Satoshi wrote about a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, and strictly following the whitepaper there's no mention that we should make bitcoin digital gold. Yet we did. We talk about store of value and price all the time, while the initial intention could've just been a medium of excange.

My only concern with inscriptions is that I don't see how on Earth would they help general bitcoin adoption, while I transact less on the base layer ever since fees are sky high. Inscriptors are free to do whatever they want unless they break the system and make it clogged for everyone else.

Pools are like representatives of the miners who work with them. The higher the value of the mined block (base reward + fees), the more money everyone earns (miners and pool). Furthermore, only 2 pools represent +50% of the hash power. Therefore, the probability of undermining the block is much greater.

But, as I said, they shouldn't be doing that. Now, it is still a way to artificially increase fees (among others), whether with Ordinals or not.




Satoshi gave the recipe for everything to work in a stable and suitable way for everyone. But people prefer to reinvent the wheel...

It can be said that it is not mandatory to follow everything Satoshi said, as Bitcoin is not his. Yes it is true. But, I think there is nothing better than following the project creator's instructions, so that things go as smoothly as possible.

This is the same as buying a washing machine, and not wanting to follow the manufacturer's instructions, and instead of washing clothes you put dishes in the machine. Would the dishes be washed? Yes, but a lot of things would be broken.  

I don't know, if it will be there. I know it is technically possible to do so. But along the road, there could be many different proposals, and I don't know upfront, which technical solution will win, and will be merged.

It is always "blockchain first, clients second". Which means, that for example here and now, you can use different sighashes than SIGHASH_ALL. You can for example sign only the first input, and the first output, if you really want, and then move that signature to a different transaction, without invalidating it. But: having something supported on a protocol level is one thing, and having it supported by the client is another thing.

There are many things out there, which are possible, but are not yet supported by the clients, and they have to be implemented first. For example, K-of-N multisig on Taproot would be nice to have.

I don't think so, because if you for example sign your transaction, you just click "Sign" button, instead of computing SHA-256 of your data manually.

Of course, but getting to the working solution is a long process: first, you have some discussions, then you write a proposal, then it is discussed, when it comes to all of the details, and then there is a BIP. Later, there is some code to be merged, and it is discussed even further. And if that code is a no-fork, it can be just merged. If it is a soft-fork, then you have to reach consensus, which is hard. And if it is a hard-fork, then you need a very good justification, like "all old clients will stop working without that change in 2106".

But here, in this subforum, we are in a "Development & Technical Discussion" board. Which means, that I assume (and that assumption may be wrong), that people are somewhat familiar with the code, and how it works. And they usually are, because if they are not, then more general topics can be created in other boards, where you have discussions on a more general level. But: if you want to change something, then you have to touch the details, sooner or later, because "the devil is in the details", and for example I could accept Ordinals, if they would be implemented as a commitments, where each TapScript would start with OP_RETURN, to prevent those data from being pushed on-chain (or better, where such commitment would be hidden behind a signature, to be compatible with all existing address types, and not only with Taproot).

Edit: If something is too complicated, it can be automated. And it can be more user-friendly, but it would require some effort to get there. And the biggest challenge is to find some programmer, who will want to do so. Because you know, for many developers, things are obvious. They start with zero knowledge, and when they start, this is the time, when they know, how to improve things. And then, they learn more, more, and more. And then, they know enough, to use it properly. And sometimes, they no longer feel the need to improve things to be even more user-friendly, because they just learned, how to handle all of that stuff. Which also means, that there is a huge potential for user-friendly wallets, and I think that market is not yet fully taken, and there is a lot of room for many improvements.

Also, I agree that BTC is more developer-friendly, than user-friendly. Technical construction of Bitcoin is what bring me there, because it is something, that you cannot see in a typical software, which was written before. But it is probably a good take for another topic, if it is not already created in some General Discussion board.

Exactly as I explained above, it is that simple. It's more like a Ponzi scheme, with a very small group of people who actually believe these things are worth something. Value is subjective, and with all due respect to Leonardo da Vinci, I would not buy the Mona Lisa for $200 if I couldn't sell it for $300. Someone else who "thinks they can see some magic on that painting" might be willing to trade it for their kidney.

Lord Varys in Game of Thrones made an outstanding statement:


I believe that:


You can see the same thing in all these famous brands. Some people would pay half their salary to buy a white T-shirt made by XYZ or buy a $50,000 watch that isn't any more accurate or better looking than a $50 watch. But then someone managed to convince them that these items have intrinsic value aside from their utility, and thus people are willing to pay for that value even if they don't actually see it.

Ordinals are no different. You would find some people who genuinely believe that Ordinals are pure art worth a lot, and then you would find other people who want to take advantage of the first group by selling them those "valuable pictures." In the surrounding context, the majority of people involved are in it for money.

