Ordinals…talk to me…
- The good?
- The bad?
- The ugly?
Making a show on this tomorrow and want to know your thoughts. Can they be stopped? Should they be stopped?
Discussion
They just are. Too early to tell IMO.
Bad, very bad.
Why? Genuinely interested, I’m not ‘in to’ NFTs but also find inscriptions pretty nonconcerning, and have some potential to be used for really cool or worthy things
They can’t. I’m not thrilled about them but if something can be done on bitcoin it will.
The general consensus I’m seeing (if there is any) is that they’re kind of annoying but not a “threat”.
If we reach the level of Bitcoin adoption where block space is truly in high demand, then serious financial transactions will quickly crowd out silly art.
before ordinals, i could reliably send sats into cold storage for 1 sat/vb but that’s looking like a thing of the past now!
I am actually stuck with a transaction that won’t ever be mined. I have no idea what to do at this point rather than wait weeks or who knows if it’ll ever happen. Limbo
You can redirect the payment and upgrade the fee i think.
😮
Use a wallet that supports CPFP and/or RBF.
Sparrow Wallet works great for this, can easily bump fee as long as there are sats in that wallet still.
Thx guys , I did not initiate the tx and it doesn’t have that fancy flag to increase the fee
Does your wallet allow coin control? If so you could try to initiate a payment and select that UTXO as one of the inputs. Set the fee high enough and it will get mined with the original low-fee transaction.
Sooner or later this is bound to happen. L1 will eventually be too expensive for that usage. Adopt LN.
Casey made a good point on Odell’s pod that people that hate inscriptions should just work on lighting. Is a payments network running at Visa and MasterCard volumes going to be able to outbid random artists and single users for block space? Yeah, really easily. So go make that happen!
If all it took to “destroy” bitcoin was a psychological numbering system, then bitcoin deserved it!!
Fat & ugly
I think they aren’t as bad as initially thought… does it make me a little uncomfortable; yea… but I’m starting to see the other side a little…
Redistribution of BTC from those with too much to know what to do with to those clever enough to dupe the former
Whoever you talk to I want to know why more people aren’t talking about bitcoin fungibility (or lack thereof) being a root symptom of “the problem”
Also would like to hear what solutions would be in order to fix any odd economic incentives introduced by taproot - not saying we should, but what does the actual implementation of a fox look like technically and socially.
I guess the latter question is about inscriptions. Ordinals at just an L2 outcome of UXTOs not being fungible.
I think ordinals stuff is just stupid but imo people should be allowed to make mistakes & face consequences.
The good: higher fees
The bad: higher fees, larger blocks
The ugly: the inscriptions
Have you seen the mempool and transaction fee floor lately? They are consuming large amounts of blockspace. In the past it was not impolitic to consider using the chain as storage to be bad. I don’t see why we should stop that tradition; maybe some people feel intellectually obligated to defend the last soft fork, even if we’ve identified an externality.
Make a distinction between ordinals and inscriptions.
Ordinals are an external mechanism provide a social valuation model. Doesn't make any sense IMO.
Inscriptions: add monkey jpegs to the blockchain. This was always possible, just got cheaper with taproot.
Ordinals - just an arbitrary scheme for agreeing on a number for each sat. Bitcoin equivalent of collecting coins or banknotes that have some significance to you, really nothing at all here for people to get upset about. Ignore if you want to, have fun with it if you want to.
Inscriptions - different thing, but *use* ordinal theory to agree on who now owns an inscribed sat if you transfer it. Inscriptions IMHO are genius and cool, and good for Bitcoin. For people that are angry, the original sins were agreeing segwit discount and taproot without fully understanding the repercussions. Max block size is 4MB, deal with it, that argument is over. Also LMAO Bitcoin accidentally has better NFTs than all the Shitcoins *and* now shitcoiners are running Bitcoin nodes. Consensus rules are the rules, not what people ‘want’ Bitcoin to be used for. This is good for Bitcoin.
Casey’s chat with Odel on Citadel Dispatch was good, important points around how Inscriptions now entangle Bitcoin with 1st Amendment free speech because inscriptions are clearly speech not money. Also potentially help with future security budget concerns and ensuring we have a healthy fee market into the future (but also inscription hype could just die out)
Think worries that Ordinal theory is a threat to fungibility are FUD - if just the suggestion of a scheme to ID sats that doesn’t require any code at all threatens fungibility, then fungibility didn’t really exist.
