Opinion: Spam can't cause high fees - Thriller post \ stacker news ~bitcoin

Opinion: Spam can't cause high fees - Thriller post www.thrillerbitcoin.com/spam-cant-cause-high-fees/

3810 sats \ 47 comments \ @Car 16 Jan bitcoin

zaps forwarded to @Scoresby (50%) @ThrillerBitcoin (50%)

✍️ drop //with @Scoresby

Your article is on-point. Clearly, people creating inscriptions are making money in some fashion, since they are paying dozens of bitcoins in fees per day. Let’s hope that said market quickly discovers that BRC20 tokens are worthless, the other inscriptions don’t seem to be nearly as prevalent.

10 sats \ 8 replies \ @eduardopro 16 Jan

"Clearly, people creating inscriptions are making money in some fashion" <-- Not necessarily. They could be... let's say... getting paid to sabotage bitcoin,

20 sats \ 1 reply \ @Murch 16 Jan

"Getting paid" is a type of "making money"

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @eduardopro 16 Jan

Point taken.

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @pako 16 Jan

Why is it always an attack? Why would anyone spend money into attacking something everybody knows that isn't going anywhere? Why when this congestion happens in other networks it's just speculation, stupidity and inefficiency, but when it happens in Bitcoin is "a nation-state attack"?

I don't what I find more retarded, the cryptobro syndrome that plagues the network today or the or conspiracy theorist syndrome that plagues most Bitcoiners.

Get you head out of your own ass, this is not an attack and if it were it will go nowhere, Bitcoin is too strong and people are too stupid.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @eduardopro 16 Jan

It's an attack because it's an attack.

If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.

21 sats \ 3 replies \ @pako 17 Jan

Give me hard proof other than the loose end correlations people are giving on Twitter as "proof". This is not an attack, this is what we advocated for when we all decided that small blocks, Segwit and Lightning were the solution. It's just not the use case we wanted for Bitcoin.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @eduardopro 17 Jan

Nope.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @pako 17 Jan

Without proof it's just a conspiracy theory.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @eduardopro 18 Jan

I already said, " I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry."

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71 sats \ 0 replies \ @OriginalSize 16 Jan

Value is subjective and transitory but the auction mechanism seems most fair. Again long-term thinking is rewarded.

52 sats \ 0 replies \ @03479d0ee6 16 Jan

I think there are different aspects that people often mix and it's important to make clear. 1-fees are a protection mechanism that is usefull if for eg you have one entity that wants to attack the network and fill blocks (spam) on purpose. Well this strategy will deplete this attacker sooner or later. 2- Fees are also a mechanism to protect the network when there is increased normal demand, it tells you the network is at a limit, so fees must go up, and some people stop transacting or pay more, and increase the base fee. 3- Ordinals does not fit a single entity attack, it's multiple participants expecting more profit, is this spam? We can consider it if we want to, Bitcoin is what the consensus and nodes say it is. A Spam attack also pays fees, a spam email is just an email that you don't want. Can something effective be done to stop ordinals? If yes, do we want to do it? Imo bitcoin should be for transactions but I don't know if something effective can be done about it , I also believe this will fade out.

644 sats \ 1 reply \ @brave 16 Jan

Fees only prevent spam if they cost more than a spammer can make by spamming.

True to a fault

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @cyberpunk02 16 Jan

lol 🔥 🤪😇 .. Might need to reconsider our spammer classifications, or just our own susceptibility to spammy noise, fine tuning our spam filters?

20 sats \ 30 replies \ @random_ 16 Jan

"If you think one of the roles played by Bitcoin fees is to prevent spam, then it follows that the people who aren't willing to pay the fees are the spammers. In this situation, that would be the people who want cheap, money-like transactions."

Pretty disingenuous to not even mention the segwit discount in the article.

100 sats \ 29 replies \ @Scoresby fwd 16 Jan

As far as I understand, some of these "spam" transactions utilize witness data (inscriptions), while others do not (stamps).

I'm trying to talk about how we understand whether a thing is truly spam or whether it is something we don't like for other reasons.

The difference is important, and I don't think it's relevant to the argument whether one type of thing uses the segwit discount or not.

Why do you think I should have talked about it?

31 sats \ 28 replies \ @random_ 16 Jan

Arbitrary data is priced at a 75% discount to tx data (v,i,o,l). The chain will be used according to how it is priced.

41 sats \ 7 replies \ @ek 16 Jan

~~Arbitrary~~ Witness data is priced at a 75% discount to tx data (v,i,o,l).

Isn't that for a good reason? Since this data doesn't have to be stored in expensive RAM of nodes but can be stored on cheap disk? That was my understanding how this decision to increase tx bandwidth this way was justified.

52 sats \ 6 replies \ @random_ 16 Jan

so pedantic lol

It's still arbitrary. It still has to be downloaded. It still has to be verified. It still has to be stored indefinitely by someone. Who exactly does this discount benefit?

