Having an enlightening conversation on twitter. Would love to hear what the nostr plebs think. 
Discussion
How can a valid transaction be valid if they're using an known exploit to circumvent paying 3/4 of the fees for the block space they use?
How can an invalid transaction be included into a block?
Does this mean you think Bitcoin’s economic incentive structure is fundamentally broken?
No. I think all vulnerabilities should be fixed. If a method was discovered to save on 3/4 of the fees needed for a user's transaction, wouldn't you want that fixed? Those people would be essentially stealing from miner's economic incentives right now. Pretend this has nothing to do with Inscriptions. I'd want this fixed ASAP so that a small group of people weren't able to cheat the system. I thought Bitcoin was supposed to level the playing field? If Inscriptiona paid the same fees as financial transactions for the block space that they're using then I'd have zero issues.
This seems like the most logical response. When exploits are discovered, they get corrected. It doesn't mean the entire system is fundamentally broken. Exploits have been discovered and corrected in the protocol many times over the years. Why is this one so different?
Who defines this an exploit?
I have been pretty agnostic to ordinals. But if they are in fact paying 1/4 of the price for the block space they take compared to other transactions, it seems like an issue.
So they got that because of segwit. Was segwit worth it? It also gave us lightning among other improvements? How do you feel about future softforks?
What known exploit is that?
Yeah, multiple framings exist. What relative importance do you place on the monetary use case vs other use cases for the timechain?
I don’t give a shit about subjective perspectives on importance of certain types of transactions.
That is the point. One perspective focuses on objective reality, valid and non valid transactions while the other focuses on subjective importance.
My perspective is that the system is sound and works therefore I don’t spend time thinking about how to fix the system’s ability to sift out “wrong or unimportant” transactions.
Sure, and one can argue that they aren’t in conflict, but I meant to ask what’s your estimate of the relative importance?
I think that fees prevent spam at scale.
So it sounds like you agree that the monetary role is much more important than the other roles, but you’re arguing that the cost borne by the intended users by these new users is less than the cost that would be borne by everyone if we make the “bug fix”. Why do you make this argument?
I believe that monetary use cases are the most economically dense.
Does this mean you think Bitcoin’s economic incentive structure as it is today is fundamentally broken?
do you hold any inscriptions, rare sats, ordinals, or other non-traditional utxos, and how might that may be influencing your perspective?
I don't think of ordinals as spam, they are a bug and not how Bitcoin software was intended to work. And there's a difference between how something works and how it's used.
Use Bitcoin however you want to make transactions. But putting a picture on it isn't making a transaction, it's uploading arbitrary data, and paying less for blockspace through an exploit.
More money for the miners! To them they are a gift. Making more coin than ever.
If Bitcoin is useful, this happens anyway. If it only survives by putting dick pics on it, then Bitcoin should fail.
What about putting wiki leaks on the blocks? Is that not a waste of space as well?
Yes that is a retarded waste. We have torrents and nostr. Bitcoin is money, not storage for your blog
Until it's uneconomical to do so people will keep putting extra things in blocks. I'm really indifferent about the topic and I think it's goofy to get concerned about. What if I wanted to just send thousands of transactions until I ran out of btc? Spam the chain for no reason. Am I not only hurting myself?
Many Bitcoiner’s become deranged because they have miss set expectations for Bitcoin. When Bitcoin’s reality moves away from their vision they become deranged as they try to cope. Sad but this is what I am trying to call out.
The ordinals people are essentially betting that whatever sats they spend inscribing they will get back and more when people want to buy their monkey Jpgs.
I don't think seeing bitcoin as money is deranged. And I don't think the devs or the community intended for pictures to be uploaded directly into blocks.
Using Bitcoin to buy NFTs is very different than putting NFTs directly on chain.
If anything it's sad after 14 years we don't know if we're money or cloud storage!
Love you tho ♥️🙏
Throwing this out, would it be possible to charge based on an exponential curve for bytes used? Encourage miners to charge on a exponential curve, making very large things like inscriptions prohibitively expensive while keeping small transactions cheap.
Miners don't charge, fees are added to transactions from the sender. Sender attached a big fee; transaction goes through faster. Think of the Mempool as a big queue where people are bidding (attaching transaction fees) to get to the front.
Fees prevent spam at scale. If it’s valid and economically possible we should assume people will do it.
I believe nostr:npub12rv5lskctqxxs2c8rf2zlzc7xx3qpvzs3w4etgemauy9thegr43sf485vg said this "arbitrary data upload" thing is not a solvable one. People will always find ways to upload dumb shit into Bitcoin. If they pay a fee idk what the issue is
I think the original framing is good.