Ordinals won't be the first or last "lie" to sell to people. The new trend might be: No-History coins are worth 5x those with history. So XYZ pool would now start selling fresh coins. You send your 1 BTC to XYZ pool, and they would include your address in the coinbase transaction of the next block they find. You get your new special 0.1 BTC that has not been "used" before by anyone else. A brand new input tailor-made for the VIPs. I won't be surprised if many people buy into that B.S and make something out of nothing.

Greed is a part of human nature. We all feed off it, just viewing things differently. But by the end of the day, everyone is greedy to a certain extent. As long as greed exists, scams will exist too, and history will never be enough to prove to human beings that the next "big thing" will end terribly like the previous "big thing." People will keep acting greedy for the rest of their lives.


@vjudeu, is the improvement you're talking about going to be built into the blockchain? In other words, will my grandmother not have to undergo any technical process to manage her transactions with someone else? Will she need to calculate anything, or else her transaction will be stuck? BTC is pretty complicated for the average person in its current state. Being a tech person like you and most others in this forum might think everything is easy to learn, but to most other people, setting up a wallet is scary enough. I'd bet that 90% of users don't even care to verify if their wallet is suggesting the best fee rate when they send anything; they probably don't even know how to do that. So, anything that requires additional steps to perform a simple transaction is most likely going to fail.

A lot of things can be done as a soft-fork (or a no-fork, for example transaction compression should be a no-fork).

Because, if you think about it, then you can note, that it is possible to include only the coinbase transaction, and then change entirely the structure of the block. More about it: https://petertodd.org/2016/forced-soft-forks

The nearest hard-fork will probably be related to block timestamps (because of year 2038 problem, or year 2106 problem).

Thanks again!

It seems there's a lot of development waiting to be done in the BTC ecosystem, as long as it doesn't require a hard fork of course...

Yes, it is somewhat possible. Because it could require for example new sighashes. Which means, if you have a Pedersen Commitment, it looks like that:
You can compare it to Schnorr signatures to see, that those things are similar. So, it could be possible, to for example take H(G) as the public key, which is revealed in the Taproot address, and then take some "x1" out of that, by providing a valid commitment. And that kind of construction could allow detaching any M people from N-of-N multisig, if it would be done properly.

By the way, some people from the mailing list think, that transactions can be smaller, than they currently are. For example, here is the latest mail about transaction compression: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2024-January/022269.html

Thanks for the detailed response.

GRIN (along with BEAM) use MimbleWimble, which is totally different compared to BTC. Is it possible to bring that innovation in the BTC blockchain?

First, we have altcoins like Grin, that can show you, that it is possible to combine everything into one huge transaction, by using Pedersen Commitments.

Second, we have Schnorr signatures, where N-of-N multisig can happen behind a single Taproot address, and you can spend by key to achieve that.

Third, we have Full-RBF, which means, that if you have a chain of unconfirmed transactions, for example Alice->Bob->Charlie, then it is possible to write a replacement Alice->Charlie, and preserve the same fees and amounts. Then, the size of the transaction will be smaller, the fee will stay the same, so the feerate per byte will increase.

It can be done, but some things are needed before. For example, you need a working tools in Bitcoin Core, to handle N-of-N multisig addresses on Taproot.

So what I'm seeing basically is this:

1) Make up some crap, doesn't matter if it has a real utility or not
2) Market it to potential investors
3) Sell

And this is actually a widely used business model, from shit-tokens created by exchanges like FTX and ponzi schemes, to literally forging a business by making up statistics, models and financials and then sucker some black suits to acquire it.

No wonder why this is annoying for people who use Bitcoin for real stuff.

I'm curious to see how you're going implement this without forfeiting self-custody. Seems like an interesting solution IF it could be implemented in a decentralized manner.

Exchanges already utilize batching, even though their fees are absurd most of the time.

Miners can accept fees as they please. If miners would want to increase minimal fees into 1000 satoshis per virtual byte, then they could just apply those rules, and not include transactions into blocks, if fees are insufficient. Or, the biggest N pools could just secretly agree to flood mempools with their own transactions, just to increase minimal fees (because then, they will get those fees back in their own blocks they mine).

That's why the solution is to handle N users per coin. Which means, if you have 0.01 BTC transaction fee, and there is one user behind that, then it is quite high cost. But if there are 1000 users behind transaction of the same size, then each of them has to pay only 1000 satoshis.

And because batching N users behind N-of-N multisig is easier than combining N ordinals (because if you combine signatures, then their size is not increased), it should be sufficient to give regular users a tool to compete with Ordinals.

Mining pools can attempt to "spam" the blockchain, a topic which we have discussed in the 2023 diff thread in the mining section, but they don't need Ordinals for that, in fact, it is easier for them to create non-Ordinals transactions that are larger in size.

But in regards to fees, Ordinals are just a currently living proof that the main chain is incapable of processing many transaction at low fees, the type of transactions is irrelevant to the fee, you may argue that the type of data they leave on the blockchain is useless and should not be on the blockchain, but fees would still be this high and worse if 1% of the population started using BTC on chain for daily payments.