Topic: The severity of the Ordinals Attack is increasing (Read 1029 times)

This sounds like a contradiction, claiming that the no.1 rule of the network is that a transaction should be legitimate, and not spam. The BRC20 and ordinals transactions are legimate, hence they are accepted by the network. They are legitimate because the users making those transactions have signed a signature proving that they own the satoshis they use for the transactions, not much else. The reason why the network has fees was never to stop spam but for spam to have a cost, in order to discourage it. I also don't believe this is a ddos, as the network remains available for users who are willing to pay the correct fee.

This is how the network legitimises transactions, by verifying them. It has nothing to do with whether users are transferring coins between accounts or otherwise. 

No, it does not. Loving Bitcoin and believing in Bitcoin makes you a Bitcoiner, not sending any satoshis to anyone.[/quote]

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree then! I don't think you need to love or believe in Bitcoin in order to use it. A Bitcoiner, by definition, is simply a Bitcoin user. It has nothing to do with sentiment.

Yes, cause the lightning network is created as the second layer and solution for the Bitcoin network. It's transactions are more faster and cheaper than the traditional Bitcoin blockchain transactions.
If the network congestion continues, we will see all crypto exchange switching to it.

I don't the developer we think of another solution than the creation of new fork coin, or making use of the BTC lightning network.

No, you didn't get it. I don't care about how tech works here. I was comparing user experience. Email spam is a serious global issue, same as ordinals in Bitcoin. Email spam if not limited by the email filter would make users' lives miserable. Exactly as ordinals do.


Again, you're comparing technologies, I didn't meant that. What I was trying to say, they have similar effect on the user. And no, there's no need to criminalise anything. It's a system error, a glitch, a bug which needs to be fixed.


I never said that certain users should have priority over the network based on the use-case. You're absolutely right saying that the network was designed so that priority goes to those who pay the highest fees and follow the basic rules, nothing else. The nr.1 rule is that the transaction should be legitimate, it should not be useless spam. Otherwise, the system stops working as it simply wasn't meant for that. Do you know what a ddos is? Ordinals are sort of a ddos on Bitcoin network.

No, it does not. Loving Bitcoin and believing in Bitcoin makes you a Bitcoiner, not sending any satoshis to anyone.

Protocol upgrade or more precisely, a bugfix is not the same as a hardfork.

there is more then one pool
if 90% of one pool stopped. then that pool will make >90% less blocks and >90% less rewards
(EG lets say 90% of foundry is in america)
other pools then make more frequent blocks due to less competition. so their block count and rewards go up

however the 10% that want to continue will be left on a dying pool which make >90% less blocks so their rewards are less. if any. yep if you have a small pool your chance/luck decreases exponentially too. its not a fair %
 
this will mean that the first pool only gets rare blocks or dies
however 10% moving to another pool means a boost in blocks for that other pool but now they have to share with an extra 10%

..
also governments dont need to ban mining they just need to make power companies apply a premium electric tarrif, and then the governments then tax it at 30% ontop and just price people out of wanting to mine in certain countries

EG
mining is not banned in japan or hawaii. but due to electric costs. making it cost ~$120k just to break even per btc mined. no one wants to mine in japan/hawaii

 As part of the recent discussion on Bitcoin transaction fees I had a question I had been lurking in my mind to @JayJuanGee Sir, @JayJuanGee tried to explain it logically but it was easier to understand when @mikeywith added something to him.  Hall
 Contrary to what he said in my question, Minara is not a member of a forum that you can maintain contact with or have the option to contact.  We know each other on the forum.  But miners have no chance to communicate with each other.  So how can they systematically stop work and create network congestion?  However, all miners know how they will benefit.  The most important thing is that the miners will mine independently if anyone wants to slow down they will lose.  His reward will be less than others.  If 90 percent of people stop mining, 10 percent won't stop doing it.  In this their profit will be more.  No one will want to harm them.  They will try to perform their tasks quickly and bring the rewards to their account.
 He also said that as long as we don't need the permission or license of a big country such as the United States, Britain or Russia to do mining, the miners will continue the mining activities without disturbing their mining but with the highest importance for profit.

At an early stage in the development of the network, developers have repeatedly introduced restrictions to protect bitcoin from malicious spam attacks. Your persistence in calling for new restrictions suggests that the current level of development of the network continues to be early and Bitcoin has not yet reached the point of maturity where any attempts to attack it only benefit it. I think bitcoin no longer needs any kind of hyper-custody and is an independent entity that follows its own path with the passage of time.

Think about this one more thing. You don't have to be clairvoyant to suggest that for the foreseeable future, bitcoin will be subject to equally strong pressure from regulators to force miners to drop mixed transactions. Transactions that pass through the mixer will also try to be declared spam, illegal, not in the true spirit of the open blockchain, dirty and not eligible for inclusion in the block. Today you advocate new restrictions to protect against spam, but are you ready to find yourself on the other side of this barricade tomorrow with the only hope of protection from those whom you accuse of connivance today?

Now you said it, that's exactly it. I am sure even worse results would happen if you checked to see the amount of people talking and the amount of people who actually use Bitcoin for other than trading/speculation. In fact, I prefer people use Bitcoin for speculation than not at all.


The funny thing is in fact it is not so much a problem of where we are in Asia. In my country I work in, I can send immediately to neighboring countries, and for almost free. It is when I send to America or Europe the problem becomes fees and delays, and my banks tell me they processed it already but the accepting bank is the one taking the time, and the big fee comes from them, not our banks!

The same if people in Asia work in Europe, they send money home, the banks over there charge huge fees to send back and then if you call the bank here, they say no, the other bank has not sent it yet.

This nonsense shouldn't be happening in 2023 Thanks to BTC, boom, done. Except when high fees like now lol

I wonder how effective the lightning network is.  How does the fee fare on-chain when we use this method.  I also think that lightning network is one of the solution but I am curious about the onchain transaction activity when we use lightning network.  Does it decrease the fee needed?


If disabling the feature that enables Ordinals and BRC 20 is not the way to go then the developer should think of a way to improve the scalability of Bitcoin so that the network can accomodate and not be hampered by this attack or the robust transaction of BRC20 that congest the network.

