So, Leonidas, one of the devs behind Ordinals, mentioned that if Bitcoin developers decide to censor Ordinals transactions, they might just create their own open-source fork of Bitcoin Core.
I really think that if it comes to that, a lot of miners would back them up. Ordinals and BRC20 could definitely stick around. They’ve claimed that they bring in revenue for Bitcoin miners who are keeping the network secure.
What’s your take on this? Personally, I can’t see how Ordinals could be completely wiped out, even if some Bitcoin devs want to push for that.
"Core devs censoring" isn't really a thing. Bitcoin Core doesn't decide what gets mined. Core ships policy for relay and mempools (what your node forwards) and consensus rules (what makes a block valid). Ordinals/BRC-20 inscriptions are just valid Taproot transactions that put data in the witness. As long as they're valid under the consensus rules, any miner can include them and every node must accept the block.
Changing that would require a broad, contentious consensus change. To truly "eradicate" inscriptions you'd need to change consensus (e.g., outlaw some forms of witness data or change the weight formula). That's a soft-fork at least, with high risk of breaking legitimate uses and little chance of widespread agreement. Node-relay policy can be tightened (some PRs try to make data-carrying patterns non-standard), but policy is not a ban--users can still broadcast to their own node or directly to miners.
Miners don't adopt or reject transactions because devs say so; they include what maximizes revenue subject to validity. If inscriptions pay more than alternatives, many miners will keep including them. If the market stops paying for them, they disappear without any "ban."
A fork is just an altcoin pretty much. If an inscriptions-focused group or a censorship-focused group forked Bitcoin Core to change the rules, they've made a new chain. Miners will mine whichever chain is more profitable and users value. That doesn't "force" Bitcoin to change.
-- Can they be eradicated?
Practically: no--not without a major consensus change that the ecosystem would have to agree on. Relay policy can raise friction; fees can price them out; but determined users will still get them mined if they pay.
So the realistic outcome is economic, not political: the fee market decides. If Ordinals/BRC-20 users are willing to pay, miners will accept them; if not, they fade away. Core devs can tweak relay policy for network health, but they can't, by themselves, "censor" valid transactions.
Of course they will. It was unclear during the first months, but now, enough time passed, so that everyone can see: nothing will be changed. Some people may want to censor them in that way or another, but eventually, all of their transactions will be confirmed, as long as enough fees are paid. Which means, that the mainchain will be turned into a spamchain, where everyone will include all non-payment things, and treat it as a P2P cloud storage. This is where the mainchain is going, and that won't be changed, because people didn't stop it during early stages, so nobody will do that now.
Of course. And they also started bloating the UTXO set, which means, that there is more and more disk space needed, to run a pruned node. In the extreme case, the size of the chain can be comparable to the size of the UTXO set. Fortunately, we are far from that, but now, everyone can see, how to spam the chain. So, that kind of things can be done: blocks can be filled with a lot of outputs, sending zero satoshis to the UTXO set, or a lot of non-consensus data in the witness space, behind OP_RETURN, or anywhere else.
And of course, when there are less payments, than needed to fill a block, it costs nothing for miners to spam the chain, so some mining pools may start doing that in the future. Then, blocks will never be empty again, because unused space can be always filled with non-payments, for no additional cost (and then, non-mining nodes will pay for all of that).
I think if someone wants to focus on payments, then processing everything, what is happening on the mainchain, will no longer be profitable. And then, spammers should be left, where they are. Those, who are focused on payments, can start building subnetworks, where rules will be more strict, and where only payments will be allowed. Everyone is free to use the original spammed chain. If it will be too costly, to send anything from the official node, then people will switch to these subnetworks. As long as the current level of spam is not kicking nodes out of the network, nobody will care.
I think they can be blocked from some subnetworks, while being allowed on the main network. Nobody can stop miners from confirming spammy transactions on-chain. But nobody can also force nodes to use the official software, and process spammy transactions in the first place. Which means, that there will be a place for both, at the same time, and users will join the network they want. If spammers will want to turn mainchain BTC into BSV, then they will. If miners will want to activate 1 TB witness per block, through some soft-fork, then they will. Segwit told everyone, how to increase the size of the block, if some users will decide to make it unlimited, then it will be done. And then, it will be up to the users, if they will still want to use the official software, or not.
I guess next limits will be lifted, one by one. Then, developers will be responsible for nothing, and everyone will be able to deploy absolutely everything. And then, there will be a lot of spam, while some people, caring about payments, will form their own subnetworks, when they will focus only on transacting, and ignore the rest of the traffic (because you cannot force old nodes, to validate all new rules, which spammers would want to introduce in the future, even if they will have hashrate majority on their side).
Edit: There is no need to make any "fork", if you want to process only a subset of the mainnet traffic. The same chain can be used, and the heaviest chain of the Proof of Work headers can be always followed.