Perhaps when the segwit discount was being decided, the developers involved expected witness data to go in the witness. Now that that's no longer a reasonable expectation, the cost of witness data should be priced the same as the rest of the tx data.

20 sats \ 2 replies \ @ek 16 Jan

so pedantic lol

It's still arbitrary

So you don't care if you store something in RAM or on disk? It's being pedantic and arbitrary?

Who exactly does this discount benefit?

I don't know. Seems like you have thought more about this than me. What do you think?

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @Murch 16 Jan

I’d rather people dump data into witnesses than e.g. in the UTXO set. The witness discount is encouraging exactly the right thing even in this controversial context.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @random_ 16 Jan

#390349_

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @Scoresby fwd 16 Jan

I think that having a conversation about whether segwit should be rolled back or changed is an interesting conversation.

I also think proposals for smaller blocks are interesting.

But I was trying to point out that the conversation around block space right now is, in fact, a conversation about what we want to use bitcoin for and not a technical conversation about a vulnerability or filtering.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @random_ 16 Jan

Keep segwit. Nix the discount. See how spam changes :)

121 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby fwd 16 Jan

I definitely agree that this would increase the cost of inscriptions. Higher price means less demand. But it would also make it more expensive for me to spend from my multisig. I'm not sure if the end result will be bitcoin as money transactions being cheaper (in terms of the total fee i have to pay, not the rate) than they are now.

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63 sats \ 18 replies \ @Scoresby fwd 16 Jan

Right, I agree. What I'm trying to get at is that if it really is spam, they will run out of money with or without the segwit discount.

If the segwit discount was of much relevance, the people who are doing stamps would run out of money because they aren't taking advantage of it and we wouldn't see much more of those.

Maybe that will happen, and if it does, great! Then we don't have to change anything to prevent that problem. If it doesn't go away, then it means they have a sustainable source of revenue and are not spam but a viable economic use of bitcoin.

We can still have a conversation about whether we want such uses, but that is fundamentally a censorship conversation and not a filtration one.

10 sats \ 17 replies \ @random_ 16 Jan

You need a concrete definition for spam.

"[Bitcoin] verifies and secures endogenous data. Your use of a blockchain to store exogenous data shows you don’t understand the oracle problem."

Exogenous data (spam) has a price advantage to endogenous data, so of course it isn't being priced out. Let me put it to you this way: every 3 sat/vbyte increase in next block confirmation for a real transaction is a 1 sat/vbyte increase for a spam transaction. Couple that with the fact that the data of the spam tx can be sold and you've got yourself a spamchain flywheel.

Would love to see comparison of the number of stamps (not mentioned in the article) to the number of inscriptions. My guess is there are more inscriptions.

10 sats \ 11 replies \ @Murch 16 Jan

If inscriptions were priced out by being 4× more expensive, why did the feerates go up ~500×?

0 sats \ 10 replies \ @random_ 16 Jan

Re-read that, friend.

100 sats \ 9 replies \ @Murch 16 Jan

So you are saying that inscriptions are making their creators money, but call them spam nonetheless. I think @Car and @Scoresby wrote this article to elevate the conversation from positions just like yours.

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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @Scoresby fwd 16 Jan

I'm not sure I agree with the definition of spam as exogenous data.

If a person encodes some arbitrary data as a signature, it seems like that is clearly exogenous data.

But what if someone uses bitcoin script in a novel way, kinda like BitVM? Is the script exogenous data?

I think the only definition of spam that doesn't bring in subjective value judgments is what I said in the article: transactions that aren't willing to pay the fees.

As to whether there are more or less inscriptions/stamps, I still don't think it's relevant. If bitcoin block space is more valuable to idiots who want to put cat videos there than it is to people who want to use the hardest, most freedom-preserving, censorship resistant money ever invented, we aren't doing a very good job.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @random_ 16 Jan

I think the only definition of spam that doesn't bring in subjective value judgments is what I said in the article: transactions that aren't willing to pay the fees.

Yea... that's not subjective at all.

But what if someone uses bitcoin script in a novel way, kinda like BitVM? Is the script exogenous data?

Depends on the locking script. Probably.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Scoresby fwd 16 Jan

I think we may be going in circles, but I do think that the economic truth of being able to pay transaction fees or not is about as objective as we are going to get.

If bitcoin fees were paid in fiat, I would agree with you, but they are paid in bitcoin and so, yes, I think the ability to pay them is an objective measure of whether something is spam or not.

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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @03479d0ee6 16 Jan

75% discount. 75% of each block with useless data.

101 sats \ 0 replies \ @designsats 16 Jan

Yet, it does.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @eduardopro 16 Jan

The spam attack on bitcoin is well-funded, they can afford to lose money as they sabotage the chain.