Those are quite drastic comparisons and completely detached from reality. It wouldn't be the same as not using email filters, email is predominantly accessed on centralised servers/clients. It'd be like asking the internet protocol (that is decentralised and based on basic rules) to censor this spam in the first place, in order for it not to end up at the destination of email clients - that would be the equivalent of Bitcoin wallets.

Do you therefore think the IPv4 or IPv6 should be blocking spam, because the decentralsied network shouldn't allow it? This is what you are suggesting, and it's completely ridiculous if not obvious.

As for drugs or chil porn, these aren't technologies, so there is literally zero comparison. Not to mention there are centralised laws in place to criminalise these activities. Are you therefore suggesting Bitcoin implements centralised laws in order to criminalise these activities? Again, that would be the equivalent of what you are suggesting here. Please try harder next time with your poor quality comparisons.

So no, I don't think certain users should have priority over the network based on the use-case. The network was designed so that priority goes to those who pay the highest fees and follow the basic rules, nothing else, whether you like that or not. If you don't like that, then I suggest you stop using Bitcoin - as that's how it was designed. Likewise it's development has led to BRC20s and ordinals that certain users are paying more for. You can claim that they aren't Bitcoiners, but if you are sending satoshis to Bitcoin miners as fees as Bitcoin network user, for the network to verify, that makes you a Bitcoiner.

I really hope this situation with ordinals / high fees doesn't end up with 2017-esq hard fork proposals, as it's increasingly looks like people are pushing for centralised protocol "upgrades" with these rhetorics...

These "because freedom" comments are just laughable. Let's stop using email filters and drown in spam. Let's legalize drugs and child porn "because freedom". Bitcoiners should have freedom to use Bitcoin and make transactions without being interfered by spammers. Do you agree?

Yes, there's a huge number of transactions at the same time but there's no network attack. Mind you, the insignificant block of Bitcoin was implemented by Satoshi to prevent any form of attack and the recent vast of the Bitcoin network was triggered by the Ordinal project.

Reduction of hype or any news is never the solution and the solution is people using the alternative which is the lightning network.

Maybe they will come up with a solution or introduce a block increase.

You can see a lot of people are frustrated with gas fees and Bitcoin network congestion at the moment but know what to do because there are many transactions at the same time or a network attack. What we need to do now is reduce the hype over this news. The psychological impact of using the bitcoin network to transact is also less stressful. Instead, expect the development team to build solutions to improve and enhance the quality of the network. Bitcoin is a leader in this cryptocurrency and will not be defeated by a problem it has encountered in the past.

This. I said it back in February, that Ordinals is just the beginning, and the problem will remain since they already demonstrated it, even if they stop, others will tryto abuse it. So it pointless to name the individual spammers, but close the vulnerability or at least mitigate it.

---

I was able to push $500 paying $2 after waiting a day, but the problem is that this current gridlock is not from bitcoin traffic, and traditionally we have seen real bitcoin transactions do this (like when exchanges move funds around), imagine when both occur...

Also remember other spammers are joining, because the doors remain open.



4 months of spam, and counting...

i mentioned 3 breeds of bitcoiners
investors throw more then small amounts in one go..accumulators put in small amounts regularly..

so the accumulator people will be hit by fee's each week/month
imagine it like throwing in $400 a month where fees were $40.. 10% fee is rediculous
now imagine third world countries like the unbanked. wher $40 is their entire months wage where they only want to put in $10 .. but fee's are $40

where as investors(not only whales) will have more coin but even if a whale, they will not want to keep withdrawing and depositing daily so end up using exchanges as custodians to keep profits

years ago i used to day trade a non-insignificant amount so i would withdrawal at night and deposit again the next day. but if fee's were this high then. i would not even bother depositing.
right now im just hoarding. i dont move my main stash for years. but my spending stash. well im giving that a rest too.. which is kind of a ridiculous thing to be doing on what was promised to be a payment system. and not im not going to shift value over to another network. i just find it stupid that we should put up with this crap when CODE can be wrote to make the system better. because thats what code can and should do. not the opposite

100% and in the gambling section that its really easy to see, you can measure that by the ammount of people talking divided by the ammount of people who really take part on pools, sahring bets , etc.


Well, this its completly true, a lot of people have a occidental way (and its ok because they live there) to think and they can access easily to the banks international transfer etc, but in the rest of the world that its not easy, its really complicated depending on what country you are and also how much money and contacs do you have, in that part, crypto its very very useful to bypass that limitation.


Two things to say. First i think if you are gonna have BTC to accumulate, fees doesnt make a real problem, because if you have 20k usd pay 10 usd for withdraw or use them, its  not so bad (i know, i dont want to pay 10 usd but in the big pic its not big).

About your last point, this its like religion some people are ultra ortodox and dogmatic, but yes i think like you, those people doesnt know the harm they are doing.

Yes, that's a good point. However, why seems that devs are not going to do anything about it? I think they don't want to do anything about it because of the censorship matter. Because some may see it as a censorship move or because they simply don't see this as an exploit / vulnerability.

the thing is.
those wanting to accumilate bitcoin now fear using the bitcoin network due to high costs.

it costs less now to wire transfer via western union than it does to remit via bitcoin. so people wont want to remit via bitcoin

those investing via trading wont want to withdraw coins from exchanges due to losing profits via fees

bitcoiners being told 'nothing should be done' to make bitcoin better, mitigate costs, avoid exploits, etc are being told this by people that love to offer other networks as solutions. these preachers are not bitcoiners.

Based on my few years of experience on this forum, where supposedly we are all made of Bitcoiners, I really don't think there are that many people at all who use BTC. I'm not saying it's bad, but I'm active in gambling and I think I can know the same people who really gamble with BTC, the majority are just spammers.

Same in Bitcoin Discussion.

But I know some deliberately use BTC because they love the coin and want it to live. I get inspired by that, so I also use BTC just when possible, unfortunately this is not a lot of times.

However, as you said it is small but nontrivial, so it is enough that a few people use it, and it means the few nontrivial are affected by fees.

