Inviscriptions - How to bypass Luke's filtering and mint useless NFTs anyway
1457 sats \ 8 comments \ @conduition 13 Dec 2023 bitcoin
I can see inscriptions are causing a lot of debate in the Bitcoin community, particularly regarding whether they should be "filtered" or "censored" at the mempool level by labeling them non-standard.
I'm here to tell you that this moral/ethical tennis match is irrelevant. Inscriptions can be pushed to the blockchain invisibly, by disguising the data inside normal-looking transactions. The true plaintext data is revealed only after the inscription is mined. I call these, "Inviscriptions", and they cannot be censored without resorting to flimsy heuristics.
https://conduition.io/bitcoin/inviscriptions/
All this is to say that node operators unfortunately cannot decide whether or not to play host to inscription transactions in their node's mempool, because it's impossible to know for sure which transactions are for payment and which are for inscribing arbitrary bytes into Bitcoin's blockchain forever. So what should we do instead?
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0 sats \ 5 replies \ @supertestnet 13 Dec 2023
They don't sound invisible to me. The translator transaction has a distinctive footprint. If pools censor/filter translator transactions (i.e. transactions which publicly decrypt a previously inscribed cyphertext) then you're in pretty much the same boat as the inscription people are currently in.
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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @conduition OP 18 Dec 2023
They don't sound invisible to me.
The ciphertext transaction is invisible. The translator transaction isn't, and that's intentional. Part of the use case of inscriptions is on-chain discoverability. If my wallet software mints an NFT, software running on other nodes should be able to detect that new NFT without an external communication channel or database. This implies the inscription must be distinguishable on-chain, eventually.
If pools censor/filter translator transactions (i.e. transactions which publicly decrypt a previously inscribed cyphertext) then you're in pretty much the same boat as the inscription people are currently in.
If I perform inscribing first in secret, and reveal the inscription occurred only after it has already been mined, this nullifies any incentive to censor/filter in the first place (beyond spite), because 99.9% of the damage (block space usage) has already been done.
Take street art as an analogy. Inscriptions are like graffiti, except permanent. Currently, vandals are painting buildings in broad daylight: Their progress is easy to observe, and thus easy to interrupt if we wanted to.
However if we start to interrupt them too much, then the little punks will just wait until dark, and paint in the shadows while we're asleep. We wake up and find their works were completed in secret, and by then, nobody can remove them. The damage is already done.
I discussed all of this in this section with more detail
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @supertestnet 19 Dec 2023
If I perform inscribing first in secret, and reveal the inscription occurred only after it has already been mined, this nullifies any incentive to censor/filter in the first place (beyond spite)
It seems to me there is a second reason, beyond spite: to disincentive inscriptions. If, due to translation censorship, you lost money irrecoverably whenever you did an invisible inscription, perhaps inscribers would stop doing it
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @conduition OP 19 Dec 2023
Money spent on fees would never be truly lost, as long as the inscriber still knows their translator secret, and as long as they have some hope of being able to publish it on-chain in the future. Again, I covered all of this in the article.
Furthermore, even if one translator transaction can be identified and effectively excluded from the blockchain, the ciphertext is already on-chain, so censoring nodes would need to ensure that no other translator transactions for that inviscription ever make it onto the chain in perpetuity, which is no small feat.
And even then, the inscribing user can still publish their translator off-chain to reveal the inscription data, and prove they inscribed bitcoins with said data. It just won't be detectable by on-chain scanning alone.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @supertestnet 19 Dec 2023
The latter option -- "do it off chain" -- is rather encouraging
Maybe you could do inscriptions even more invisibly by doing more parts of the process off chain
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @conduition OP 22 Dec 2023
You can do the whole process off-chain using OpenTimestamps and taproot commitments if you wanted to.
The people using inscriptions don't care about efficiency though :( They want it all on-chain, for reasons beyond my understanding.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Zepasta 13 Dec 2023
deleted by author
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @notgeld 13 Dec 2023
Stamps are capable for bypassing censorship. Luke's attempts to block NFTs are fruitless, even harmful.
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