I’ve yet to understand why ordinals are an existential threat to bitcoin— seems like they just cause higher fees and make nodes more expensive to run due to size, which lowers decentralization.
If we got rid of ordinals and higher fees / higher node storage are an existential threat then what is the plan when adoption goes up? Is adoption then also an existential threat to bitcoin?
What’s happening is people confuse today with what they think bitcoin will look like in the future.
Truth is non monetary use cases will be priced out. But they aren’t yet.
This creates a narrative that ordinals are “paying for bitcoin security” and gives Carte Blanche to degens who skipped all the ETH fun.
Bitcoin wasn’t designed to store images.
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tl;dr below
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It wasn't designed to stop people from storing images, but I doubt Satoshi had monkey pictures or png wizards in mind when he/she/they were working to fight government bail outs.
The question is whether the design needs to be changed and what changing it would mean to the purpose of bitcoin. Would prohibiting ordinals stop bitcoin from being sound money or the most secure computer network on earth? Would it prevent bitcoin from being fungible, transportable, divisible, etc?
What would the impact on ordinals be if they were prohibited? Would it prevent them from being created in other ways? Would it mean that miners won't eventually make more money from rising fees as the blockchain becomes more adopted anyway? Would prohibiting ordinal inscriptions actually be censorship as some say it would be, or would it just be putting things in their proper place?
Ordinals may be technically permissible, but just because something is permissible doesn't mean that it's beneficial. A house can be used by hoarders to hoard a bunch of unnecessary things, but is that the best use of the house? Or to put the analogy into a more relatable context, would people be OK with hoarders storing their things in the middle of the highway, forcing others to have to swerve around them? Hoarders have a right to use the highway just as anyone else does, but how are they using it?
Various changes that the bitcoin network has undergone over the years have had their detractors, but have the changes that have been made over the years to the network stopped bitcoin from being bitcoin? Would prohibiting ordinal inscriptions stop bitcoin from being immutable money? If so, how? If not then what is the issue with having a restriction on them? What is it stopping them from being other than stopping them from being a nuisance/obstruction?
Free speech is not free. You can't yell fire in a crowded theater just because you have the permissionless ability to push words out of your mouth. I'm sure at some point you could, but they enacted a rule against that for a reason. They prevented the block size from increasing for a reason.
People being ok with ordinals being on the network just seems to me like people being ok with a kid not cleaning up their room when their room is in the middle of the road. The answer isn't necessarily to get them to clean up their room (as great as that would be for them) but more so to move their room out of the highway (great for everyone else).
I don’t know that ordinals/nfts/etc don't have a place or utility in this world... this is open source software, after all... but I think they need their own space. You can't take a shower in a parakeet cage, you can't go swimming in a baseball glove, you can't rollerskate in a buffalo herd, and maybe you can't inscribe a wizard png in an international monetary ledger.
/my2sats
tl;dr
Would prohibiting ordinal use on the network change bitcoin in any demonstrablely fundamental way or not? Would bitcoin not be bitcoin without ordinals? Would ordinals not be ordinals without bitcoin? Which is necessary and which is not?
Ordinals/NFTs may or may not have a place or utility in this world but maybe they need their own space (i.e. layer 2 or 3?)
But any insight on where I might be wrong in any of that^ would be helpful.
For me, if it hinders Bitcoin transfers in any way, fees, mem pool jams, block sizes, etc. it shouldn’t be done. I think the community will decide if it’s currently a bug or not.
If there was a way to properly add ordinals/images that everyone agreed on, let’s say a new bip or core upgrade, sure, but currently it seems they are going through a back door that is questionable and degrading Bitcoin’s true purpose.
Bless your heart.
Organics arguing over how to use Bitcoin, yet none of them bothers to ask: "What does Bitcoin want?"
Maybe Bitcoin wants to be a giant file server, maybe Bitcoin wants 2kb blocks consisting of only Bible quotes, why don't try asking Bitcoin for once?
Yes - I think that this characterises the situation well.
It's not about whether you think JPEGs on the timechain are a good use of blockspace.
It's whether you think Bitcoins current incentives are adequate for permissionless, censorship resistant money.
I find it ironic that this shit was enabled by the unintended consequences of the tap root soft fork. That people are now advocating for more changes to "fix” these changes. She swallowed the spider to catch the fly...
I trust that Bitcoin's incentives will fix this high time preference behaviour, with time.
Agree.
Generally agree with your characterization.
Enter Faction #3 - thinks monke pic is highly regarded, but that Bitcoin’s incentive structures will eventually price this out. More likely, the degens will move onto something new and shiny long before any code changes to “prevent” monke pic are proposed and reviewed.