It's definitely not as bad as it was when first became an issue but big enough that if you pay some things you have to pay fees more than the item.

Somebody in a thread I am active in pays subscription for VPN and that's a few dollars. If the fee is same as that, not worth.

What you said about investment rather than currency I partially agree. For me BTC is like a remittance or wire transfer. I don't use it a lot compared to swiping my card or QR code or whatever. But for me depositing BTC into a casino, or sending BTC to some friend, or receiving BTC, or even shopping online, it can be nicer and cheaper to do, and for sure in terms of remittance, way way faster.

If you live in Asia try sending America or Europe some money or if you work abroad and send money home. Big big fees, big big delays, and sometimes stuck if the bank is a crap bank. It's definitely been useful for me as a currency, unfortunately I don't have enough to say investment, more like savings

YES.

ITs like i come now and i say, " look BTC its censoring me because i cant upload GTA 5 in a block of their blockchain".

Or if we have a family of 65 people and i go out and claim, "look the car industry its against me because they only transport 4/5 people".

Come on, dont confuse  rules or parameters with censoring.

I had no idea what was causing the network congestion, and thanks to OP for starting this thread.  As to your comment, slaman29, I sort of agree; I don't know how many people actually use bitcoin to buy things, but I suspect it's a small but nontrivial amount.  There's probably not much a bitcoiner can do to avoid this shit--network fees have been crazy before, and it happens from time to time.  Right now if I'm not mistaken, some of said congestion has been relieved, no?

Honestly, if you're going to be buying anything using crypto through a payment processor you're probably better off keeping some litecoin or doge in reserve since those are usually accepted as well.  I've always thought bitcoin was a much better investment vehicle than it is a currency, and this nonsense is doing nothing to sway my opinion.

Exactly there was a lot of really unsavory stuff uploaded back in the early days. Which is also why it was a bit of a let down to see this current mess as not having been anticipated.

For your information we have been "censoring" this types of malicious transactions from very early days of bitcoin to protect all principles of bitcoin including censorship resistance.

Nobody says limiting OP_RETURN size is against censorship resistance or saying limits on the witness size for version 0 program is against censorship resistance. Same with 50+ other limitations.
So why should limiting the size of witness version 1 be against censorship resistance?

I see suggestions that "rules" should be applied to stop these transactions and that miners should "block" these transactions, but I see no calls for people to protect Bitcoin's censorship resistance.    Is the idea behind Bitcoin, not for individuals or groups not to be able to "censor" certain transactions?

We should find other solutions to protect the Bitcoin network against attacks like this, without sacrificing the principles that are protecting the users transactions. 

Important thing to consider specially by those who say "this will go away".
Even if the attack were to be stopped today and the fees drop down to 1, the vulnerability that this attack is exploiting is not going to go away. Tomorrow this attack could start again or the day after tomorrow a new form of attack could exploit the same vulnerability to perform a new form of attack.

The exploit must be fixed/removed to solve this for good.

Well said. It doesn't have to be some evil witches in a lair with sinister laughter being echoed while they plan their attack
In fact the historical cases I was talking about were all the same, the attack is designed in a way that gets regular people to unknowingly participate in it. In 2015 the code name was "Stress Test", in 2023 the code name is "Ordinals".

Wrong.
They have tried using these vulnerabilities to perform similar attacks. In fact in early days there was an increasing number of transactions that used the outputs to store arbitrary data in the blockchain. That led to introduction of restrictions and eventually to OP_RETURN and its rules.
Ever since then we have been introducing strict rules to prevent similar attack vectors until the Taproot soft fork.

It is not a feature, it is an oversight that led to a vulnerability being introduced into a small part of the protocol which is now being exploited. That also doesn't mean the whole bitcoin is broken just because a small vulnerability was found and exploited.

The fate of Bitcoin is in the hands of three groups of people. 

These are community members (coin owners), miners and developers.  In my opinion, at this time, the bitcoin ownership community should strongly urge bitcoin developers to make changes to the bitcoin code (i.e. soft fork). 

This is definitely a necessary step.  We all remember the year 2017, when two scoundrels Roger Ver and Jihan Wu decided to destroy the real bitcoin by replacing it with another coin called Bitcoin Cash.  In 2017, the Bitcoin network was also spammed with small transactions. 

At present, it is also necessary to repel the attack on Bitcoin and restore the state of equilibrium.  And this cannot be done without the participation of Bitcoin developers.

I don't believe that anyone has a constructive proposal to overcome the crisis aside from removing the feature from the chain.

My new speculation/assumption is that Ordinals will remain a feature and that a new way of scaling to mitigate the effects that it is having on-chain will be implemented.


This is important. NFTs were used to launder money, I have no doubt Ordinals would be too. I do doubt that this is the catalyst for the attack on Bitcoin. I believe that the attack is completely intentional and for the purpose of hindering the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Eventually, these adversaries will burn a significant hole in their pocket. It will either be a waiting game until it is no longer feasible to continue the attack/until it is not worth continuing, or until a scaling solution is incorporated to mitigate the effects.

The reality is that the possibility of introducing arbitrary data into the bitcoin blockchain has existed since the launch of the network, it’s just that no one has tried to widely use this possibility before. Read the previous sentence again and try to understand that this is not a bug, but a feature. If you consider this a dramatic problem, then the whole bitcoin is a mistake, because the problem does not have an adequate technical solution, only palliatives with very unpleasant side effects that still do not solve the problem, because it is of a fundamental nature.

Further, if we call it a "fungibility attack", then we have to admit that the attack would have no chance of any kind of success if the fungibility of bitcoins existed in reality, and was not an illusion and a figment of the imagination of a limited view of the open blockchain.

Bitcoin is not broken and there is nothing to fix here, the system continues to work normally. But perhaps many of us will have to reconsider again (I think not for the first and not even the last time) our outdated stereotypes about what bitcoin is, what its role and place in the world is. If for someone this experience is disappointing - this is an individual problem of his personal expectations.

Well i dont know really what to do but i have to point something, the main problem with exploits its this, you know they were you know they exist but until they dont get exploited you dont make anything to solve them, its like a lazy thing.

