Blockchain Bloat Doesn't Matter
1228 sats \ 31 comments \ @l0k18 6 Feb 2023 bitcoin
Blocksize Warriors and Shitcoin Trolls are putting a great deal of support and promoting the use of Bitcoin as a public file storage system. They think that they will drive users to their garbage and/or force the Bitcoin community to give them bigger and/or faster blocks.
But it's not gonna matter:
  • Miners don't care, full blocks means more fees.
  • Hosted Lightning services like Wallet of Satoshi don't care, they already bulk open channels and aggregate user funds in their custodial wallets to manage channel capacity and connectivity.
  • Semi-self-custody LN services like Breez and Phoenix don't care, they already use zero conf channels to open immediately operational channels to their users because the users can't double spend on them anyway, when the funds arrive via LN.
  • Most bitcoiners realise that LN is the most important area of the Bitcoin ecosystem right now, and congested blocks don't substantially impact on the network for established operators who provide the core connectivity of the network.
Driving people away from on-chain transactions is not a bad thing for Bitcoin.
The UX is awful anyway.
Full RBF means that zero conf on-chain e-commerce apps are no longer a good idea for the merchants and market operators.
The big money in bitcoin right now is LN, and the ordinals are competing with ETH/AVA/SOL/Polkadot/Cosmos. The LN providers will be quite capable of outbidding the jpeg spammers, the miners get more profit, reduce their rate of selling pressure, and miners know what side their bread is buttered.
The general population of full node runners help reduce the chances of a hard fork splitting the chain, but the miners really are the arbiters of chain content. They will choose the block with the biggest fees. If NFT bros spam up the chain with worthless bits the LN operators will just raise their fee rates and leave a lot less room for the spam to be mined on.
If any of these fools think they are gonna somehow coerce bitcoin into their vision or drive people away from bitcoin, they are mistaken. Blocks full of transactions means less miner selling pressure. Number Go Up means more DCA bros coming on board and accelerating the saving instrument use case.
Let the fools spam the chain. They are just moving more money into the Bitcoin market cap anyway, and out of their spoilt brat paper hands.
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86 sats \ 0 replies \ @ribeye 6 Feb 2023 freebie
Custodial LN solutions shouldn't even be considered in the UX equation. Might as well use a Coinbase wallet if people are going to start telling users this is alright.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @AmadeusK525_old 6 Feb 2023
It does matter for decentralization. The higher the block sizes, the more centralized a network is, because storage isn't exactly cheap - this is the whole reason for the block wars that happened in 2017. I very much think that we should cap that shit because it's simply wasting storage space on useless trash, and I don't like that at all. The only way for the network to be sustainable, in my opinion, is to cap the amount of data you can cram in (maybe take the NYT headline that Satoshi used and set the max to that, as a symbolic message and limit).
I do agree that LN is where the focus is right now (rightfully so), but ignoring the problems that come with what is being done to the network right now is not a smart idea. LN is nothing without the solid foundation that is the base Bitcoin, and that foundation is under attack (not an immediately strong or super concerning attack, but an attack nonetheless)
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28 sats \ 2 replies \ @siggy47 6 Feb 2023
I agree with you that
If NFT bros spam up the chain with worthless bits the LN operators will just raise their fee rates and leave a lot less room for the spam to be mined on.
However, where I disagree with you is your assertion that
Most bitcoiners realise that LN is the most important area of the Bitcoin ecosystem right now...
The Lightning Network has great potential, but it is nothing without the solidity and security of base layer bitcoin. I also believe that we tend to overestimate LN adoption and usability right now. I recently listened to a podcast interview with Sergej Kotliar, CEO of bitrefill, and was shocked to learn what a relatively small portion of sales were occurring on LN compared to on chain.
The Lightning Network can be employed as a layer two to any shitcoin blockchain. Its potential is tied completely to base layer bitcoin.
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70 sats \ 1 reply \ @l0k18 OP 6 Feb 2023
Maybe I should have written "bitcoin maxis" not just "bitcoiners". I do about equal amount on chain vs LN now, even at $20/tx I still see at most 0.2% fee rate for my on chain transactions.
If ordinals manage to drive chain space up towards the $10 or higher all that ecommerce going on with on-chain is going to see a drop-off and successful operators will see the sense in adopting Lightning as an option for payment and putting money into promoting adoption of LN.
