I just hate *why* the fees are where they are, not that they have gotten here. Instead, a bunch of fucking shitcoin trash is pricing out legitimate, monetary use case and payments.
Discussion
Never a dull moment.
In the other hand it forces us to think of solutions right now and not when they are actually needed. This nonsense will stop eventually. The issue will occur again though.
For how long I wonder?
Can someone explain to me both, why it’s happening from a technical standpoint and economic standpoint? I’m very much lacking in transactional knowledge.
I understand fees with be this high on main chain when more people around the world are using it but this seems sudden. And I’m curious.
#[4] #[5]
I listened to your podcast Guy, and I understand your perspective, but I’m in the camp that a valid Bitcoin transaction is a valid Bitcoin transaction. If people want to make transactions which seem silly to us non-shitcoiners, that is well within their right. And it’s probably a great net benefit for security and scaling.
well said. the bitcoin network decides what a valid or invalid transaction is by verifying it follows consensus rules.
it’s as simple as that.
Agree. We don't like people telling us that bitcoin is a waste of energy, yet we look down our noses at use cases for bitcoin we don't like? All value is subjective. It is okay not to like it. But, be careful on where this hate and fear takes you.
Well said. I have no clue on how to use or why ordinals matter. I only use for regular UTXO spending. And it’s fine, free, open network working properly
It's not fear. It's about the fact that #Bitcoin has a very clear purpose and its not for maintaining a permanent record of others people's garbage. Just because the park happens to be a place that people can dump their trash if it starts to overfill their living rooms, doesn't mean it's good for the park because they are willing to pay a fee to do so. It is exactly at odds with what the park does and why it was created in the first place.
This isn't some sort of #Bitcoin killing issue, but it absolutely is a concern regarding the tragedy of the commons. Do not mistake #Bitcoin as some divine or perfect thing where as long as things play by the rules then its all by default something we cannot question. This would be to reject the idea that Bitcoin has a purpose, and our responsibility as its stewards.
@note1lke78ehle27kccj2au5tgprmazvw0gvq7ecntmn8k8kakf5t2fjsxnmn8u
If you want to make things you don't like (like littering in the park) illegal, propose it. All good.
BTW, what is up with your claim that you have read more about bitcoin than anyone. I don't get it. A joke, or attempting to establish credibilty?
Park/trash analogy is apt. Stealing it.
Exactly. The network is working as it was designed to work. Ppl can be upset, but this the free market idea: base premise is set, and as long as it is a valid transaction, all good.
It's not about whether it's "in their right" or not. The content of the chain is not arbitrary or something that is divine as long as its natural and pays a fee. Ultimately this is software and an open, adversarial network that needs to be robust. DoS and spam are the ultimate issue of all open networks.
If someone figured out a way to make 1,000,000 unspendable UTXOs in a single transaction or just a handful of blocks are were happily willing to pay those fees while creating a huge, immediate jump in the amount of RAM every node had to have to stay in sync, despite not a single one of them having any monetary use or relation whatsoever, would you consider that "valid" and perfectly fine? If you did, then I would argue that you and I disagree on both the purpose and engineering concerns of the network.
Bitcoin is like a giant, trustless clock, that has no alternative. To stamp a bunch of bullshit images and shitcoins into it is like grabbing a precious time keeping device and using it to hammer a nail. Its dumb, doesn't even work very well, and is directly at odds with why the device is so valuable in the first place. This is *not* about who is willing to pay a fee, this is about the purpose of the network and whether the bloat of data is at odds with the very fundamental value that #Bitcoin provides. This is about the tragedy of the commons putting costs on those who maintain the network, by people who don't even give a shit about the value that the network provides.
Guy, maybe I need to spend more time on the technical side of things to understand your argument. How is the UTXO set stored in ram? And if UTXO bloat is a problem of ram storage instead of dedicated SSD storage, then isn’t that a huge issue which needs to be solved in order to increase the number of UTXOs anyway?
It seems like your main argument is that it’s a stupid way to use Bitcoin and creates bloat, which I definitely agree with, but I’m confused about how that relates to the issues people are voicing with the fee market. And if these transactions are uniquely causing excessive ram consumption, at what point is my 4gb ram Raspberry Pi no longer going to be able to sync?
bitcoin core keeps a cache of the UTXO set in RAM for fast access.
iirc, there are 94M UTXOs currently. gonna take a hell of a lot more than 1M UTXOs to cause a spike in ram. also, the max number of outputs you could create in a block is something like 13k (back of the napkin math)
How many bytes are UTXOs? Wouldn’t 94M UTXOs @ 140 bytes each be about 1.3GB of ram?