They are useless and harmless until they become harmful, and you are not prepared in the right way to overcome the issue.

But the good things its... it can be solved and its a minor issue in the big movie.

What else can we do to stop their exploits?
We don't want to split the chain again all because of the Ordinals. I may not be coordinated attack from the start when they tried that NFTs on top but its the idea now because when there are a lot of them benefiting this, they will all continue to do it.

This is gonna diminish the demand of BTC.

It's still bloated, just the amount of red tx went down, but yellow level went up.

Anyways, these whole thing doesn't even last a week. How long would you say it's going to last before the ordinals-based shitcoins implode and people realize they've been investing in scams? I give it another week and the drain is going to unclog and wash them all down.


Only the top of the scheme is earning. Have you seen statistics of some of these coins? They have addresses that hold more than 5% of total supply each, and I'm not talking about the exchanges. When these insiders cash out, it's going to look like the Terra Luna chart.

I doubt these ordinals geeks who loves nft (now BRC-20) that earned them good money would stop as long as they keep earning from the trend of it. So maybe we are talking about a long time problem here for the bitcoin community as these high fees wouldnt regress for a while. It will go down but some folks are now spamming on socials on how good profits are being drawn on brc20. Ive saw some airdrops being posted on twitters with dozens of feed and comments. Crazy it is!

Well, nice to see somebody have more info about this.

About the second quoted, man i cant believe some people here saying this its not an attack on BTC, i know maybe its not a coordinate or inittially its not an attack directly against BTC, but now in an abstrac way its an attack.

I dont understand people who say "its not against the rules" yes man, we know that but do you know the difference between law and moral? or do you know if something its legal not always its good?.

Let me explain the point with a simple example:

You live in a street with only one can of trash for the whole street. When youa re gonna drop your garbage to the can, you see the can its filled until the top and you cant deposit your trash, and this keep repeting everyday.
When you start to seek an answer for that, you see a neighbor of you put ton of garbage made by him in the trash can and full the can by only his trash. So nobody in the street can drop their garbage.

Well he is not doing nothing against the rule he its only throwing away his garbage. But you can see its not good for the community and also its not a good behavior.

To those who think this is going to go away without some proactive community mitigation, "You're naive fools."

So many BTC related services and businesses operate on a cots + basis and might enjoy the lower frequency but juicier tx. And so many in "the community" are from pampered US and EU backgrounds where they forget what these fee increases mean in the areas of the world where actual growth has been happening.

Loosing the voices of people in South and Central America and parts of Asia will set the overall Bitcoin and crypto back by years as a whole.

Best alleviation I see right now is ATM producers getting their fingers out about lightning and moving onto it. But I have serious doubts that will happen as they too do cost+ and greed is a powerful motivator for doing nothing.

Yesterday it was around 650sats/byte now its around 230 which is good news but looking at the number of unconfirmed transaction is still high above 400K so I guess the problem is going to stay here for a while until those craze for brc20 goes away until that the price of Bitcoin surely under a big concern and no wonder it it falls below 20K too for short period.

I'm already maxed out on my post count for the week since yesterday - further conversation about that is comical.

As far as I know there's nothing illegal here, the creator of BRC-20 token was able to find a loophole in Bitcoin’s 2021 Taproot upgrade and then that's it. It's the start of this 'inscription'.

But this is an attack to bitcoin's fungibility and I don't think that the community is divided, majority doesn't support BRC-20.

In any case, this is hype and we all know how fast this kind of fad is going to die down.

Pooya87 doesn't need to come forth with a solution to the problem, the fact that many people don't see this as a new problem that will greatly affect Bitcoin is what makes it a good discussion, many people think that this ks something we have seen several times in the past, and because it's also making Bitcoin miners rip good amount of profits but this is going to throw Bitcoin in a new BS situation.

Many new projects are getting on Bitcoin Ordi right now and some are just preparing to launch, the transaction fee will keep going higher from now on and many investors will quit Bitcoin, this is a valid reason to quit Bitcoin because people are violating its purpose.

I do not consider this a serious problem that deserves an immediate search for ways to solve it. As well as the problem with Ordinals Attack.

But if you want to delve into this dialogue in more detail - first remove your commercial signature so that I stop thinking that you are not trying to earn another four dollars and for you this is a key driver for continuing the conversation.

And wait, peeps... There is more of this crap...
https://thebitcoinmanual.com/articles/orc-20-tokens/

WTF is these people thinking?? I hope that these scams die quickly along with the people who created them!

Among those who have the right to vote, there are enough companies that will definitely take this step.

Although I am skeptical of Binance, their mining pool will also support the change as the current situation is significantly hurting their core business.

So what do you suggest people do to solve this problem?

Please lower your level of aggressiveness in your rhetoric, because I may qualify this as a verbal attack on the self-identity of bitcoin. Like any human creation, bitcoin was not perfect at the time of its creation and remains imperfect now. This leaves room for the development of bitcoin itself and also gives room in the sun for a thousand altcoins that may be faster than bitcoin, more private than bitcoin, but they are not bitcoin.

From a certain point of view, the mixed transactions from the mixer you advertise here are also spam on the open Bitcoin blockchain. Think about it at your leisure.

Good news, it appears that in the past few hours, the shitcoins activity is cooling down, and 200 sat/vbyte transactions should be within the top 2 vMB of the mempool.

I still think it will take a while for fees to drop from three digits, but this is some minor progress.

Tbh I don't care who is attacking bitcoin because it doesn't matter at all. It could be anybody. Maybe it is just a group of random haters... The point is, bitcoin should be stronger than these attacks. If bitcoin dies after an attack like that then bitcoin don't deserve to survive at all. Like you said, Bitcoin survived these attacks before. They tried to bring it down in 2017 and bitcoin didn't care.

What changed this time? I missed the late events but it seems like these NFT thing is responsible for it. And how did ordinals&NFT's become available on bitcoin? The last time I was interested in the tech, bitcoin didn't give a crap about token creation. Who let that happen? Whoever it is, he miscalculated everything and now we are paying the price.