Shitcoins adopting LN is a loser's game, not only is the small chains less secure, most of them already have very high fees (ETH/SOL/AVA) and big/fast blocks. With taproot ready to permit both sidechain and LN transit of shitcoin tokens the momentum is on the side of Bitcoin, the cost for adapting to enable this capability widely is far lower for Bitcoin LN than it is for the setting up of an LN system for other chains.
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3 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 6 Feb 2023
100% agree
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18 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 6 Feb 2023
I have the same approach about this shit drama. You put it very well explained.
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30 sats \ 0 replies \ @LouisLoyaX 6 Feb 2023
The priority should be to prune witness data by default.
Peter Willie even said there is no need to download the data to begin with.
This would mean for people not wanting to store this, their node will be leaner and faster at syncing.
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/117057/why-is-witness-data-downloaded-during-ibd-in-prune-mode
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @03a8c5f853 8 Feb 2023
"Full RBF means that zero conf on-chain e-commerce apps are no longer a good idea for the merchants and market operators."
zero conf on-chain was never a good idea, even without RBF...
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Modus 7 Feb 2023
Are they putting whole images into the Blockchain? Why not just a hash of an image?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ursuscamp 7 Feb 2023
Still, I wish I had consolidated my UTXOs when I had the chance.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TNStacker 6 Feb 2023
Really informative argument. Thanks!
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @gunson 6 Feb 2023
I like this take.
Do you know if the digital artefact has to be duplicated on chain if ownership is transferred? Sorry, I don't have a full grasp of the technical specifics of ordinals.
I'm thinking of the repercussions of wash trading which seems like the number 1 NFT use case.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @selfish_gene 6 Feb 2023
только что понял?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @l0k18 OP 6 Feb 2023
No, it just worried me for a while because of channel opening delays from chain congestion. Then I learned about zero conf channels.
It was a possible onboarding issue for Indranet with clients setting up for the first time. Relays must open them but waiting a day for a lower fee channel open TX isn't a big deal. Setting up DNS for a website also often takes a day, it's just users who need instant access.
As such it's not really a problem for businesses based on LN they don't intend to close channels frequently, and open fairly large, long lived channels to reliable peers.
It's obvious that at least part of the support for Ordinals is coming from enemies of Bitcoin but they are just shooting themselves in the foot. Migrating ecommerce systems to LN will just accelerate hyperbitcoinisation and further increase its already dominant network effect in the p2p payments space.
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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @kandycoder 6 Feb 2023
Well said. I first thought it was a bad idea, but now I think the worst thing that can happen is that fees go up to the point that Bitcoin becomes prohibitively expensive for those who are not already established in the space. I believe the door of opportunity is closing fast, and soon there will be a wall of separation between the wise who value freedom of speech and the fools who will HFSP.
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @AmadeusK525_old 6 Feb 2023
"Bitcoin becomes prohibitively expensive for those who are not already established in the space. I believe the door of opportunity is closing fast"
How in the world is that a good thing? Bitcoin is peaceful money, we're betting on a monetary revolution here, hoping that it'll change the world to a better place where everyone can use safe and good money for their everyday transactions. If you think it's a normal thing that "the door or opportunity is closing fast", you're still thinking in fiat terms and that's honestly a real shame
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10 sats \ 2 replies \ @l0k18 OP 6 Feb 2023
I saw this coming when LND nodes went out of sync with the chain because BTCD had coded in a size limit for witness data. With that attack the cost would be fairly high, as in, a properly encoded witness is a lotta signatures piled up, those two transactions would probably have taken at least a minute to generate, filling a whole block with this garbage would probably have taken several days at least.
But if they can just skip ahead and fill it with cheap garbage data instead then you can see how this is all connected to an error in the Segwit specification that gave no limitation on how large this piece of data could be, no ratio limit nor absolute limit.
It's an open wound in the security of the Bitcoin protocol that is the main legacy of the Blocksize wars, which resulted in the introduction of Segwit and a "hypothetical" block size increase.
The whole thing was specified so poorly that a witness data can fill the entire block!
They are just exploiting this weakness now because of the sharp increase in LN capacity and the very likely impending market pivot to the next upwards trend, while they are trying to get their favourite protocol turned into the base layer for CDBCs.
