262 sats \ 6 replies \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 18 Dec 2023 \ on: Taproot Didn't Cause Ordinals | sethforprivacy.com bitcoin
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.
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.
reply
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.
reply
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.
reply
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.
reply
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.
reply
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.
reply