I think the more features getting added to bitcoin, the more vulnerable it gets to the new attack vectors. (just like any other software) I hate Craig Wright for everything he is but maybe he was right about this one.

Sometimes less is more.

Jesus Christ did alot of miracles for the people but in the many still support his death, no matter how good a thing is, everyone can't love or support it. Satoshi solve the biggest issues of Blockchain technology and is obvious, not everybody loves him and so there will always be those who hate Bitcoin.
 This may be from the government or some altcoin supporters (but a harm to Bitcoin will affect the whole cryptocurrency   ) or those who will just derive joy the fall of Bitcoin.
Some previous attacks on Bitcoin :

• MTGox: Addressing Transaction Malleability
• Bitcoin's Empty Blocks Analaysis.
• Dust Attack, what it is, why it is dangerous and how to prevent falling to it
• Network Attack on XVG / VERGE
• Mother of all spam attacks on bitcoin network! proof?

• Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud - Tulip Trust addresses signed message
• List of Sybil Attacks and Attackers

But in the end Bitcoin still conquers all, now developers will try to fix this and any other flaws that can be exploited

10k bytes may be too big and remain exploitable (eg. using multiple inputs) and we can't do anything about OP_PUSH itself since the signature and pubkeys are also pushed to the stack that way.
We should first come up with a size that we need based on the transactions that people are making and NOT leave the protocol wide open like this. Unless there is any Taproot scripts that need anything bigger than 100-200 bytes, there is no need to let it be bigger than that.

This is a dumb argument made by people who either have never looked at bitcoin source code or are intentionally ignoring it. Under the hood, in the consensus rules, spam attacks like this have always been possible but we have been preventing them using the standard rules.
This is also not demand for more block space, this is a spam attack. Period.

Keep in mind that ICO scam is still alive to this day. They kept changing the name and upgrading their scam methods:
Ordinals attack looks somewhat similar:

I'm a little busy these days and need to find some links before I can post some historical facts about some of the attacks against bitcoin that let's just say look very suspicious... So hold that thought...

It can't. Tokens need a blockchain where they are stored not just a layer where nothing is stored and only money changes hands. Side chain is the solution and if they wanted to end up there, they would have started there considering how solutions already exist!

Wrong. They are not using the protocol, they are abusing an exploit. There is big difference.

Only real comparison is SatoshiDice and the evolution it caused. This too will cause evolution, if the protocol doesn't evolve...... L2 is at best a stopgap measure or it leaves the protocol open to more of the same at a later date.

So who hates Bitcoins today?,

We all know  that in 2017, Roger ver or MemoryDealers and friends try to attack Bitcoin blockchain such as today, they seek to tell the world if the size of the Bitcoin blockchain is small and can't accommodate the transactions.

So if someone (maybe altcoin enthusiastic) tries to do the same thing in 2017, that is possibly the same person (or community).

From today we have to watch carefully also Craig Wright, Roger Ver, and their friend. Those communities still mining Bitcoin, right? maybe they did this for profit purposes, and simultaneously drop the prestige of bitcoin.

This talk of "fixing the protocol" sounds very much like 2017. I remember the forks that happened then that apparently "fixed the protocol" but wasn't very popular was it.

As I've said numerous times this will only encourage the usage of L2 which until now didn't have much reason for existence, fortunately now they do. Eventually the likes of BRC20 will end up on L2 as well, so only necessary payments will be on the settlement layer. Also kinda bored of people describing this as an attack on Bitcoin when people are using the protocol in the correct manner (following the rules).

Sure I'm waiting to make a transaction myself, but when I started using Bitcoin I knew what I was getting into: an experimental technology. Welcome to the experiment, please try to embrace it.

"This too shall pass!" to quote Neel Kolhatkar.

The only real similar precedent for this was the Satoshi dice spam, which was one of the driving reasons for tx older than 120 confirms no longer being fee free being dropped as a concept. There was a very clear distinction between fee paying and non fee paying SatoshiDice tx with the non fee paying ones clearly being spam imo.

This might take a while longer though and could possibly lead to more lightning adoption and/or larger blocks. What really surprises me about this is that it wasn't preempted people have been dumping random crap onto the chain for ages, 2010 dickpics etc etc etc.

However, some form of resolution of this needs to happen fairly quickly or Bitcoin will loose the ground it has gained in El Salvador and much of the rest of Latin America where current fee levels are completely unsustainable for people using BTC as part of their daily lives.

Personally I would like to see the lightning peeps get their fingers out and get better ATM and POS support for less, this will mitigate some of the issues though not fix all of them. There are a bunch of older BIPs that might also potentially be of use for finding a more elegant long term solution.

If only I have the power, I would kick this BRC20 to the trash and forbid it to be included on the Bitcoin network or be accepted by Bitcoin nodes.  But well, I am just an affected user so all I have to do is hold my horses and deal with my own stress, hoping that the developers will act very soon before users like us look for an alternative again.

I would not want to see years of efforts of Bitcoin promoters and evangelists go to waste just because of the greed of a small group of people exploiting and attacking the Bitcoin network.  So hopefully, Bitcoin developers will take this issue as an emergency and lay a fix on the current situation by keeping this BRC20 transaction out of the Bitcoin network and address any possible exploit on the Bitcoin Ordinals if it is really not the one creating the mishaps.

I have the same attitude towards this.
After all, we're either in or out. I'm in all the way. I had many occasions to be scared, like when China was banning bitcoin, or when LUNA and FTX were crashing the price. I don't feel like we're in a worse situation now, so I'm in. Can I do anything about the network spam? No, I can't, so I'll wait it out. Sooner or later these spammers will run out of money. I can wait a year, can they keep this up until halving? I doubt it.


So FED is spamming the network with NFTs... yea, right.

Well, i fully agree with you on this. But here and in the whole BTC community like in life, we have a lot of people who sin innocent , and think, no man that its only conspirancy, or why a guy its gonna put money to destroy btc?. But YES this exist no matter if you deny or believe that.

We need to prevent this not only for bad ussage but in the near future to no suffer a real direct attack over BTC.

Imagine this situation:

- FED needs to implement CBDC.
- For that they need to destroy BTC.
- So they put millions of dollars in a operation to spam and destroy the function of the BTC blockchain.