I see three possible countermeasures that will become part of the solution:
  1. Make prohibiting the relaying of these transactions in mempool the default. Slow to take effect but steadily impinges on the propagation time, there's easy support out there for volunteer node runners to adopt this.
  2. Add a configuration option to Bitcoin nodes that enables a manual setting to refuse transactions based on size for relay and being added to a mined block.
  3. Prune the non-cryptographic parts of the witness data space being used for this scheme, I mean scam, out of the block for storage, add the handling to recognise this type of data and not allow it to waste storage space.
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17 sats \ 1 reply \ @AmadeusK525_old 6 Feb 2023
I think you responded to the wrong post =p but I do sympathize with your points
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @l0k18 OP 6 Feb 2023
Just skipping ahead to the "so what can we do" part of the discussion :D
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @TheBTCManual 6 Feb 2023
If dudes want to spam the chain and pay fees for ordinals go right ahead less sats for you, If there is a real market for this nonsense NFTs wouldn't ordinals on Liquid or a Drivechain pick up? If it overs cheaper fees thats the incentive to move to something cheaper, we saw that with the shitcoin NFT craze
Right now I just think its trolls and miners who are punting it to make an extra buck or two.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @ursuscamp 7 Feb 2023
Ordinal inscriptions are like the perfect NFT, though. They’re not going away, imo. For people who are “digital collectors”, an actual on-chain NFT with many content types is rare enough. On the premium blockchain, no less?
This is the stuff NFT degen dreams are made of.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 7 Feb 2023
And you can't stuff arb data in Liquid or a drivechain cheaper? minting is only 1 part of the NFT craze, the whole thing is built on finding a greater fool and building markets to trade it, whats going on now is the novelty and the first x amount lets say I was one who created one of the first 1000 but after that it, you have to craft a new novelty narrative or it you're just putting easy to reproduce random data on the blockchain with no eager buyers, thats assuming there are eager buyers for a marked satoshi of a file that is reproduced all over the internet for free
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryptocoin 6 Feb 2023
Well, it is inevitable that some day eventually fees will be rising as bitcoin gains further traction. This might pull that day a little closer. And those higher fees will push aside the jpgs.
Mostly so far though, it appears that a small number of people like to make a lot of noise.
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70 sats \ 7 replies \ @Zepasta 6 Feb 2023
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40 sats \ 6 replies \ @l0k18 OP 6 Feb 2023
yeah, kinda sucks, a 1tb drive will probably be full in less than a year from now.
I think there will definitely be strong arguments in favour of putting some limits on Witness and Taproot transaction sizes, it won't immediately solve the problem but as more nodes upgrade to versions that soft-fork to sane size limits on transactions and especially witness data will slowly strangle the excessive growth of data size. Or there is another option where such transactions get the garbage data left out of the on disk storage, since it isn't important to the security of the transaction anyway.
There's multiple approaches, I suspect we may see changes in protocol implementations that push back the upgrade necessity.
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29 sats \ 5 replies \ @Eximpius 6 Feb 2023
Na, even if every block was 4MB from now to 1 year later would only be around 220,000MB or 220GB. That wouldnt put use at or over 1TB. This is 10 min average block time.
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17 sats \ 4 replies \ @Eximpius 6 Feb 2023
I dont want that though lol. Id rather have 1.5MB blocks but if they are paying for the space, then so be it.
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5 sats \ 1 reply \ @shyfire 6 Feb 2023
I think the point is that they are paying less for space than transactions would have
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @l0k18 OP 6 Feb 2023
Yep, this is the open wound in the protocol from the blocksize wars. Weight of witnesses is under-counted compared to normal data. The first two shots broke btcd's witness size limit parameter, which was not in protocol but there because of the likely resource exhaustion attack.
I told y'all that's what they were doing. But everyone wanted to hate on btcd instead of think about why btcd had that limit. Most people probably even think it was a "bug" instead overzealous prudence.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @l0k18 OP 6 Feb 2023
Yeah, I suppose if the end result is NGU then the price of storage has to go up faster to matter.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @l0k18 OP 6 Feb 2023
The rewards "curve" also has an impact. Anti-tail-emissions people don't consider the fact that the "increase of supply" is a sawtooth wave with halvenings.
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