Still no consensus regarding the “registrations” issue. In the meantime, the decentralization of Bitcoin is decreasing day by day.
What is the problem ?
We recently wrote that the developers in charge of Bitcoin Core were (and remain) under fire. One of them finally broke the silence in the podcast What Bitcoin does by Peter McCormack
But before that, let's remember what we're talking about. Registrations are arbitrary data foreign to the bitcoin protocol. The best known are called “ordinals”. These are image files (Jpeg) that are inserted into a bitcoin transaction by passing them off as a public key.
The “theory of ordinals” is a convention also external to the bitcoin protocol. It makes it possible to maintain a conceptual map of ordinals via virtual numbering of satoshis. The goal is to keep track of the ordinals from one transaction to another (proof of ownership).
These registrations are widely criticized and readily described as scams that ruin the decentralization of the network. They must therefore also be considered as an attack.
We therefore have on the one hand the ordinals (very large Jpegs) which have the harmful consequence of increasing the size of the blockchain. Today, you need at least 600 GB of memory to run a full node.
And on the other hand the even more toxic inscriptions, the “STAMPS”, which generate phenomenal quantities of utxo. Utxos are the little pieces of code that mathematically link your bitcoins to your BTC addresses (your public keys).
The number of utxos has more than doubled since February 2023! Today there are 180 million, or 10 GB. The problem here does not come so much from the necessary memory (although…), but rather from the lengthening of the IBD (Initial Blockchain Download) time.
Bitcoin IBD
Registrations significantly increase the time required to install a node. This is what emerges very clearly from tests recently carried out by @GrassFedBitcoin :
“It took me 26 hours to download the entire blockchain until February 2023 and another 55 hours last year alone. The explosion in the number of utxos makes IBD time extremely laborious »declares the founder of the Ocean pool.
“The situation is much worse than before. That's a difference of several orders of magnitude. This is not FUD. The more we close our eyes [sur les inscriptions] and the more we accelerate the centralization of the bitcoin network. At this rate, we are on track to add over 48 hours of IBD time each year. »
In other words, in just ten years, it will take 24 days to install your node… And this, even if we take into account the improvement in the power of the Raspberry Pi which doubles every four years.
[Le Raspberry Pi est un nano-ordinateur de la taille d’un gros paquet de cigarettes qui permet d’installer Bitcoin Core pour faire tourner son nœud et ainsi participer à la décentralisation du bitcoin]
“In 2022, I could carry out the IBD in less than 48 hours with a simple Raspberry Pi 4. I now use a Raspberry Pi 5 whose processor is twice as powerful. The Pi 5 reduces processing time for the same amount of data by 50%. And despite that, the IBD took more than 82 hours instead of 48 hours! “.
These numbers are frightening. Do we really want to extend the installation of a node to several weeks? Not to mention countries where the internet connection is far from Western standards.
What does Bitcoin Core do?
The question was obviously asked to Gloria Zhao, one of the five developers with a PGP key allowing new versions of bitcoin Core to be published on Github (twice a year).
Gloria is the least experienced of the big 5 which she joined a little less than two years ago. His salary is paid by the OKCoin exchange (approximately $150,000 were allocated to him via Brink).
Gloria long insisted during her interview with Peter McCormack that he “There’s nothing she can do that isn’t entirely public.” “I recognize that I have many privileges over Githubbut there is nothing we can do that is not completely verifiable”she insisted.
Certainly, but not submitting code is just as serious as submitting malicious code. And that's where there is discord. Many are calling for filters to be updated to stem registrations. Notably Luke Dash, the second largest contributor to Bitcoin Core.
Filters are the short name given to rules preventing certain transactions from being relayed to a miner's node who will add them to a block. For example, there is the “dust limit”. A transaction will not be relayed by the nodes if the amount sent is lower than the transaction fees.
The code to prevent transactions containing ordinals from being relayed exists, but the big 5 remains passive. They seem paralyzed by Bitcoin Magazine, whose CEO manages an investment fund which invests in particular in the registration business…
One of the few excuses offered by Gloria Zhao is that we should not do anything that would go against the financial incentives of miners.
This argument is difficult to hold up if the decentralization of the network is at stake. What will happen to bitcoin once it is centralized? The financial incentive must not cause ideological blindness. You have to be rational. Engineers don't do ideology.
We are now waiting for the four other core devs to come and explain themselves. If the arguments are not convincing, you will have to start asking questions. For example on the income that an exchange like OKcoin collects from registrations and draw conclusions from it.
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