As I recently discussed, inscriptions cannot be practically filtered/censored at the mempool layer. It's fundamentally impossible from preventing clever bitcoin users from paying fees to utilize witness space to host arbitrary data.
Clever 'coiners cooperate instead of clashing.
Forget fruitless debates about whether inscriptions ought to be used or not. I want to start concrete technical action to reduce the burden of inscriptions on the bitcoin mempool and fee market by going directly to the source. We should be spending our effort streamlining the actual apps and protocols which are pushing all this data into the mempool in the first place. Who wants to help?
Good idea and approach!
However, would this really prevent the mempool burden? If you compress data, it means that you can then put more compressed data there... If you make something more efficient, the "attack" (or give it a different name) can become somehow cheaper. Even if we optimize inscriptions, something else can still come and repeat this type of issue.
Either we can somehow enforce or better motivate miners to prefer using btc blockchain for "legit" monetary transactions or this situation will continue or come back again. Don't you think so?
E.g. fees would be computed in a significantly different way for inscription-like data and the "legitimate" common monetary transactions. Something like "add proof that you have the appropriate private key to the included signature-like looking data (thus you do not post garbage) otherwise fees goes 100 times higher for your transaction to be mined". Miners would be feeded, but the amount of such strange transactions would be reduced.
Well, it is not that simple, I know...
reply
A valid point - even if we succeed in reducing the footprint of a single inscription transaction, that might just make it cheap enough to incentivize others to start inscribing.
Perhaps I should not bother trying to optimize a dead-end technology, and simply wait for the fools to burn through their money. There's no way to introduce a new fee structure without a hard fork unfortunately, so it seems like patience and faith in solid economic incentives is the only practical solution.
reply