TL;DR: It's too expensive and inneficient.

Before going any further, let me clarify some things:
  1. I don't think Ocean is going to win anything filtering transactions.
  2. I don't think to put filters is the right action.
Having said that, I begin.
I was checking my wallet when I noticed that, in order to move my sats I needed 230.000 sats. Nothing new for me, but then I checked the block 840.000 and saw people paying almost 2 f****ing bitcoin1. Well, if you have the money, be my guest. But then I recall the Runes that one you guys were talking.
Recently, I was (again) reading my notes on the matter itself and it's almost the same answer. Now:

Can you prevent people to stop using ordinals/memecoins2?

No, you can't do anything.

Will you run your own node version where there's no ordinal/rune/brc20?

It's like to put a curtain in your house to delete the sun from your view. It doesn't make sense in long terms. Today, Ocean have less than 5% of total hashrates and while I understand their vision, economically it won't work...Say your solution is to put filters today, tomorrow, once your solution is propagated, these degens will find a way to disguise their ordinals in something else.

Why people are using these...things that are not useful in the bitcoin L1?

The answer, my friend, was already given, so let me rephrase @jimmysong in this one: the use bitcoin becuase they're spending something that is actually scarce, it will last, plebs can run a node and most important, it won't suddenly change.

And why are you sure they won't last?

Maths and market. Having studied the Rune protocol, I see the efficiency of what they want to improve about BRC20. With BRC20 you'll need four transactions to mint your token3, with Runes just one. Casey improved the standard but still very expensive..way too much. And it's not suitable for everyone. The fee market dictates how much you're going to pay to put your trash in the next block. Once you pay, it's all you need to do but here's the thing: for how long can you mantain this? My two cents: not for too long.
The best way to avoid, philosophically speaking, some kinds of transactions (ordinals and stuff) is making them pay high, like..really high. Let the market do the work. Also remember, the shitcoin narrative is not bitcoin but Ethereum and Solana, both layers can do what Runes does but in less than 1 minute and 99.99% cheaper.
So, that's it.