Existing monies like fiat and gold both have similar things, where an aureus will be worth a lot more than its gold weight because it is an aureus and those are rare and cool; and a 1900 dollar bill is worth more than a dollar for similar reasons. But a pawn shop and a hairdresser can still treat them as just bullion and just a dollar. Most sats are boring under ord theory in the same way a 2021 pound coin is boring.
well said, yeah the 1A attack vector is going to be an interesting one what with all the "objectionable" content. But, this data can be pruned from a full node, right? So not every node op will have it on the premises...
Bit of a philosophical question as to what “counts” as a full node, my feeling is generally a full node doesn’t prune and retains everything. Though yes you can avoid storing some of this stuff, but most nodes are going to have it.
The objectionable content is more of a concern for non-Americans that don’t have the benefit of a 1st amendment, and may live somewhere with shitty speech laws.
(Side note: my definition would be any node from which a new node can complete a full sync from scratch is a “full node”)
The node will have to download everything if it's verifying signatures, but it can then be deleted.
Ordinals are old news. Check out Extraordinals with LIFO and multipled by two. They are twice better!
The best way to permanently broadcast your stupidity.
First, i'd explain the difference between Ordinals and Inscription.
Semantics matters
One thing that I’m sure of is that I don’t find them very original.
Have Casey on or bust
Tick tock next block. This is what we signed up for.
High fees will incentivize lightning and more efficient use of block space.
NFTs are garbage IMHO, which is why I choose not to waste my sats on them. But bitcoin operates in a free market, I am just one opinion.
The good: hard to find any, but this does throw down the gauntlet to developers who care about “real” transactions on Bitcoin. Those use cases need to be made compelling enough for people to be willing to pay the higher fee to crowd out inscriptions
The bad: There are monke jpegs on the timechain. Need I say more?
If we make a good faith determination that there is a serious security threat to Bitcoin in the form of ddos attacks via inscription spam, a node-level or even protocol level change might be warranted. If not, any change to Bitcoin just because we don’t like monke jpegs would be censorship, IMO.
The good... everything is good for Bitcoin. I've had dozens of Ethereum and NFT people reach out to me about running nodes. They are learning about UTXOs. There are a lot of positives with this. Ethereum and Solana won't be around, nor with the web sites hosting their NFTs in a decade. Bitcoin will be around for hundreds of years. It makes sense for them to preserve their artwork on Bitcoin compared to alternatives.
The bad... it's a peer to peer electronic cash system, not a file system. It's spam. They're paying 3/4 less by using an exploit or an unintended use of the system. If they were paying the same fees as the rest of us, then I wouldn't hate it. If they were not abusing the system, then I wouldn't hate it.
The ugly... This would be me telling someone how they can use Bitcoin.
Imo eth “people” don’t deserve Bitcoin
absolutely nailed it
i love that ordinals is capable of running javascript
medium. people are using this to install worker processes in people's browsers as proof of concepts of malware.
I don’t understand ordinal integration yet, (although I’ve been inclined to believe NFTs while intriguing lack grounds for real utility) but I’m predisposed to indifference: if the BTC idea is so strong/sound, would it be so easy to extinguish it with a few monke jpgs?
I.e. if ordinals are so bad, and the answer is for individuals to willfully not integrate them into core, isn’t that like the ultimate test?
(OR: decentralization is the best of democracy; democracy is the worst of BTC; therefore democracy must inevitably its 🌋💩)
Words from a true hodler 👏🏻
I just installed the newest beta of MyNode where I can install a custom Bitcoin version named Ordisrespector v24.0.1. After that I only see a portion of the mempool and no more Ordinals on my node. 😉 I think you should talk about this option too.
Focus on secure btc network. You can filter out inscription data. https://t.co/a8Ct903o4F
Day 1 I was very concerned... Now not so much.
Jpeggers are running nodes, learning utxo control, its silly to me that jpegs brought people in.. But people coming to bitcoin is good. Even with the discounted hlockspace for segwit - financial transactions are so much smaller that increases in sat/vbyte rate are fairly easy to stomach compared to the inscriptions...
My concerns are that the economics don't play out like i expect and bids on jpegs are so high that financial transactions get pushed out.
The good: more people are learning about Bitcoin, UTXO, mempool and nodes.
The bad: Bitcoin is not a filesystem, however if a bunch of jpegs can spam and flood the chain, can you imagine what a well organised state or bad actor can do? These attacks are good for making Bitcoin more resilient.
Two things: 1) Escalating fees were always predicted as inevitable with a busier network, and in fact desired as a means of supporting miners. We aren’t going back, but that’s ok; 2) I think of inscriptions as analogous to unique coins in traditional money — coins that were minted with an aesthetic error, or are exceptionally old, or another unique feature. They are still fungible, and most people trade them without knowing or caring, but a smaller community collects them and pays sometimes large sums to own them, removing them from circulation. Occasionally even these people spend them by accident, and they are back on the market.
