Ever since the infamous Taproot Wizard 4mb block bitcoiners have been alight, fighting to try and stop inscriptions. Inscriptions are definitely not good for bitcoin, but how bitcoiners are trying to stop them will be far worse than any damage inscriptions could have ever caused.
Inscriptions work by embedding images or other data into the bitcoin blockchain by using a trick in bitcoin script. They essentially put the data in an unreachable code block followed by the real spending conditions so the user can claim the ordinal/NFT. It is quite an ingenious trick but has broke a lot of the assumptions many bitcoiners were operating under. Previously, the main way to embed data into bitcoin was OP_RETURN, which is basically an op code exactly meant for embedding data but had two problems for the NFT people: it makes coins unspendable and by mempool policy is limited to 80 bytes. Inscriptions has the advantage that their only size limit is the block size and since their data is in the witness, not the output, they benefit from the witness discount, allowing them to embed 4x the data. This broke a lot of bitcoiners assumptions that the theoretical 4mb block would never happen because it'd be silly to have only witness data, however, the NFT people found a way to monetize it. Now this is common place and we've seen tons of inscriptions happen, driving up fees and block sizes.
Inscriptions are an attack on bitcoin. Inscriptions are not going to kill bitcoin, but none the less, it is an attack. Exploiting a trick in bitcoin script to use the witness discount for embedding data is definitely hurting the network, blocks were never meant to actually reach the theoretical limit and it is a problem that it is happening. Nodes will be more expensive to run and this will hurt decentralization of the network. However, now that it is happening and common place, we cannot stop it.
In retaliation bitcoiners are proposing ways to "stop" inscription and these will do far worse damage then inscriptions will ever do. Almost every proposal to stop inscriptions boils down to preventing these transactions from getting into the mempool. The mempool is the battle ground of bitcoin transactions and we need to preserve it. The mempool only works if it the premier way to get the highest fee rate transactions to miners. If we lose that guarantee, people will move to centralized systems and we may never get the mempool back. Filtering spam transactions from the mempool will not stop inscriptions, at best it will delay them by a week. The people buying inscriptions are morons, but the people selling them are not, they already have back channel communications with mining pools and if we cut them off from the mempool, then the only pools getting these fees will be the shitcoin aligned pools. This has already happened to many shitcoin networks where their mempool was killed off for one reason or another and now the primary way to broadcast a transaction is through a centralized api. This essentially creates a permissioned network, where even if anyone can run a node, if you don't have access to the transaction broadcasting api, you cannot access bitcoin. We are currently seeing congress try harder and harder to regulate nodes, miners, and wallets as money transmitters and losing the mempool will make this problem 1000x worse. There is also serious security problems without being able to do trustless fee estimation if we lose the mempool, but that is out of scope of this post.
Further, filtering transactions based on "spam" metrics can lead us down a dark path. The most economical way to transact in bitcoin is not the most private. Today the most popular way to get privacy for your on-chain bitcoin is doing a coinjoin. Coinjoins are not necessarily economic transactions, you are merely spending to yourself along with a bunch of other people. If we set precedent that you have to justify the usefulness of your transaction to not be considered spam, soon people will find a way to exploit this to try and get coinjoins and other privacy techniques excluded from mempools for being spam.
With all this being said, if bitcoin is going to work, we shouldn't need to care about inscriptions. The promise of bitcoin is a global monetary network backing the entire financial world, if that is overtaken and its primary use case is a NFT trading platform, then bitcoin was doomed to fail in the first place. We have seen many shitcoin bubbles for over the past decade and this one is no different. The shitcoiners will eventually run out of fools to buy their scam and things will go back to normal, but we can't shoot our self in the foot trying to stop things prematurely, when we can just wait them out.
#SaveTheMempool
Well said Ben. A one-off $10, $100, $1,000... fee per transaction is a bargain to keep your wealth safe and secure for many years and potentially many generations of your family. We have layer2 networks for near zero cost day-to-day bitcoin transactions. Scammers are paying for more miners to further decentralise the network - let them pay, own nothing and be happy ;)
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Not In My Mempool.
You are a free to do what you want with yours, as I am with mine.
As far as the disease. It's stage 1. It can evolve to stage 3. prepare accordingly.
