What makes it upstoppable now, are it's defenders
Discussion
All in all defenders have been doing a piss-poor job in 2023.
Ikr, there's an ongoing attack and it feels like I'm the only one doing anything (at least it's a small crowd)
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Subjectively more or less 10 or 15 real Bitcoiners doing something and fighting everyday.
What probably would be needed, would be experience and understanding of the architectural, design, structure of the implemented actual code. Also high competency in informatics and related areas.
Functional code and built proposals, which people could easily run, would be more effective as providing people strings to read.
Agree, we need to get you more support. We need to get the word out who's defending virtuous Bitcoin. True Bitcoin.
As always. The bad guys identified you as a good guy and started work to isolate and shut you down.
It's time for true Bitcoiners to step up. Especially #fullnode operators. We are responsible for enforcing a virtuous #Bitcoin #protocol. True Bitcoin..👍👑🗽
I would have liked to be able to implement ordislow or any other anti-spam measure but I don’t have the skills unfortunately 😞
At least you're in the fight with us. That's a lot more than I can say for many of the others just reaping the benefits..👍🙂🧡👑🗽
Ordinals are just idiots being parted from their money and on-chain transactions are still affordable. If the price of bitcoin is 100x higher then they are 100x stupider being parted from 100x more money. Pretty simple maths.
Spoken like someone who doesn't contribute computing resources to the network.
Being able to arbitrarily raise the storage and memory costs to run a full node with cheap frivolous data is in effect an attack vector on Bitcoin's decentralization.
Ordinals people may be plain old idiots or they may be sophisticated attackers with a large budget, but it doesn't really matter. Long-term thinking noderunners would benefit from mitigating this exploit in any case.
Not to mention that apathy is a very bad strategy if the end goal is to run the bitcoin experiment for +100 years. If node runners are trained to rationalize things away and do nothing instead of looking for ways to mitigate the problems we face and fight back, at some point we'll fail.
Maximum theoretical capacity of bitcoin for 100 years is 21 terabytes, right?
4MB x 24 hours x 6 blocks per hours x 365 days x 100 years
How much is a terabyte these days?
The cost to run a node that will last 100 years today is not that high.
Ordinals are a form of attack on bitcoin. But frankly, my perception is ideological attacks are more dangerous than this.
I run a node, but you're right I don't think about these kind of network attacks as much as yourself or Luke. And I sleep better at night knowing you guys worry about this.
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I believe that to defend the network we need a more dogged mindset than this. It might be doable to store 21TB in the next 100 years, but if it turns out it's just 11TB because we've kept 10TB of gifs, jpeg and json out of the blockchain then we'd have done a much better job, because all other things being equal there would be more pleb nodes.
And Luke and me thinking about this shouldn't help you sleep better. Bitcoin is a decentralized network and thus emergent behavior from independent actors is needed for things to happen. The blocksize war would've gone differently if one guy worried about it and all the node runners had sat on the fence.
What should help you sleep better is figuring out how to run ordisrespector and do it (assuming you don't want to relay unconfirmed inscriptions), even if your individual action doesn't have a visible effect on the whole picture.
Ordisrespector distorts fee estimates on the local node, and doesnt do anything meaningful to prevent inscriptions nor the bloat to UTXO set caused by transactions in general.
Im not opposed to smaller blocks (1MB, even 512KB would be fine) to help cap but I dont yet know a way to truly reduce UTXO quantity by encouraging consolidation
It would do something meaningful if the dev team would've treated inscriptions as an exploit and released a security patch with ordisrespector turned on by default. Then it'd be just like any other standardness rule, like the 80 byte limit on OP_RETURN, or the dust limit of 546 sats. You can still get non-standard TXs mined but it doesn't happen by default, which is enough.
Individual node runners patching their nodes won't mitigate the issue by themselves, but building a modded Bitcoin Core is a good learning exercise that shows that Bitcoin Core is not a consumer product given from above, and that you can use it to show your preferences (staying within consensus).