And is there another way to store the UTXO set? How do pruned nodes manage it?
Thanks for the explanation though. I enjoy guys podcast a lot but that explanation may have slipped a bit through the cracks
the fact that people are able to mine these transactions, even if you hate them, means #bitcoin is working as intended.
There is a fair point here and I agree to the extent of the nature of transactions being unable to stop, & the open market for clearing them. But I still think it isn’t so simple, regarding the bloat in data that has nothing to do with the transactions themselves. #Bitcoin isn’t cloud storage, it’s a censorship resistant *monetary* network.
If someone was able to write, and openly paid for a transaction, that was openly mined, that had a mathematical exploit such that this single transaction took 10 minutes to compute, this would follow all of your same rules/heuristics without violation, but would be a disaster for decentralization and could turn into an ongoing attack that could have a horrible impact on the ability to run a node and potentially permanently damage the ability to sync any new nodes onto the network save fee a few major entities going forward.
Now, I’m NOT saying this hypothetical is that severe or even comparable to the current situation. In the big picture I do not think this incident is a major concern. But I simply want to point out there is a hole in your line of thinking, because we cannot extract the purpose of the network from the context of what is being confirmed. Bitcoin isn’t merely an open market, it is an engineering feat as well. And if we don’t think like engineers we end up sacrificing the system in the name of the philosophy, while failing to acknowledge their interdependence.
💯
Satoshis original message of the chancellor was essentially an ordinal.
The entire block is the canvas. Who is willing to pay the most to put their work their will get access to it.
This ordinals fad will pass.
your hypothetical are comparing apples to oranges. you keep referencing malicious transactions that would break consensus rules we have in place today. what im talking about are transactions which stay within consensus rules but are for a use case that you don’t like (fwiw, that i don’t like it either).
go back to your original post and replace “bullshit jpegs” with “terrorist non-OFAC compliant” and see if your argument changes. it doesn’t.
None of my examples broke the consensus rules.
lol both of them did. but that’s not the point.
the point is your argument is that we should be making judgements about what is a legitimate use of bitcoin OUTSIDE of the rules of consensus, to make sure people are “using bitcoin in line with its intended purpose.”
i fundamentally disagree with that.
How does a difficult to compute script, or a means of creating a boatload of unspendable UTXOs break the consensus rules? What rule is broken by either hypothetical?
Second, yes we should be making that judgement as engineers, just as everyone who worked on it has always done, or the system literally could never have worked. It’s not a judgement of “which transactions should be allowed or which people should have access,” which is the principle you seem to *want* to apply, but doesn’t. It’s about what *kind of data* is allowed, which cannot be avoided.
Again, you seem to be sacrificing the extremely unambiguous concerns of security and design of an engineered, open protocol & network, for abstract libertarian principles that cannot apply unless the system works in the first place.
You are falsely equating the conversation with censorship or specific ideas or specific people, when that isn’t what it is, anymore than the blocksize is a “censorship” of all the people who want to use Bitcoin but can’t fit their transactions in.
There are engineering realities that we can’t hand wave away with moral declarations.
I think the main issue people are having with those who are frustrated about ordinals and inscriptions shitcoining all over the “park” is that there is no legitimate solution proposed. All technologies incorporate a balance of different trade-offs, and lots of people think that we are already in a place where keeping things the same and living with the current structure is better than continuing to try and fine tune the protocol and the way data is stored on the time-chain.
I’ve spent a decent amount of time thinking about ways to disincentivize this behavior, and although I’m not very technical, I’ve come up blank. I’m open minded and am willing to listen to the proposed solutions of others, but many Bitcoiners find it dangerous to call for engineering changes when there isn’t a straightforward solution on the table as a proposal which can even be discussed.
This post I made a week ago also came to mind in relation to blocksize and how most individuals will interact with Bitcoin in the distant future:
nostr:note1mngvwgetst5jnruuq9kr4sfz35nr84lqpfteccetxvtysm8y4xfsuwxge6
Agreed
I agree with Guy on this. ☮️🧡