I'm sorry, what's the "exploit" here? What's the problem he's trying to solve? Because to me, the network is working just fine, and the free market of fees is working as intended.
I can state my opposition and my reasons for it but persuasion is about all I can try to do right now because I don't know if it's even possible to fix it technically
BTW, I'd like to add that his use of the word "exploit" is completely dishonest here. There is no actual exploit as in funds being stolen, or malicious remote code execution happening on nodes, nodes crashing.
It's just something he doesn't like, so he misues words, not unlike the US Government calling "terrorism" anything they want to crack down hard.
I really have no dog in this fight but I if like @supertestnet says there is a bug (and this is the first time I'm seeing anyone say its a bug) then someone is exploiting it. An exploit has nothing to do with funds or even remote code execution. It can be that but it also can just be a bug in software that someone is able to exploit to a do something that wasn't intended.
The question is, is this a bug. Not is this an exploit. If it is a bug, then it is an exploit of the bug.
What's being illustrated here is that even the term "bug" is a matter of sociological convention. Bug with respect to whose intentions? is the question.
From Luke's perspective, it's a bug. From other points of view, it isn't. From a legal point of view, In the USA, corporations have many of the same rights as people. Is that a bug? Depends on who you ask.
Who put you in charge of saying what "bloat" is? If people are willing to pay for this, it gets in. We came to this revolution because we like the free market of fees regulating the network, protecting it from spam, in fact.
It is inevitable that fees will go up because at the margin (in a century or so) miners will only make money this way. Fighting it is just delaying the inevitable. Luke would do better to help work with what we've got, like better throughput on L1 through more space-efficient tx signatures or a more robust L2.
I put myself in charge of what goes on my node. I'm paying for the hardware. The node running community, in consensus, is in charge of what belongs on the blockchain and what does not. That is not you either, and neither is it the 'free market'.
Bloat is obviously non-transactional data. BSV adopted this model of 'putting anything and everything on the blockchain' and it served them extremely poorly.
You might not mind $15 transactions, but when bitcoin really takes off, it's going to be 10x that. Fees will get out of control someday, but the sooner it happens, the sooner the average person is priced out of self-custody and we enter a whole new era of bitcoin. The longer we put that off the better.
I am deeply interested in doing what is best for the health and strength of the bitcoin network. It seems obvious to me that BRC-20 and Ordinals are an exploit of an unintended oversight, and if they were foreseen, they would have been patched out by Core before they materialized.
Why on earth would you defend them so passionately anyways, unless you're using them to your personal gain, by buying and dumping junk assets on the public? These are shitcoins.
Lol this gives me block size war vibes, miners love ordinals and tokens, they making bank on fees and even supporting marketplaces for this stuff as they double down on it as a revenue driver, anything that hits their pocket is going to get backlash
I've been giving it some thought, I don't think they will be priced out, these guys are willing to outbid any normal bitcoiner so why would that change after the halving? I think it keeps going and continues to eat up block space. These guys are also happy to do out-of-brand transactions and pay using other mediums like stablecoins to miners or accelerators to get into the next block.
They are creating securities violations galore with these tokens, so exchanges might be barred from touching them and these so-called "tainted" UTXOs so it could be good for keeping liquidity off CEXs in the future so could even help pump the underlying asset in BTC not just their shitcoins and NFTs
The fact that transaction cost money is a defense mechanism in itself. If you spam-attack Bitcoin, you just funnel money to miners, make mining more profitable, enticing more hashrate, strengthening the network.
So you agree it can be an attack, an attack that makes Bitcoin unusable for the small user for as long as these guys can sustain the spam. This hurts Bitcoin's adoption as money.
Can someone point to any thing which shows how ordinals/inscription brc20 translates as value, innovation, or extending community in a notable way? Genuinely curious.