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you're free to do what you want in your mempool just like you're free to get the covid shot. Both are likely worse cures than the actual disease
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Analogies aside, that really depends on the goal of the action.
For me this is just not to be party to this kind of harmful activity in as much as can be controlled with my own node. I don't have delusions about this making an impact on anything else outside my nodes mempool/ram.
These attackers do not get an entirely free ride on my resources. And I'd argue, they shouldn't be given one by you or anyone else who views them as attackers. The majority of node runners feel the same way, and yet don't know their configuration options to achieve this perspective.
Your concern for the mempool is probably fair. There's a tragedy of the commons that can happen there. But I see that as low probability, medium impact. I would think stratum V2 adoption helps with this concern, but I'm not sure.
So too can the same tragedy of the commons happen with block space via illegal content, and to a lesser extent, bloat.
There are no good solutions here.
waiting it out is fair and hopeful. preparing for the worst case scenario is also prudent.
That means developing tools and options before they are needed.
I hope you understand.
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Had 6 covid shots and never got the disease, meanwhile the retards that don't are getting sick with covid every year. Works as intented. Stop believing retards on the internet that never studied this shit
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regardless of anyones personal opinion this is it.
your node, your rules.
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What would be stage 3 like?
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Fees will push the bs out of blockspace. Give it time to adjust and let the miners be fed up like big fat bulls!
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Censorship is censorship. Plus 200 GB of space every year is fine, and inscriptions will eventually get priced out so it does not matter
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How far can the fees go in your opinion? 🤐🤐
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if we lose that guarantee, people will move to centralized systems and we may never get the mempool back. Filtering spam transactions from the mempool will not stop inscriptions, at best it will delay them by a week
If the mempool is this weak it deserves to die
No place for weakness in bitcoin
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SegWit was a mistake to being with. But we have to live with it now.
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Nodes will be more expensive to run and this will hurt decentralization of the network.
Come on man. The rest of the argument is good, but this is silly. You can build a shitty node that will run for the next several years for the same price regardless of inscriptions.
Decentralization of nodes is not the issue here.
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You can see the chain size increasing faster since inscriptions started
If that is not the problem then what is?
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With every block full, that 1tb hard drive you bought years ago and connected to your Raspberry Pi will still take years to fill up. Hardware costs are not the issue.
The mempool filling up and UTXOs turning to dust is the issue.
You made a good argument. You don't need the "hardware costs hurting decentralization" fiction to justify it.
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fees were always going to go up, we are just early
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Agreed. I think it would have been better, all things considered, to have had some more time, so that 'real' btc use could have developed more, but it can't be helped.
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I am glad that ordinals / inscriptions happened for this reason. It's good that people get to see Lightning operate in a high-fee environment and learn about its deficiencies in real-time.
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Can you explain its deficiencies in a high fee environment like im 5?
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Opening and closing channels require on-chain transaction fees.
So suppose I want to on-board someone onto Lightning, with a non-custodial wallet such as Phoenix. I could send you $10 worth of sats to get you started, but a good chunk of that will be spent on the channel opening fee.
There are custodial wallets out there where you don't have to worry about channel management at all. These are far cheaper to use as a result, but of course you have to trust the provider. They are perfectly fine for smaller amounts. However, we might be seeing less of these as they are a regulatory target (see: Wallet of Satoshi, BlueWallet).
Not everyone in the world can afford a 1TB hard drive. Yet another way ordinals are pricing out the poorer users of Bitcoin.
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You can bet on it because everything is bounded, barring some additional fork: if blocks are as full as they can be from now till eternity, the growth of the chain will be far less than the growth of relevant technology that supports chain growth (hard drive tech, in this case, but also processor power and bandwidth.)
I mean, I am seriously good for several more years on the piece of shit Raspberry Pi that I bought several years ago for negligible money. You can run a high-performance node in the form factor of a deck of playing cards. And that's without using a single scaling optimization, that's a full node with the entire chain history. The present resilience is testament to the vision of the Core devs for these last years that decentralization has been prioritized so hard.
This sounds at this point like I'm nitpicking, but I'm just saying, there are legit philosophical and design tradeoffs to be made here, so we don't need to water down the argument with non-issues.
