How do multiple projects affect the Bitcoin blockchain?

I was reading a post here by @examplens earlier today and it got me thinking about revisiting the Bitcoin white paper. I wanted to see if there were any hidden gems I missed back when I first read it or if anything new has been added. The reason? All this buzz around the Bitcoin ordinals protocol, BRC-20 Tokens, Bitcoin Runes, and now stablecoins and crypto dollars making their debut on the Bitcoin Blockchain. Initially, I tried to compare the Bitcoin white paper to Ethereum's and realized there’s a huge difference in their core purposes. Satoshi focused on peer-to-peer transactions, avoiding third parties, tackling double spending, and using Proof of Work. Meanwhile, the Ethereum white paper takes a broader approach, with concepts like smart contracts and Dapps, designed to be a platform for other projects. Over time, Ethereum has seen a flood of projects, which have definitely impacted its scalability. The Bitcoin Blockchain isn't immune to this either, especially with all the Ordinals cluttering up the chain and making things messy. Bitcoin is the main player in this game, and it feels like some folks are trying to stray from what Satoshi envisioned. At this point, Bitcoin's price is sky-high (around $67.6K), so we really shouldn't be treating the Blockchain like a playground for random projects.

Here's my short thoughts, 1. Blockchain size and total UTXO keep growing at rapid pace. 2. Depends on the project, but IMO many of example you mentioned have more negative impact. 3. Unless you can convince Bitcoin dev/community to make transaction created by those project as non-standard or invalid, probably no.

Well, you will see just more congested mempool. And then, users will switch into other chains or coins (or even transact with fiat currencies), which on the other hand will decrease this load, and the whole cycle will constantly repeat. It is self-regulating mechanism, just like the mining difficulty. It depends. There are some projects with some positive impact, for example sidechains like RSK. Because then, you can experiment with new features, without affecting the main chain. But obviously, there are also other projects with negative impact, for example Ordinals (it is all about data pushing, and the whole "ownership" of satoshis is more or less random, because creators didn't think about things like "signatures" or "sighashes", to do it properly). Of course, you can talk with some people, and try to convince them, that some idea is bad, or should be done differently. But many times, people don't listen, and they have to make some mistakes, to see in practice, why their idea is bad. For example, I told them in 2022, that zero satoshis could lead to some problems: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-February/019985.html https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-February/019986.html And here is what happened in 2023: https://github.com/supertestnet/breaker-of-jpegs

I do not consider Bitcoin NFTs and other parasitic "business" schemes as "on the Bitcoin Blockchain". They are a separate thing, which utilizes the Bitcoin Blockchain. But they are not an intrinsic, irremovable part of it, like the ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain, for example.

1. More spam tokens invading the Bitcoin network then it results in the surge in TX fees and by this time we had already been aware of it for over a year and they are not really part of Bitcoin but just found the loophole to use the Bitcoin's popularity to sell their tokens for lump amount. 2. Bitcoin gains nothing from it but leaves the users who transact BTC to pay higher fee than they are supposed to be. 3. Here truly decentralization comes into play, no one can decide what they allow or not to do with the bitcoin network.

To be clear the main problem is not that these things are "junk", the problem is that they are abusing Bitcoin by exploiting it. You see Bitcoin is not a cloud storage as you already figured out. It is a payment system. So it should not be used to store arbitrary data (which Ordinals and its alternatives are) and that's causing a problem. The price is also irrelevant here in my opinion. In this context Ethereum was created as a token creation platform and should be used. Ordinals if created on Ethereum can be an actual token instead of arbitrary data injected into transactions by using an exploit. It depends on what "projects" mean. Stuff like Ordinals are not projects added to the blockchain, they are arbitrary data (or a spam attack). And like any attack they have a negative impact on Bitcoin. The more severe the attack, the worse the consequences will be. 3. There is. The way is to patch the exploits so that such malicious "projects" can not abuse it to spam attack the blockchain.