Just look at what the "cryptobros" are doing over there in the shitcoin land. Monkey JPEGs, clown coin casinos, rugpulls, NFTs. You may disagree that is constitutes "value" but a) value is subjective to begin with and noone should be preventing others from spending their money however they wish and b) they did generate a massive business, even in terms of aggregated rugpull value. Again, you may disagree with the ethics of that business, but the facts stand: they did "build" something and got rewarded for their effort.
Now there might be some other, let's call them "pragmatic", uses, like digital deeds of ownership, blockchain identity, on-chain oracles, financial instruments ("DeFi") and whatever else might come up as a result of a more programmable and data-rich blockchain.
Your false dichotomy is incompatible with logic. Without rules there wouldn’t be a definition of money to spend. When saying people should spend how they want, there’s an implicit assumption that there are rules governing what money is. Dropping all the rules invalidates the axioms on which the statement was made.
.. they wish and b) they did generate a massive business, even in terms of aggregated rugpull value. Again, you may disagree with the ethics of that business, but the facts stand: they did "build" something and got rewarded for their effort.
fair point.
Find it hard to argue with: 'censorship resistance is the value prop'
I just find there's minimal value to come from the suggestion that defi will do xyz argument. I remember we had that whole prop on ERC20, and many (including myself) being a naive Bitcoin student at the time, was sucked in to and luckily pulled myself out of before becoming rugged and learning from that.
Appreciate your reply. These conversations help straighten out internal arguments in my mind. Think my mind rests in the possibilities of a data-rich blockchain, as you say. Maybe the current epoch is that of a teething stage we must go through.
I feel like the whole "DeFi" thing is greatly misunderstood, along with "Web3", and even villified in the bitcoiner circles just because of where cryptobros took them, which is, mostly shitcoin casinos.
Very few finance applications with "real world application" (in quotes, because I'm careful not to denigrate businesses that were built and gave value to their creators) were actually built in the crypto world.
Things I'm mostly looking out for in the Bitcoin world:
Derivative instruments on commodities (not just BTCUSD), that is futures and options. These are instruments that producers, manufacturers and merchants used for a long time (futures are way older than modern fiat money) and will need those going forward, even if fiat systems collapse and hyperbitcoinization happens. These would ideally be programmed to be self-sovereign and settled without intermediaries, making this a "true" DeFi.
Actual "Web 3.0" (as in, a significant upgrade to the current enshittification) wherein Bitcoin gets tightly integrated into internet protocols, so that you can, for instance require payment to receive an e-mail, or call API. I want 402 Payment Required to become commonplace.
I want 402 Payment Required to become commonplace.
As I understand rice futures in Japan were the beginning of financial instruments that hedge risk and I can see necessity to have such instruments but isn't layering transactions and settling on-chain a more feasible than encoding data in to on-chain transactions?
To my mind, Web 3.0 rarely seems to be talked about with Bitcoin in the same breath and usually current ideas leverage a digital implementation of fiat as opposed to the tight integration with Bitcoin. Still seems a long way to go.
If someone told me that the reason mempools are full is because of an email service which has launched, or some other real-world utilization of block space to encode data to authenticate transactions, that'd be different. I can't see similarity to these use cases with Oracles, Inscriptions, nor BRC20 tokens.
Maybe there's value by extension by testing block space readiness (and simultaneously creating pain in the fee market?)
isn't layering transactions and settling on-chain a more feasible than encoding data in to on-chain transactions?
I'm afraid I don't understand Bitcoin programming nearly enough to answer this.
But I think this is going to be a case of "buy a house on-chain, buy coffee over Lightning", where participants will weigh the risks to decide which layer to use. For instance, these "microtransactions" (another villified word) for API/emails will surely take place over L2/L3 but a large farmer might want to secure a price for his produce by timelocking funds on-chain, and binding them to an oracle-arbiter (a third party to discern whether goods have been delivered per contract).
This might also not happen at all. I can equally see a future where Bitcoin simply replaces US Treasuries as a backing asset, and even a unit of account, but the vast majority of it, at least in the corporate world, is centrally custodied by banks and there are proprietary networks that move it around much faster and cheaper (and only batch-settle, say, hourly).