ITs not so difficult, and you can blame like now..... " oohhh yes its cryptomeme fault guys""

This its only an example but you can change the subjetc for whatever you want.

Disclaimer: Im not saying this its what its happen right now, but its a possibilitie in the near future, so like the wise said " Prevention is better than cure "

Well at least we have this, time to spread the word:

Ordisrespector

This fork should at least alleviate kicking the spam out of our nodes.

I'm in the this too shall pass mode of thinking.
Sooner or later all the ordinal people are going to give up and move on to the next big thing.

No idea what it will be, hopefully it will not involve the BTC blockchain. But if it does, sooner or later that next thing will give way too.

Altcoin boom & bust
ICO boom & bust
IEO boom & bust
Bitcoin forks boom & bust
NFT boom & bust
and so on.

So things are going to get funky for a while, so be it. It sucks but it will help cull the weaker players.

-Dave

Bitcoin went through so much that this isn't going to break it. Idiots paying high fees for nothing will lose.
Think about this for a moment. Who's going to be the winner here in the long run? Is it going to be someone who paid $0.000004 for a worthless token just because it used to be worth 50% less a day ago? Is it going to be someone who pays $100 BTC tx fee because they need an instant transaction and can't wait an hour?

The winners will be bitcoin miners and scammers who made scam tokens. Holders will hold, traders will trade, shitcoin investors will be left with shit.

This is part of the consequences of blocksize increase.

 Blockchain is designed specifically for paper-light data weighed according to their mass. But Fool said let us include iron, diamond, zinc, brass, and other heavy metals , which tend to have higher mass compared to their paper equivalents. This will actually increase the weight of the data, and lessen the number of "papers" that can be added to a Block/Container.
Well, fools who care more about money/fees would focus more on accepting the metals even though they are not supposed to be included, while ignoring the feeless papers which actually are the proper part of the Bitcoin Network... or are the proper assets for the network. If this game is from the enemy, he could win easily just by merely dangling the carrots to fools.

The community should work more on preventing heavy data on  Bitcoin Blockchain. Let the Blockchain be used for what it was designed for. They could build something else for the so called ordinals, ontop/within the Bitcoin System/Network

Breathe deeply, you are excited.
link

Of course, its a repeat of much of what caused Ethereum collapse, since everyone and their dog uses that blockchain for whatever, and some people want the same for Bitcoin. Maybe they want to make money with "bridges", parallel blockchains, altcoins, etc, etc.

The fee is increasing in an alarming level, it was already doubled the last time I check this morning. I doubt they can keep up this kind of spamming to the Bitcoin network on a fee that increases exponentially. A month or 2 is already enough to stop this bullshit because NFT is proven worthless on Ethereum. People is just buying this shit out of desperation for a hype profit.

We might see the fee increase to 100$ and I hope this will stop all the bullshit unless they are willing make the miners pocket overflow with unreasonable fee.

I’m afraid that this might be the start of shit scam modus like DeFi on Bitcoin because I saw some project developing an L2 for Bitcoin that main purpose is to bring DeFi here.

https://www.mintlayer.org/en/

Yup, wishful thinking. Maybe it won't technically "last", but it could easily take years until they run out of funds to spam, and that's all they need...

I think its part of his vision. Give the people the freedom to do as they like. If they want to do something stupid like leaving their Bitcoin in someone else's hands, thats fine. They have the freedom to do so and once they lose their money, they will serve as an example to future Bitcoiners not to do the same.

The whole Ordinals "attack"? A lucrative reward for the miners.

It will not last because it is not only a nuisance to Bitcoiners, but simply unsustainable and pseudo-decentralised. It is still on a secondary market because Bitcoin has no DeFi protocols. So obviously the launderers will soon hit a wall of regulations and government barriers. There are only so many idiots who are willing to throw their money away for Bitcoin NFTs / Memecoins. Its just a fad and it will disappear. Like ICOs.

And all the poor saps who bought the memecoin scams will be left stuck, sitting on them.

History does repeat itself, this ordinal attack is again being conducted or sponsored by big block supporters (BCH, BSV scammers):

Like i have been warning since February, this is different because they found a sustainable way to attack Bitcoin. That the spam is actually profitable or not is wishful thinking, once demonstrated there are actors willing to spend money to spam Bitcoin for their own interest in having Bitcoin hurt as a project.

And besides this is how the mempool is looking like now:

The main problem its not matter what the thing is, BTC ETH, GOLD, FOOD, SEX, ETC, WE CANT FIGHT AGAINST the stupidity and greed from some people.

Their are gonna pay $ 100 for a transaccion with the only willing to be rich from evening to morning, its pure greed and gambling, its like buy a lottery ticket in a more sofisticated way for them.

Their brain works in that way, and most of the people in the world sadly have that think, they only re think when the scam explode, but they dont really care they only run again to seek the next one.

The greed and the dream of being rich from one day to another its more powerfull than anything.

ummmm what?!?!?!

Who in their right mind would say Bitcoin isn't a peer-to-peer digital cash? That is literally what it is. Everyone knows that.



Anyway, I agree with the people who say Bitcoin is not a file storage system. It was never meant to be used for something like ordinals and the fact that taproot had this unintended exploit only means that we need a fix. We need an update to not allow this sort of spam to take over the blockchain. Honestly this should be very high priority and should be something that gets fixed and implemented fairly soon, like definitely before the halving.

Bitcoin is for moving money, not storing useless image data. Just because Bitcoin is decentralized doesn't mean the community must allow this sort of spam to continue just because a protocol update accidentally allowed this to happen. Let's get another protocol update in the near future to fix this attack vector.

Yes, I remember this muddy story with voting for Segwit. This seems to have been accompanied by a deep internal rift within the bitcoin community, a large part of which opposed any change. Then there was an equally deep disappointment among the miners, deceived by the fact that there was no increase in the block size, although this is in conjunction with the adoption of Segwit. This was soon followed by the bitcoin cash story and the hashrate war. Do you really want to repeat this success?