The bogus fee estimates are the #1 criticism I get but it's not a problem in practice. Normal transactions usually dominate the fee market, and if they don't it's trivial to get a second opinion. Miners accepting non-standard TXs off-band, or Mempool's TX Acceleration service probably do more damage to fee estimates than ordisrespector.
Yeah thats a cat and mouse game where you run the risk of breaking other valid transaction signatures while doing nothing to stop other UTXO bloat and space waste caused by Bitcoin Stamps and Muun
Ordisrespector simply filters unconfirmed TXs with the OP_FALSE OP_IF sequence. There's no other use for that sequence of opcodes than embedding random bytes. And even if the developer fucks up the logic of one of these filters and discards valid transactions they can be amended without causing any long term damage.
Most of the recent UTXO bloat is due to a tidal wave of BRC-20 nonsense TXs that pay market fees to move amounts below the dust limit, like this one: https://mempool.space/tx/d5261e9d383bee5bc429ab5cffbd00fbe031fdd7dd943541f5d18adf40bc0b41
So yeah, ordisrespector as standard policy would possibly be an effective stopgap to UTXO bloat, as it's being fueled by inscriptions.
Regarding stamps, the equivalent stampdisrespector patch is already present in Bitcoin Core. You can turn it on with permitbaremultisig=0 (I do). As a "funny" trivia, Luke tried to turn it on by default back in 2014 and Mike Hearn shot him down:
That’s wrong. Mempool bidding fees are determined by the margin and not by absolute. Non-inscription transaction are bidding more for compensation than transaction with inscriptions.
By the way, how could you even know that since you are not enforcing #ordirespector?
One of my nodes runs ordisrespector. The others do the inverse, disconnecting nodes that are ordisrespector.
Then you are distorting your fee monitoring yourself.
Possibly. Every node has a different mempool. How does yours compare.
Yes..the fees are affected there
How does your node test for that?
Fair points.
Talking about storage just means you don't understand this issue AT ALL🤡
Then help me understand
It's not been my intention to minimize the attack. I see that perhaps I have / it's been taken that way.
Is the main issue/threat as you see it then, failed synchronization and re-synchronization of nodes, esp. with low bandwidth connections? Or am I missing the mark?
Tbh, I've watched this before when learning about the blocksize war... Rewatching it doesn't make me think I won't be able to run a node or wouldn't want to do it in 50 years.
I think the biggest obstacle in running a node will always be the learning. If somebody can give me a practical reason why I won't be able to, or why bitcoin will stop working - and I'm living in very suboptimal circumstances in a western country - I'll start to worry about this myself.
As far as I can tell, and without having experienced any economic benefit of holding bitcoin yet, nothing is stopping me from running a node for the next 100 years in my current circumstances.
I don’t worry about myself either I have a server totally allocated to bitcoin with 32 gb of ram and a 2TB ssd (I can literally put the UTXOs set in my ram) I’m especially worried about small nodes like raspberry pi 4.
I also asked myself the question how far a raspberry can go, whether at the IDB level (it takes a week at the moment) or just to stay synchronized with the network unfortunately it is always unanswered.
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/119019/utxos-set-size-for-small-node
Maybe it's even probable that pi nodes start losing sync after enough time and that's what's required for people to agree that it's a big problem and requires action to protect decentralisation. Or maybe the ordinals stupidity resolves naturally before then.
Maybe we focused on different things because somehow it made me a bit more hopeful 🤔
I never realized that assuming a constant block size the size increase of the blockchain in % is reduced every year until the rate of improvement of technology catches up. Sound like a journey through the desert and then we're good (if we don't die in the desert).
Even if Bitcoin survives to the peak, it's going to take a very long time to recover significantly
Fuck. We are in this together I guess 😅
For what it's worth I already decided that I want to run a full node until I croak, and I'm committed to throw at it whatever resources it needs to run. Hope it's enough!
Terrifying, if bitcoin fails a too large part of my savings will leave with it, as well as my hope to one day see a hard money. 🫠
We’ll get there! (I say this clearly to reassure myself)