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Taproot didnt cause Ordinals.
Ordinals, Inscriptions, Stamps, and now BRC-100 are a symptom of decay within the Bitcoin community. A rejection of censorship resistant money, and a desire for fame and bragging rights. A desire to destroy something beautiful. A symptom that the barbarians are at the gate.
It is an affront to the cypherpunk movement -- they do not see the need peer-to-peer money. All they want is a token to brag to their friends. They want to tag their name on the cathedral walls. Privacy and Anonymity is undesirable, they want the world to know their name, and what ugly jpegs they are holding. It is the enshitification that destroys everything good we have been trying to build.
Trying to use Bitcoin for things beyond financial transactions is an attack on Bitcoin. We have more and more fools raising their stupid, uneconomical ideas, and even more fools listening.
"sats dont exist". Absolute Barbarians.
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Nevertheless it was bound to happen one way or the other. Either by successfully congesting the network using monetary transactions or by spam making monetary transactions more expensive than they would have been.
Either way, fees is the way, so best get used to it and build what's needed to still be useful despite congestion, whatever the cause.
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If these fees are going to continue, running a Lightning Node will be uneconomical and unsafe. Might as well pack up and go home.
It already was uneconomical, now its unsafe too. Ive lost many sats lately due to the situation. Just one force close has destroyed a lot of value. The security model of LN requires timely, economical closing of channels. This is impossible now.
We cannot accept this. Accepting it means letting the barbarians take over. I have not been more uneasy about Bitcoin in years.
There is a war brewing, and those that want to build actually useful things are being smashed in the face by a bunch of kids with too much fiat to burn, etching jpegs.
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Bitcoin requires fees to compensate miners without a tail emission. Bitcoin requires congestion to develop said fee market.
Lightning was meant to scale Bitcoin. If you are correct in that Lightning requires the Bitcoin network not to be congested and if there's no solution to this within Lightning, then Lightning is flawed and something else is needed.
Otherwise, get used to it and improve Lightning so that it works. If it cannot work, abandoning it is the right move.
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There has to be a fee market, but it should be aligned to the monetary case. The problem is the incentive difference between storage vs money. The storage users can outbid because they don’t care about total loss of value. We must address this, possibly even increase the block size.
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Please, don't give up. Many great people have rage quit already; how is it going for them? Yes, bitcoin has its limitations and its problems, it's not perfect, it's not a magic wand that is going to solve our problems on its own, but we don't have any other alternative, so in my view it is worth staying.
If anything needs to be done, it has to be done at the cultural level, outside the protocol itself. The protocol already has the fees and the block size limit as its defenses against spam. If you are afraid that bitcoin is going to fail, work through your fear and feel it.
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I agree it needs to be done at the cultural level -- I think these symptoms of decay is entirely cultural.
The old bitcoiners are scoffing -- yeah, we always knew you could write data, yawn -- meanwhile, the narrative switches from 'oh look i can encode data' to 'i will force you to accept this spam data at any cost, to my own failure, just to fuck your project up'. The low quality of everything in the inscription and ordinal space is blight. Ignorance is the primary attribute.
We find ourselves debating old debates, on technical countermeasures and changes. Sensible folks find themselves being drawn into discussions of censorship, etc. There are no easy answers. It cannot be solved when indistinguishably is the game. Indistinguishably is the countermeasure to censorship.
Censorship resistance is pointless when nobody can hear you over the noise and You can never win against an enemy scorching the earth beneath you.
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Nice article
Right on point though cause I'm seriously wondering whether this ordinals craze happening just after all the drivechains zealots crying everywhere, and covenants supporters coming back from the ashes after poor Rubin also tried to force his changes last year, is a total coincidence...
Nobody with a bit of honesty can deny that what we are living right now is extremely similar to when Jihan Wu and the big blockers were spamming the chain to push their agenda and proving the small blockers wrong...
But I agree that this episode is a good occasion to think ahead and anticipate more the future in a high fee environment. Also i still think that LN is underrated and denigrated by people frustrated (maybe rightly) that scaling was prioritized compared to on-chain privacy back in the days. I've been doing tones of LN tx this last few weeks for no fees, because rather than spitting on it, I opened channels while it was still cheap...genius lol
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Yes, it did. Deal with it.
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Good input!
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I don't need to expound here. It's pretty clear you cannot do 1MB txs with OP_RETURN or other inscribing methods.
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I explained in the post, you can absolutely do it with multiple inputs with SegWit, no Taproot necessary.
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Could've done it before segwit. Doesn't mean it was simple enough for the people on the margin to invest time in doing it.
I don't lock my front door because it becomes impossible to get inside. I lock it because it creates a barrier.
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This is what most people need to hear. Taproot wasn't the change that enabled data storage. It enabled the marginal space and cost efficient storage of data per transaction by removing the MAX_SCRIPT_SIZE limit of 10000 bytes but the envelope method could still be used in witness v0. Multisigs could also be used to store data and I don't think OP_RETURN are restricted by a data size, smaller than the max script size, at the consensus level.
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Nice article, thanks for writing and sharing
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Thanks for the good info and clarification!
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Whenever situations like this high fee environment happens, one should ask, "cui bono"? Who benefits?
Blackrock benefits. That's who.
I am skeptical that there is some sudden surge in the bullshit NFT market, but rather, I speculate that this is a deliberate attack to drive up fees across the network and shake plebs confidence in Bitcoin itself. Blackrock is a major investor in 4 of the 5 top mining companies. So increased fees directly benefit Blackrock's mining company portfolio. This means that they can at the very least partially regain their spent sats after stuffing inscriptions. With mining companies earning a windfall, the multiples of their value in Blackrock's portfolio likely offsets the initial expense of these ordinals.
And here is the bonus: plebs look at the alarming fees and dump their Bitcoin which Blackrock would then scoop up at a discount to front run their own ETF. High UTXO fees are immaterial to institutions moving multiples of whole bitcoin, but they matter greatly to the average Joe and retail. This current high fee environment does not affect the larger aspect of Bitcoin becoming the global base money, which is the end game. We should not lose sight of this and continue to HODL. Carry on and stack sats.
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In my opinion the historically high fees are not caused by ordinals. Its caused by some big players mixing coins who are also in a rush.
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Roughly half of the transactions in the mempool are inscriptions.
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The other half are to/from exchanges
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