I was chatting in another thread about possible forks...
and I went (for the first time probably ever) to go look at the bitcoin NFT market, ranked by 24h volume[1] where I kinda got a sense of the scale of the potential damage bip110 could have to a very vulnerable and underrepresented subset of our community (specifically, people with sufficient disposable bitcoin that they can afford to buy NFTs (evidently priced at around 2btc/unit, maybe I'm doing that math wrong)
24hr volume, for the whole market: 1,181.4 BTC
Total number of sales in 24 hours: 527
I guess I'm kinda getting on the train late or something, everybody seems to have made up their minds: either Luke is the smelly kid and is too nerdy to have acceptable views, or he's actually a stupid megalomaniac and he psyop'd all those rednecks to hate the righteous core devs.
at least it feels that way sometimes.
To be honest I have zero, probably negative, sympathy for NFT holders.
It seems like absurd, decadent nonsense.
you and I are closely aligned on this.
it may not seem like it by reading our interactions, but I suspect we're aligned on a lot of other things.
BIP-110 is not good. Filtering data on the consensus level is a terrible idea, that will backfire immensely,... soon some "other" data will be also considered "not good" anymore. Like transactions from obvious criminal activity... and down the rabbit hole we go.
Filter transactions on the application layer, not consensus layer
Assertion.
Claim...
explanation? proof? demonstration?
You're saying that BIP-110 is bad because the community which gets together around preventing a specific spam exploit is likely to get together around ... some list of specific form of "criminal activity".
that is, at least, easy enough to understand. I just don't think that it holds water.
right now, there are businesses who make their revenue exploiting unintended side effects of changes from long past, and (previous to v30) sidestepping the application filters to get that exploit into the permanent ledger.
BIP-110 sounds good on paper — a temporary soft fork to reclaim block space from Ordinals and inscriptions — but it fundamentally misunderstands the problem it's trying to solve. The proposal introduces seven consensus-level restrictions targeting data embedding vectors, yet Peter Todd demonstrated its fatal flaw by encoding the entire text of BIP-110 itself into a single compliant transaction. If the rules can't even stop someone from embedding the proposal's own text, they won't stop determined data embedders — they'll just make the process slightly more expensive and fragmented. That's not a solution; it's an inconvenience.
The deeper issue is what BIP-110 represents for Bitcoin's future. Bitcoin's consensus rules have historically been objective and content-neutral — a valid transaction is valid regardless of what its data "means." The moment we start restricting transactions based on subjective judgments about "legitimate" versus "illegitimate" use of block space, we set a precedent that could be turned against any disfavored use case tomorrow. And with only ~2.4% of nodes running the activation client and zero miner signaling, a forced UASF activation risks a chain split that would burn the community's coordination capital — making it harder to rally support for consensus changes we actually need.
If blockchain bloat is the concern, there are better paths forward. BIP-54 (Great Consensus Cleanup) addresses overlapping security concerns like worst-case block validation time through targeted bug fixes without making content-based judgments, and it has far broader developer support. Bitcoin's censorship resistance isn't just a feature — it's the foundation. We should be solving the spam problem with better economics and smarter protocol design, not by giving anyone the power to decide which transactions deserve to exist.
How about that?
I don’t see what BIP 54: Consensus Cleanup has to do with blockchain bloat at all, but otherwise agree with the gist of your comment.
embedding text is not a problem. embedding reams of paper, representing continuous data, that gets easily reassembled into images is SPAM.
yeah, if Bitcoin's future is the antagonistic hyper-independent, I'm here for that. it's bitcoin's past, too.
every single mechanism for identifying changes in the protocol (as specified by the BIP) are objective
nope... it's financial data vs. non-financial data. this is a P2P cash network. there's no reason to continue accidentally enabled support for cat.gif.
what exact precedent are you describing? the precedent for not accepting network abuse by a minority of "art dealers" to take massive advantage of the stupid?
if you run a node, then you know how to coordinate to address this
a) better economics for who? certainly not the NFT hustlers who are enabled by v30. probably not the massive mining pools who are supplementing their shitty power costs by mining these fucked transactions (pre-v30) via out-of-band solutions.
b) Protocol design happens by BIP. This is a smart, limited solution to a fucking awful problem: remove accidental support, for 1 year in, in order to eliminate the profitability of the corporate entities engaged in this practice.
Why would any of these people... want these NFTs? They are infinitely reproducible.
And if "we" actually did Bip-110... we would be increasing NFT scarcity not decreasing it. Just "put" that sucker (to the extent than an NFT even exists) on a Satscard or an opendime...
And then you can physically sell or transfer it to anyone you want, it becomes even 'more' rare at least for a short while... because no more "can be made".
It would arguably give the Bitcoin-NFT market even more legs and actually make large inscriptions provably scarce. They become one-of-a-kind sort of... which is the opposite to the message we want to convey.
Not to get off topic... but knots/bip-110 does nothing to slow the growth of memecoins, 83 bytes is large enough for almost any metaprotocol. That's why IMO bip-110 misses the forrest for the trees.
metaprotocol is WAY better outcome, imo, than storing image data in the UTXOs
it's also a lot easier to point to and say: "look at this UTXO on the mempool browser, you're paying somebody to embed json... which isn't art, even if the JSON contains a pointer to some image file made by an artist, stored on some server somewhere"
The image file, the 'ordinal theory' is the metaprotocol. None of this stuff exists, either it's baseless speculation on data you don't "own" or it's an attack neither of which bip-110 fundamentally fixes.
That's why I do not support it.
in the case of these problematic UTXOs, it's not the metaprotocol that's the problem. meta protocol is (as you've suggested) just JSON formatting, indicating what kind of message we're looking at.
the issue of the "spam" is not the JSON. it's that there's a bunch of data embedded in witness, which is part of the UTXO and needs to stay in RAM in order to validate incoming blocks. since the UTXO is unspent validation requires that the node keeps track of this information. that is what's filling up the RAM of the computers operating validating nodes.
I was under the impression... that witness script in op_if op_endif was unreachable, in other words the computer just ignored large blocks of op_if of_endif freeing up resources.
Large inscriptions... make large blocks easier to verify rather than harder. No?
How much of this volume is self dealing?
Lotsa washing on these kinds of things.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
How do you know that that volume isn't just one guy making trades with himself?
As foretold by the prophecy, this is the nth time that we have outlasted a data embedding fad — and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.