Ordinals are not IPFS or a Tor hidden service and they should not have the responsibility to circumvent censors such as the Great Firewall.

Bitcoin is not designed to be a file storage service, else we'd be hosting our own bitcointalk images there and would not need Imgur or Talkimg.

@franky:

I'm sure that these miners that are just paying themselves with fees are taking advantage of the high fees situation caused by BRC20.

So, BRC20 usage needs to die down so that the miners (the ones with half a brain, at least) have no justification to make 600+ sats/bytes transactions.

No, it's not. It was conceived this way by its creator, but the number of people buying Bitcoin in centralized exchanges, even leaving them there, and the number of people using custodial wallets is far from the initial idea. I don't think Satoshi had in his mind people paying massive capital gains tax on their Bitcoin sales either, since you don't pay taxes for using cash.

Often an invention ends up being different to a greater or lesser extent from what its creator conceived.

Moreover, Bitcoin has become so valuable that it is almost contradictory that it can be a cash, because what is valuable you don't spend it, you tend to keep it, something that Gresham was able to perceive.

On the other hand, I agree with witcher_sense. As Bitcoin becomes adopted, and we reach those dream prices of $1M per bitcoin and more, as halvings progress it will be normal for fees to be higher, so paying a few dollars for a coffee or similar using the main chain will be impossible. Right now it's going through a crazy bubble of people thinking they are going to change their shitty lives by becoming rich overnight spamming images on the blockchain, and I understand why people are upset.

But I would leave things as they are: whoever is stupid enough to pay those fees to store shit should pay them. The rest of us will have to adapt to the fact that we can't make small payments using the main chain until the bubble bursts, but as I say, bubbles aside, in the long term I think fees are going to go up.

Bitcoin is clearly a peer-to-peer system of digital cash as perceived by its creator; however, any improvements like Taproot makes it less and less of what it was supposed to be. If Taproot made it a cloud storage, then we should blame ourselves, not those expoiting this "bug", for accepting this change. SegWit has so far been benefiital for Bitcoin, but the last one was clearly a short-sighted misstep that made this stupid attack possible.

FYI they were saying the same thing back in 2017 that the spam attack is benefiting miners and they will never accept the soft fork and they will continue spamming to keep the fees up. We know what happened after that...

By that logic we should not have hard forked after the 2010 value overflow exploit and called it "legitimate usage of the protocol" and allowed the miner to keep the massive amount of coins they received as reward after exploiting the system!

As I've said many times, bitcoin use case is very clear. It is NOT a cloud storage so anything like Ordinals that exploit the protocol to use bitcoin blockchain as a cloud storage must be prevented. If you want to compare this exploit with legitimate adoption by people and countries then I don't really know how to answer your first question

the latest attack is not ordinals. its idiots injecting transactions into blocks to spend value to the max to create dust utxo and majority of previous utxo go to fee's

edit: for instance in the latest block

there is this
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/bc1pxdgz3gh9lygk2uhhekrg4wnxm3pk6y0767rzp78w28ggmvkuprzslvmaqr

the value being spent is the near same as the fee
where its stupidly leaving silly dust amounts as left over amounts
(having $28.23 and putting a fee of $28.03 to leave just $0.15 as left over.. has no rational purpose of real world utility)


if you take the taint back a bit you see the spender also makes large tx fee
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/672b92b29a5c70bb71f5429e5f6313e2cded071d8fa5aafa484fec4fe76e7350
$216 fee for just a tx of 1345 bytes.. which sat/byte=575sat/byte to set up the crap stream of utxo spending 99% of themselves

these transactions have no real purpose of function of spending you buy products/services. they are just spam transactions to cause fee mania

That's what a hard fork does, a soft fork adds rules of the protocol which does not make a second chain. If you go through my post history you will see that my opinion about hard forks is that they are not practical.


Selfish? We are talking about the entire bitcoin community having to pay large fees just to do their day-to-day business.

This solution which I have just proposed does not depend on miners doing anything different, it is protocol developers that do all the fixing.

Now please explain to me what kind of use cases BRC20 tokens provide for end users (and trading does not count). Go on, I'm waiting

---

And about the miners: Nobody has actually commented on whether or not they endorse this token craze, so nobody should assume the role of conspiracy theorist and consider the miners to be "the world elite George Soros powerful people" until they actually say something about this.

That means, for all that we know, they could be against it, or they could be for it. We don't know for sure.


Most people who jump in to BRC20 are not adopting Bitcoin, they are just using it indirectly for the sake of the tokens and will gladly abandon all of it once they are done with the tokens. In other words, they are like the current crop of altcoin traders.

The only existential threat to the network is its split into two competing branches with an inevitable hashrate war between them, which you are now calling for.

It is deeply erroneous and selfish to attempt to judge the validity of a transaction by the usefulness of its contents. Before the first bitcoin sold for fiat money, the entire bitcoin network was absolutely useless from the point of view of the layman, although by that time it had already functioned quite stably. The key to Bitcoin's anti-fragility is its architectural simplicity. The miners are not trying to evaluate the usefulness of the contents of the transaction, but for some reason you are trying to get them to start doing it.

I mean something shouldnt have done at all. But we all know bitcoin is decentralized and if the protocol or thing he created (ordinals) have something wont put him in jail then theres nothing wrong though it really affect the whole network.

Exactly and we cant stop it right? Only we wait for this to die down or should we say if they already grabbed a lot of profits. Adoption can be good if many can use bitcoin but I doubt some are gonna use it when the fees are really high like this.

I prefer people getting their shit together to stop the existential threat to the network if it means the entire Bitcoin Discussion becomes an Ordinals board temporarily.

I for one will support any soft fork for this.


There's a difference between putting non-bitcoin data with a niche use case on the blockchain, and putting "worthless" (BRC20 creator's word!) BS on the blockchain in hopes that it will pay for your Lambo and 48 months of house mortgage that you're about to get evicted for.