And I think we're precisely going through a test period right now, and I hope it's spurring silent innovation, with builders trying to work around a problem (unfeasible fees for retail transactions) and we will see the fruits in the coming months/years.
The thrust of this discussion is what I was poking at here. I think the things you're looking for will be met needs that the ecosystem satisfies, either on btc or on something else.
It is simple, your node your vote, if there is consensus they will make the change, you will vote with your node, period. And if you are mining in a pool, you will point your mining operation to the pool that follows the rules you agree with. At the end is our choice, one way or the other.
Well, as much as the Ordinal/Inscription mania is incomprehensible to me, expecting it to go away just because 0.1% of the hashrate started excluding them from their block template is just slightly unrealistic.
Nobody expects it to go away. But I wouldn't want my node to relay those transactions or to include them in a block. If enough nodes do that, at least they will have to pay higher fees and it will be more difficult for them to keep spamming.
Your node has no say about whether they're included in a block, unless you're mining.
And your node failing to relay is of nearly zero importance unless the other nodes come to the same decision in such overwhelming numbers that it amounts to a de-factor protocol fork.
On one hand, that seems stupid to me (hashrater) but since bitcoin doesn't care about my views, Ocean is putting hashrates where their speech are; all Ocean's known members are anti-ordinals, so it seems logical this point of view. Since Ocean is working following the protocol and doing some filtering1 and they're not attacking the network, go ahead and keep doing the work sir.
Now, are they going to survive filtering ordinals? Let's see what the market and us, hashraters say about it. It's going to be fun :)
Regarding your footnote, I don't call that censorship, I call it "leaving money on the table", but again, it's something everyone is entitled to, if their ethics require them to. Yet others might call it "virtue signalling" but hey, welcome to the marketplace of ideas.
Let me ask you this. If your email provider would start filtering hundreds of daily spam and scam mails that suddenly popped up and make the client unusable, would you leave them? Or would you suffer the censorship?
Well, your filtering is also considering coinjoin, omni and BIP47 transactions. And moreover, the client provider is saying that is the creator's fault without any logical argument.
But, coming back your example, you made already the assumption ordinals are spam, they're not1. They're using bitcoin in ways you and other people disagree.
Don't like it? Two options:
Consider Dr. Calle's solution: shaming people for owning jpeg. Long time preference on this one (?)
Put your hashrates in Ocean and start mining while show people that joining Mining is ethically2 but also profitable business. Show miners that, without ordinals, bitcoin can concentrate in other projects such as Lightning Network and make more money.
There's a third option also: cry like Kaiser 🤡 but since we're all here for decentralization I can't recommend hard enough this one. But hey! feel free to join.
Bitcoin was not designed to store arbitrary data, it was designed as a money. Hence arbitrary data being stored on chain and clogging its money use case can be considered unwanted and spam according to this ethos.
From the start, measures were taken to combat spam (e.g. fees). These measures have been unsuccesul for the past months, which lowers or slows the adoption of Bitcoin as money.
I am not saying Luke has the right solution here. Or anyone for that matter.
Right? whole other level. But bitcoin allows miners to choose blocks. Mempool state isn’t even a shared guarantee… so he’s free to do what he likes. It’s not even going to dent the traffic at his pool’s current rate of mining. If once every 50 blocks or so are sans-ordinals, it’s a meh, nbd, to the ordinal fans.
I see you have strong opinions about what people should or should not do with their money. Have you considered running for the office of a central banker?
No, Bitcoin does not care what you do with your money. An invalid transaction is not a transaction at all and is not "doing something with your money".
By freedom I mean, you can donate to Canadian Truckers, Ukraine, Hamas or North Korea. Or you can buy monkey JPEGs.
And on the point of SegWit, it is my (probably unpopular) opinion that it is Bitcoin's single biggest, and largely unspoken of, hipocrisy. After "winning" the block size wars unchanged, Bitcoin then effectively doubled its block size anyway. But bitcoiners still sit on their high horses and pretend to be "purists".