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seems like it was on a pretty steady increase even pre inscriptions
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Well yeah, chain grows with every block, but slope insreased with inscriptions
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fair enough
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In the West you can. But every resource cost increase prices out poor node runners around the world in places where earnings are far less.
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This too shall pass
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Not only do I agree, but you gave an excellent explanation of the OP_RETURN method v the current inscriptions for non technical people like me. Thanks.
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Coinjoins are not necessarily economic transactions, you are merely spending to yourself along with a bunch of other people
On average, if you send someone sats via a coinjoin, you use fewer bytes then if you did so without a coinjoin
This is because about 4% of an average transaction consists of the transaction version number and the locktime, and in every transaction you make you have to pay for that data. But in coinjoins this data is shared by all the coinjoiners, yielding up to 4% savings in block space compared to if all those people did the same transaction separately from one another. Coinjoins aren't just more private, they also use block space more efficiently.
Coinjoins are "anti-spam."
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Perhaps one could implement a tool that uses the same mechanisms of Coinjoin, but the sole purpose being to spread the fee out across all the entries, rather than mixing.
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why not both?
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I guess based on a recent experience using Coinjoin, it seems some entities providing the service charge a large fee, which defeats the purpose trying to save on fees. I want a tool that focuses on spreading out the miner fee. But if it could be done in a way that adds privacy too, then great.
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In wasabi and samourai, the coordinator charges a fee that obliterates the savings
In joinmarket, there is no coordinator (well there sort of is, but they don't charge anything), but other people won't be part of your coinjoin unless you pay them, so your savings get eaten up by that -- unless you become a market maker, in which case you get paid to coinjoin, which is awesome
I made my own implementation of coinjoin over nostr that is similar to joinmarket except you don't have to pay people to coinjoin with you. I figure people will want to do so anyway just because it gets them free coinjoins. You can check that out here: https://github.com/brilliancebitcoin/void
However, even this one doesn't result in any fee savings for someone who is spending via a coinjoin. They don't have to pay a coordinator or the other members of the coinjoin, but the transaction fee isn't divided up among all the members. Instead, the person who hit the send button acts as the coordinator and pays the full mining fee. So they don't get a cheap transaction, they pay the full fee for a large transaction, which more than eats up their savings.
I'd like to see a coinjoin implementation where anyone can announce their intention to do a coinjoin in like 24 hours or something. Then other people can register to join it if they happen to need to send some money around the same time frame. When the time arrives, everyone gets a cheaper transaction (because they share the fee) and they also get to be in a coinjoin for free. So win win!
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I made my own implementation of coinjoin over nostr that is similar to joinmarket except you don't have to pay people to coinjoin with you.
If you look at the orderbook, there are some JoinMarket makers that don't charge any coinjoin fee, so for some amounts and number of counterparties it's possible to pay only tx fee for JM coinjoin as a taker.
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sure, why not.
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Only if you send in a coinjoin. I don't think any implementation support this
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joinmarket does
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Yes, but I believe there is room for improvements, it's possible to make it more blockspace efficient, by having multiple payments in a single coinjoin.
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You don't know how hard it was for me to not repost this myself.
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Is this not original content?
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Is this not original content?
i originally posted it on nostr
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Ah ok, makes sense!
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They (bitcoin core devs) will not be able to stop inscriptions or any other data storage technique that will appear in the future. Same for other blockchains like litecoin and dogecoin (all of them are being spammed too). So the only rule we have to minimize the spam is the 1mb / 4 vMb block limit.
In any case, Luke was able to scare some of the spammer in the last week as the fee is coming down atm.
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I think it's time we talk seriously about a blocksize increase, CTVs and Drivechains.
IMO it's stupid to have something that is too valuable but you can't move because there's a technical choke-point that nobody cared to fix.
Not everyone will be able to use Lightning in a self-custodian way, and a lot of people who own Bitcoin won't be able to move it because it will be economically unfeasable, if we continue on this path Bitcoin will go form "Available 24/7" to "Available once a month to the average joe", which beats the purpose.
Sincerely, it's necessary that we rethink the "settlement layer" thesis when the systems we have in place to help Bitcoin scale are, either unreliable (LN), incomplete (Ark), Federated (Liquid, RSK), or custodial (exchanges).