That's how she already works. You can shake the air as much as you like that you do not like this way of using the network - it will not change anything. In the genesis block of bitcoin there is an encrypted text fragment of the headline from the newspaper, you can at the same time resent that this is also the misuse of a network intended only for the transfer of financial information. If some government wants to use the bitcoin network as a public distributed ledger, for example, to store all real estate transactions or educational diplomas in it - should we consider this a misuse of the network, while each transaction is properly paid and confirmed by miners? And if someone pays with bitcoin for the purchase of drugs, weapons or human organs - should we consider these confirmed transactions to be wrong, because we do not share the motives of the people who committed them for ethical reasons?

The growing adoption of Bitcoin, especially by nation states, may also lead to serious mempool congestions and unbearably high transaction fees. Would you also call it an attack on Bitcoin, or where should we draw the line? Who are to decide which use case of Bitcoin is acceptable? I think that the decentralization of Bitcoin should work in both ways: no one can prevent you from using Bitcoin, and you cannot prevent anyone from accessing it and using it in whatever way they see fit. Don't take me wrong, I also consider Ordinals a scam, nothing else, but a tricky way to siphon off money from naive investors, but I am totally against forking off every time we see red squares on the mempool.space website. Ordinals is a mere demonstration of how the Bitcoin protocol will look like once everyone is using it to make transactions. We shouldn't fight it because the adoption is inevitable, we should embrace it and adapt to its consequences.

What do you mean by illegal?

Bitcoin is open source, decentralised and clearly freewheeling as long as the basic operating protocol is not impacted. With Bitcoin, if something is doable, it can be done without any authority intervening. After that we all agree that what is feasible and can be done, is not necessarily good and should not necessarily be done...

I hate this Ordinals crap and the consequence it has on transaction costs and the congestion of the mempool.

But some people do have an interest in it: imagine you own a BTC mining pool, which does not pay transaction fees to its miners.
Imagine the profit you make when the fees are 1.5 BTC or more per block?!

I imagine that some industry players will fight to preserve this Ordinals crap at all costs.

I think we should only wait for the hype to die down. Degen peoples are increasing the trading of those so called ordinals. Its true this will affect regular business or merchants that use of bitcoin for transaction. But does this action by the creatoe who established this new tech of ordinals is illegal? I mean does core devs can somehow fix this? Since the creator choose to use a decentralized platform for this idea.

Ok wow I had no idea it was going to be this bad.

Quite worrying right now because I have bitcoin in a few places and I remember very well the last time this type of fee war happened, I had btc stuck in many places.

Problem now is to plan ahead of what you need and to just leave btc alone unless you want to get things stuck.

252k transactions now waiting o god.

Let's be realistic, even if your initiative is implemented in the form of a new version of the bitcoin core, we will not be able to reach a consensus in voting for its implementation, given that the current situation is beneficial for miners. But you can always initiate a hard fork and create your own little improved lamp version of bitcoin with blackjack and whores, it just won’t be quite bitcoin anymore. And the real true bitcoin is exactly the same as it is now - with expensive and slow transactions and with a small block size filled to the brim with stupid pictures.

The fact that you have to ask this question proves you haven't seen my proposals ergo we did need a new topic.

To summarize the way to prevent this attack should have been the same method we have been using forever to prevent similar attacks and exploits. It could have been introduction of standard rules that would have made such malicious transactions non-standard hence majority of full nodes would have refused to relay them and that would have successfully prevented this attack from growing.
Standard rules are easy to implement too since they don't need a fork, we just had to get full nodes to run a patch for their old clients or run the newest release to enforce the new rule.

However, I don't see this method being effective anymore considering how the scam has grown big and the market size of it is considerable enough to encourage the scammers to run full nodes themselves without enforcing the said standard rule to relay their spam. There is also incentive for them to pay the miners behind the scene to mine their malicious transactions.

At this point I'm afraid we need a soft fork to make these transactions invalid/illegal as part of the consensus rules which is much more challenging since it requires implementation, locked-in period, getting miners to vote and accept this fork, etc.
But that effectively and easily prevent this attack whilst keeping the protocol flexible for future improvements. For example the rule can only limit the witness size for version 1 program (similar to version 0) and leave any bigger size for any future possible usages (if they arise) to future versions which are already non-standard and not relayed by any of the full nodes.

I wonder how much more should we wait to stop this attack? The fees are ridiculous, 100sat/vbyte is a reality already now (if you want reasonable transaction times). I'm waiting for the core devs to respond to this hostile action against Bitcoin. Taproot bug must be fixed.

These people are really crazy for overpaying the Bitcoin fees in order to get their worthless NFT, due to decentralized Bitcoin network, there's no way to reject it and the miners obviously prefer to broadcast the transactions for people who willing to pay higher.

But I think this ordinals is just a hype, I guess a year later people will not really interested again and the transaction will be cheaper, but it can't back like when before ordinals attack started.

The current situation like forcing people to adopt lightning network.

So, you are sure that in this section one more topic is needed to discuss the current situation. What are your constructive proposals for overcoming this crisis?

There has been a speculation that this attack is going to fade away slowly and there won't be any need for intervention to fix the protocol where it is being exploited by the Ordinals Attack. That seems like wishful thinking now.

As I've feared the market around this scam is growing hence creating the incentive to attack Bitcoin more and with more people. According to brc-20[dot]io website the trading volume of this scam has surpassed $10 million daily with a total of 14,079 scams at the moment.

We can see the effects of this attack on the mempool with the fees surpassing 300 satoshi/vbytes.
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight
https://mempool.space/

This will only get worse as the scam grows and the scammers and idiots trading this garbage don't care about paying $50, $100+ for a transaction if they are laundering money with a fake transaction they call a token that is worth $1100+ or have a chance of scamming an idiot who would pay them that much for this garbage.
Regular users on the other hand do care about being forced to pay such outrageous fees just because scammers are spamming the chain.



The full nodes will also start being put under pressure as the spam will increase cost of running a full node for many reasons. From the increased traffic putting high pressure on their mempool and transaction relays to their chainstate (UTXO database) growing with a lot of dust outputs that can not be spent but they have to load in their memory for transaction processing.



https://statoshi.info/d/000000009/unspent-transaction-output-set?orgId=1&from=1682080884686&to=1683521607397

Both of the above charts show a very fast slope of how this attack is growing in size and severity.