Ordinals and other “inscriptions” are no longer popular. Popular vindictiveness is palpable.
Ordinal, the resurrection of counterparty
Ordinals are essentially jpegs housed inside bitcoin transactions. This is the latest technique for inserting arbitrary data into the blockchain. The ordinals are in fact an almost identical remake of “counterparty”.
As a reminder, a bitcoin transaction is actually a “script”. That is to say a small piece of code that mathematically locks an amount of bitcoin (a number) to a public key. Knowing that a bitcoin address is nothing more than a public key encoding.
A transaction also includes “signatures” made using private keys. These allow bitcoins to be unlocked to link them to another public key (aka carry out a transaction).
During a transaction, nodes use logical cogs called “opcodes” to check if everything is in order.
Counterparty used the OP_CHECKMULTISIG opcode to include arbitrary data. This opcode is used to verify the signature of a P2SH (pay to script hash) multisignature transaction. here is a example transaction from Counterparty dating from July 2014 (source: Bitmex blog).
The transaction returns the bitcoins to the original address and creates three additional utxos including data related to the Counterparty protocol. The use of OP_CHECKMULTISIG can be considered a bug since this was not its intended use.
After much debate, we created the OP_RETURN opcode to house this arbitrary data. This opcode makes the utxos hosting them “Provably Unspendable/Prunable”.
In other words, the few sats used in these utxos are sacrificed because they are “non-spendable”. The advantage is that the utxo can be pruned (prunable) by the nodes, which prevents them from being cluttered with data foreign to the bitcoin protocol.
Slow Erosion of Bitcoin Decentralization
The ordinals use the opcodes OP_FALSE and OP_IF instead of using OP_RETURN. The result is worse since they aim to fit an entire jpeg into the transaction. The harmful consequence is that the average block size has almost doubled, going from 1 vMB to 1.7 vMB.
The size of the blockchain increased by 20% in 2023 alone. It now weighs almost 560 GB. While it grew on average by 55 GB per year in recent years, it was 93 GB in 2023, mainly because ordinals.
This accelerated growth caused by spamming ordinals erodes bitcoin’s decentralization due to the increased time required to set up a node. It currently takes between two days and three weeks to download the blockchain.
However, we do not know how bandwidth will evolve in the future. We hear politicians pleading for rationing of 3 GB per week. It would then take 1,300 days to install a node…
Another problem: the STAMP protocol. These inscriptions are less voluminous than the ordinals. But just as toxic in that they make the utxo set grow. But the latter obviously cannot be pruned by the nodes.
It took 14 years for bitcoin to reach around 80 million UTXOs and less than a year to double this figure due to registrations. We went from an average of 7 million to 80 million additional utxos per year.
More than juicy scams, these registrations are a DoS attack which is also financed by the naive who will buy these “Bitcoin NFTs” and other on-chain shitcoins. Among the profiteers are the owners of Bitcoin Magazine.
The discontent spreads across
Bitcoin Magazine CEO David Bailey was recently humiliated by artist MADEX:
As a joke, MADEX responded to David Bailey’s interest in one of his works with strong irony:
“The original work is sold, but don’t worry, the value is in the jpeg file. I’ll send it to you by email for 1 BTC. »
Sensing the right buzz, David Bailey agreed. The response in French from MADEX was crisp:
“Thank you very much for the offer. I’m not taking offense or being angry, but it’s obvious that you don’t know me if you think I might be tempted to participate in one of your schemes. A BTC would certainly be very useful to me, but at what price? I won’t let you proclaim everywhere that you have a MADEX ordinal. I will not offer you the right to believe that you hold a piece of my soul. […] You’re not doing this because you want to immortalize MADEX on the timechain, you’re doing this to try to scam people with a ponzi. »
More and more personalities are dissociating themselves from the fashion of inscriptions. After a time of hesitation and hesitation out of respect for the uncensorable nature of bitcoin, the voices of reason are multiplying. It was recently the turn of Peter McCormack to forge consensus on X:
“I want bitcoin to do three things:
- Send bitcoins.
- Receive bitcoins.
- Store bitcoins.
Personally, I’m only interested in what allows bitcoin to do these three things as quickly as possible, in the safest way, while maintaining maximum decentralization.
[…] Today we are degrading the bitcoin system for non-monetary uses. »
Wise words. Unfortunately, the young and inexperienced maintainers of Bitcoin Core still refuse to send a strong message by updating the “filters” of the Bitcoin network.
Bitcoin Core’s complicit inaction
It is possible to filter registrations and stop what is nothing more and nothing less than a DoS attack. The argument that transaction fees are the only filter we need doesn’t hold water.
The inscriptions are backed by ponzis like the shitcoin BRC-20 ORDI. And as with any ponzi organized with the persuasive power of a media such as Bitcoin Magazine, it is not the instigators who lose money.
Bitcoin Core should send a strong message by updating the filters. This is what Luke Dash recommends:
“It has always been possible to exceed the limits established by the protocol (‘consensus rule’). If the script is too large, it does not execute, but the data remains in the blockchain. Spam filters have always been applied as a ‘policy rule’, and this is where they belong. »
Filters prevent certain toxic transactions from being relayed by nodes into a block. The goal is to avoid certain DoS attacks. For example, Bitcoin Core does not relay transactions weighing more than 100,000 vbytes, or those paying less than 1 sat/vbyte in transaction fees.
In the absence of filters, it is easy to burden the blockchain by transforming bitcoin transactions into casino tokens. OP_RETURN is a testament to a time when any harmful use of transactions was seen as an attack.
Don’t miss our article: Bitcoin Core Devs under fire. We reveal the cowardly shenanigans of Bitcoin Core developers aimed at justifying inaction.
Maximize your Tremplin.io experience with our ‘Read to Earn’ program! For every article you read, earn points and access exclusive rewards. Sign up now and start earning benefits.