Taproot allows for better on-chain scaling solutions such as rollups and zk proof, and we are already activating assumeUTXO on Core, nobody really needs to run a full node and those who already do, will me willing to spend the money to keep their nodes running.
I think this conversation has to take place again, whether we like it or not.
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I see where you're coming from.
I don't know exactly what this means in this context, could you be more clear?
Now, I also don't know how this should be tackled, my proposal would be to increase the block size dynamically and algorithmically, something that works this way:
Blocks with heavier transactions are smaller to reduce spam, while blocks with lighter transactions can be bigger to promote 1in1uto TXs and while not killing the inscription of arbitrary data, disincentivizing it; also, bigger blocks will be needed for quantum resistant public keys (choosing a boogie man here, but they are closing in faster than anticipated).
Activating the driverchains proposal would help a lot with this as well, we could limit the functionality of the main chain and yet let the spammers "spam Bitcoin" without us having to run it.
And CTVs, well, I don't even have to argue in favour of them, if anyone thinks CTVs are a negative most surely they are simply conspiratorial or a purist who doesn't want change or progress, only vindication.
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Inscriptions might go down as a story similar to the Bitcoin Blocksize wars
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Inscription are the bane of the Bitcoin network
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I wonder what the people that bought Inscription and Ordinals feel at this point
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Yes it's an attack
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Bitcoin obituary of the day:
Bitcoin was a technology to feed the world and end hunger until some enterprising wizards realized they could gum up the machine by making it produce shit burgers, which they would flip on the garbage art market until their VC money ran out.
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I can resume this outstanding post in one picture
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Not sure anyone could have put it better. Great perspective and post. Bravo.
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1st point. No one is buying and selling inscriptions. Its justs bots. The promoters of inscriptions are are paid in fiat/btc to mint inscriptions by miners to raise miner fees overall. Second. Inscriptions aligned pools want bitcoin to get centralized-shitcoin mentality. But pools are made of miners. I still believe super majority of miners want decentralization. But they might be in minority in terms of hashing power-i.e not fiat bankrolled.
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Well said, Ben.
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My. This has been a very sobering morning on the current state of bitcoin and L2. Bitcoin itself is still experimental. It's not ready to on-board the world, let alone lightning.
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I think ordinals will slowly dies just like the NFTs, they cant grow a real community behind ordinals because they offer nothing of value, lets not try to attack them because it could give them some kind of reason to exist, like " look we are fighting the evil maxi, buy my shitcoin "Just let them play and disappear in the long term like they always do, in the end bitcoin will have countered another attack and grow stronger.
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Thanks a lot for sharing your perspective.
I am worried though that if this is a state sponsored attack, it can be kept up and hurt Bitcoin for a looong time. I think many don't see this risk, and assume this will go away soon. But what if it doesn't for several years. That would hurt early adoption quite a bit, pulling forward the moment at which small users are priced out. But on the other hand it speeds up innovation.
The question then remains what is worse, trying to reduce spam and possibly make further mistakes there, or accept that spam will remain on the network for an unforeseeable time (and try to innovate our way out of it).
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How hard is it to forbid any transaction with unreachable code? I mean, putting this restriction in the protocol not in some implementations of the mempool.
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It's not possible, there's a million ways to do it and they can do it to make it look like a valid spend path
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it's too late for that already
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blah blah blah blah blah
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If you were working in McDonalds and you had to serve customers who wanted a burger at your cash register, and you found some of there customers are aggressively offering you a few dollars on top of the price of a burger to front-run and buy many burgers, as fat as they can, while others take a ticket and wait with the correct change, which customers are you going to serve first?
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Well said Ben. A one-off $10, $100, $1,000... fee per transaction is a bargain to keep your wealth safe and secure for many years and potentially many generations of your family. We have layer2 networks for near zero cost day-to-day bitcoin transactions. Scammers are paying for more miners to further decentralise the network - let them pay, own nothing and be happy ;)
Agreed. Let the market decide. If people want to spend their Bitcoin encoding data onto a network not designed or optimized for that task, that's their own foolishness. Eventually they'll realize it's an inefficient solution for this purpose, get bored, and move on
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