Footnotes

  1. Yeah, it's real, check the transaction.
  2. Did you guys noticed? It's not shitcoin anymore but now it's for fun, therefore memecoins. It's the same picture.
  3. It's really fun to learn these things. Now that I understand what they're trying to build, rest assure they won't last.
That's the beauty of bitcoin, everyone does as they please and doesn't need to explain themselves to anyone as long as they pay the price. Bitcoin is an anarchy with a few small rules.
reply
Indeed. By the way, I heard Casey in a Bankless podcast when the host asked: why bitcoin? and the answer was, paraphrasing like why not use the money other people spend in ETH, SOL et al. when you can put that money in bitcoin?
At first makes sense, but in the long run, no. Because shitcoins makes only sense when you can act freely and without too much restrictions. In bitcoin, you pay the price.
reply
I wonder how long this can be sustained and how crazy the mania becomes, if these Runes make it to exchanges, there's plenty of exit liquidiity for etchers and minters to dump on retail and realise gains,
I think these big fees are VCs and they're happy to say oh minting poopoo coin cost x million dollars therefore thats the floor is X, and the price of token is now Y and then sell into the late comers, could see plenty of normies getting rekt, which is part of the cycle I suppose
One aspect I am interested in is how this affects miners, do miners factor this into their income calcs and go deploy over and above what they can manage when these fees disappear in a bear market? Last cycle plenty of miners missed the mark and got rekt, this additional fee incentive market could make that a lot worse
reply
Yes, you're right. Shitcoiners can only afford until the fee is low.
reply
Yeah I hate when they call this “spamming the chain” it’s not spam they are paying a cost. Eventually they will run out of money.
This is why you can’t have free transactions. Then you will have a real DDOS problem with something that is trying to replace global money
reply
And email spammers, call spammers, social media bot spam don't pay a cost? 🤔🤔
reply
The cost they pay is marginal. Block space is scarce. That type of spam isn’t scarce. They don’t pay higher and higher fee to do that type of spam.
reply
Exactly. You pay to get a place in the blockchain and following all the protocols suggested in the node. You do that and it's yours. Don't like it? Well, cry or yell. Besides these almost free transactions happening in other chains can't support hard money. It's shitcoin because it works like the USD: big blocks, few nodes supported by organizations and shareholders who keep running everything. It's free but the final cost is...you.
reply
👏👏👏
reply
They're spamming the nodes with arbitrary data. Not a hard concept to grasp.
reply
By paying a fee. It’s not free to put that data there
reply
That's very optimistic.
Personally I don't agree.
It is a huge attack vector and we aren't even facing serious abusers, just a bunch of degens and relatively small VC in the financial sector.
Imagine the amount of sustained load onto the blockchain if it get to nation state attacks. And it doesn't even need to be a sustained load, a coordinated effort could already do a massive damage to a nation fully adopted Bitcoin.
And there are plenty parties and nations in the world that can raise enough money to do something like this.
Even if it doesn't get to that point, every cycle having VC funded scam spamming the network would be very disastrous.
It's weird to me why so many are being passive about it.
reply
And there are plenty parties and nations in the world that can raise enough money to do something like this.
Fair point but unstable in time. In 18 blocks, Rune degens spent almost 20.000.000 USD and say it's an attack vector...we're talking about 1.000.000.000 USD each week1 to sustain these projects. Now, I may be optimistic but if you show me how they can raise 1.000.000.000 USD weekly to keep doing just stupid shit without any incentives2, I'm all ears. Otherwise, it's FUD.
every cycle having VC funded scam spamming the network would be very disastrous
Attack bitcoin is not wise, we're all know. They know also. Now, if you say something like they found a cheaper way to edit blocks...now that's real shit you're talking. Otherwise...again, FUD.
It's weird to me why so many are being passive about it
Well...I'm not passive tbh, I'm enjoying the revenues3. First, you can't do shit to prevent it. Use Ordirespect is a waste of time, Ocean is not profitable at the time I'm writing4.
What? What do you want to do? Two options here: you either cry (I don't recommend) or just give time to show these people how stupid is their movements. In the meantime, miners can make profits and most important: we're having fun with stupid stories about people losing sats just because they want some stupid jpegs.
Footnotes
  1. Remember fren, they're attacking and not earning shit, even shorting bitcoin, they won't win anything. So essentialy, they're burning money for nothing.
  2. Do some house mining fren, it's fun.
  3. I've checked. Ocean is the only offering Bitcoin Knots and they have 0.2% of total hashrates.
reply
US just passed a 95 billions fund, have passed trillions in spending bills etc previously. that's not really a problem when a nation state can always raise debt. And I see no reason why other nation states cannot do a similar attack if they so choose to. The combine debt raising ability in the globe is significant.
reply
Spend billions to attack a network? And then convince your allies to join the attack while spending more and issuing more bonds? Keep in mind that you're attacking, therefore putting shits you can't even profit.
You're not even attacking a country, just a network.
Meawhile, you look to coordinate other nation states, those same countries who can't even put themselves into consensus in certain more simple topics such as property rights or migration law?
Good luck selling that fren :)
reply
Why would that be unthinkable?
If bitcoin does threaten USD status as reserve currency, then it makes total sense to attack the network, precisely because it has no nation backing it, an attack wouldn't seen as an attack on x nation's security.
It doesn't even have to be the US and its allies, it can be China and theirs if BRICS currency or RMB do become something significant. In fact the latter is extremely likely, since one of the main selling point for bitcoin is free capital movement.
All you need to see is if the interest for them align (yes it does), the potential conflict (low), cost (high but not really in grand scheme of things) and effectiveness (which is pretty damn effective if lightning cannot function well)
An example would be carbon neutral and ESG policies.
Not to mention the multiple attack vectors can occur at the same time, crack down/capturing miners, stronger restrictions, spamming network etc.
Just like funding ukraine is profiting off a proxy war against Russia, attacking bitcoin is protecting their prime export asset, USD.
As any bitcoiner should know, trade off isn't measured in any monetary value as profit/loss, it's power and always have been.
If anything, a network that is unusable for a sustainable amount of time, will be far worse than 51% attack.
reply
Bitcoin is the only true free 24/7/365 market. Market regulates. It will level out but fees will remain high which is good to secure the network.
reply
Wow, what is the likelihood they will get a return on their investment where the fee was $127,000?
reply
I think Ocean only have about 0.2% of the hash rate
reply
Yeah, I've come to the same conclusion as well. It's just not sustainable unless you can peddle your "nft" for more than you paid the fee for.
Though with all this insane fee pricing, is there really that large of a demand for these things? Who's buying this crap?
reply
I'd be interested to see if people can put numbers to this. There's like $800mn volume a month in NFTs on Ether - I can see something like a $1.5bn market cap total on Runes currently: https://www.okx.com/web3/marketplace/runes though I have no idea if that's a complete figure. My perspective is that this is irrational market behavior, but the market can persist in irrationality for much longer than assumed. Having said that, I'd be surprised if this fee environment persists for much longer than a few months. But it has the numbers to keep on running with a few assumptions - i.e my read on this is that Runes saw 2x the monthly NFT Ether market at launch. If these are seen as semi-equivalent markets, then Runes might be able to persist at an annoying enough volume for quite a while.
reply
paying for NFTs, unless it comes with a subscription or used as a login key to certain contain aren't very useful.
reply
People were getting tattoos of their NFT apes. Stupid -- but I will admit this is subjective appreciation of art.
Now for runes -- there is no subjective value of art to this. There is no value at all. There is nothing -- not even a good meme. Its strings of text. Caseys mom? Hodl diamond dick? Pathetic.
Nobody is getting tattoos of bullshit strings on Bitcoin.
I think the community should demand that Rodarmor gets the top 5 strings tattooed on his body. Then there might be value in letting the community decide what defacement is necessary for this spam attack.
reply