Bitcoin does not care what you do with your money. An invalid transaction is not a transaction at all and is not "doing something with your money".
I don't think I am understanding you properly because this seems self defeating. You could do X with your money until rule -X was added. At that point it no longer counted as "doing something with your money" (this is where I suspect I am misunderstanding you) so it doesn't count as censorship.
If you believed that (which I don't think you do, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, I'm trying to show why I suspect I am misunderstanding you) then I don't see how any rule is censorship. Not even Luke's proposed changes. They just make it so that something you want to do with your money "doesn't count" anymore due to the new rule. To me, that's the same thing as censorship. But it seems like to you it's not? I am probably just misunderstanding you though.
Yea, something got lost in translation there. Anyway, per my understanding, that's not how new rules get introduced into Bitcoin anyway. You cannot just proclaim all those ordinals invalid because you would then fork away from nodes that never upgraded to "Luke's fix" version.
But Luke's narrative is to treat it as an "exploit" in the first place (only because he doesn't like it, and his likes and dislikes are irrelevant), he implies to intend to erase Ordinals from existence, which makes him a tyrant. So I took a punt at a comment trying to defend it.
that's not how new rules get introduced into Bitcoin anyway
But it is
Take segwit as an example
A big reason it was introduced was to block coinbase transactions that used covert asic boost
They used to be perfectly valid, and moreover, such transactions were popular among miners. But segwit put a stop to them
Censorship, pure and simple
We censored before and we can censor again. If the things being censored make bitcoin worse money then I'm in favor of it, because such censorship makes bitcoin better money, which is what I want: better money
You cannot just proclaim all those ordinals invalid because you would then fork away from nodes that never upgraded to "Luke's fix" version.
Sounds like you can do it with consensus
But Luke's narrative is to treat it as an "exploit" in the first place (only because he doesn't like it, and his likes and dislikes are irrelevant)
But they are relevant
Bitcoin's rules are whatever its node operators, collectively, want them to be
He wants rules that make inscriptions more difficult
That's a perfectly valid proposal and I support it too so that makes at least two of us
Consensus emerges with sufficient support, and that's when bitcoin's rules can change
inscriptions remind me of the dot com bubble. The entire market was fed and subsisted on advertising dollars until the investment money dried up and then the advertising revenue dried up and it uncovered that there was no real value inside most of it.
I could see this happening with bitcoin and inscriptions--a bunch of VC funds got the green light to spend millions on inscriptions--they are spending that on mining fees, but eventually all of it will dry up and we'll see who isn't wearing any clothes.
The only question in my mind is how long these startups can keep pushing the investment/loss forward to the miners without realizing their fate.
What if miners become the majority creators or inscriptions, thus the economic cost isnt really exhausting the inscriptors and miners profit off inscriptions and not fees and there is no space left for other economic activity ? I dont want that to happen and worried about it 😞
Although, the current activity isn’t a fork, it’s just selective mining, which miners have always been allowed to do. Only will be a fork situation if Luke and team decide to make their code inoperable with the current rules to create a fork. But if that happens, they would be volunteering to be the shortest chain and lose the title of Bitcoin.
This would be a good response if his assertion was that anything not prevented by Bitcoin is morally right, but that's not what he said lol
What I believe he's saying is that it's strange for a group of people who originally claimed to support the unwavering right to store and transact Bitcoin now have a problem with how people are transacting.
The free market will decide. Feel free to argue with internet strangers, or to choose whatever you believe and let the free market consensus determine what attributes it values enough to be part of bitcoin core
To me this whole brc20 and ordinals stuff is a way for shitcoiners to try and weaken btc. For me this is non-utility, bunch of scam stuff we don't need on our chain, idgaf if it gets censored, u cannot sensor these dumb shitcoiners/scammers enough. Just scroll once on r/cryptocurrency, filled with absolutely retarded people that think btc is trash.
Footnotes
Footnotes