For "inscriptions-focused group", they can increase the size of the block, just like Segwit did, by making yet another soft-fork, where blocks would optionally commit to data, in additional space, processed only by new nodes.
For "censorship-focused group", they can process the subset of the mainchain traffic, and ignore the rest. They don't have to process or store any transactions, that they don't want to. They only need a minimal setup, to make sure, that blocks are valid, and if one node can make a proof, that some data between offset X and Y is valid, then the rest of the nodes can accept the proof, validate it, and move on.
Nobody knows, what is the exact code, which is running behind some node. People can only check the end results. And as long, as other nodes are working on the same block headers, they can store nothing behind them, if they want to. One group of nodes can mine soft-forked blocks with 1 TB per block. Another group of nodes can mine empty blocks, with only coinbase transactions. They can live on the same chain of block headers, as long as they all agree, that a given chain of Proof of Work headers is the strongest one.
They can write the code, which will optionally process the subset of mainchain transactions. But as long as the whole spam can be handled by all node operators, nobody cares, and nobody would care.
Source to their statement would be great, since censorship could mean many things.
They will stay. Until this day, AFAIK many developer don't even agree to make OP_FALSE OP_IF ... OP_ENDIF as non-standard script, when the script would never executed. In addition, no monetary/financial transaction would ever need to use such script.
It's also to worth that the UTXO growth force you to use bigger RAM capacity or use fast SSD (to read/write UTXO change quickly).
This is the original post on twitter
https://x.com/LeonidasNFT/status/1964225563725291732?t=tQBdTCaD_CV-tWzbnpD4JQ&s=19
The censorship here is purposely trying to limit their usecase of Bitcoin.
Sadly can't really deny that but the issue is if the trade off is worth it.
It is unlikely. Check out the fees, it is clear that the Ordinals Attack is no longer a thing. They have not been able to congest the mempool enough to raise the fees with their spam attack. So there wouldn't be any kind of incentive for a miner to switch to a copycatcoin (which is what it would be if they forked bitcoin, something like bcash, bgold, bsilver,...). Even when the attack began and the spam was at maximum the incentive to switch to such a fork was not enough.
Not to mention that at the end of the day what is being referred to as BRC20 is NOT part of Bitcoin protocol so if they create a shitfork where the only purpose is to allow these "arbitrary data" to be injected into the chain, they would be competing with actual token creation platforms such as Ethereum. In other words such a fork would be dead before it begins because the only reason why gullible newbies even considered this garbage when it came out was because it was using the bitcoin chain and bitcoin name to advertise it self even though this was never a token!
The correct term is "prevent abusing an exploit" not "censor" and I don't think anybody is trying to do it...
Thank you, i'll quote it so everyone can see his statement.
I have thoughts about his statement.
1. It seems making OP_FALSE OP_IF ... OP_ENDIF as non-standard also considered as censorship to them.
2. Runes use OP_RETURN and IIRC Bitcoin Core 30.0 will loosen OP_RETURN usage, so it's weird this tweet talk as if there's plan to "censor" runes.
3. Each Bitcoin nodes broadcast all transaction on their mempool, so i don't see anything special with those "twenty Bitcoin startups that operate economically relevant nodes".
4. It's weird he mention monetary transaction regarding censorship, but later doesn't mention plan to defend monetary transaction.
LAUGHABLE.
Does everyone actually believe that a group of dick pics and fart sounds users would win in a fork war against the Core Developers? Will the economic majority actually believe that Leonidas' group be the better stewards of the Bitcoin network? Will the miners actually risk everything and support to fork the network away from the Core Developers? Will the exchanges list Ordinals-BTC as the "real BTC"?
LAUGHABLE.
Leonidas was definitely shilling his "DOG" shitcoin in his post.
LAUGHABLE.
I have been familiar with the Leonidas guy for a few years now and while he is very articulate and knows how to get people inspired, he's an absolutely unprincipled grifter -- he is here to max extract on the back of Bitcoin through lies and grandiose promises, and for no other reason.
He knows the hype around ordinals and BRC-20 is dying, that's why he made this statement about wanting to fork. However, he will never actually do this as the prestige of the dogshit he peddles rests entirely on the fact that it is on Bitcoin, and not some altcoin chain.
Of course I'd be happy if he fucked off to his own chain & took that part of the scammer culture with him, but unfortunately that's not going to happen, regardless of what he says.
In all the spam attacks that Bitcoin endured over the past decade, the attackers usually try to pretend what they are doing is not a malicious attack. For example in one of the largest early years attacks they called it a "Stress Test" when they flooded the mempool with garbage transactions creating one of the first large congestions in history.
The Ordinals Attack has been the same. They have sold their attack as being a "good thing", for example here they are calling injecting an arbitrary data into the chain as "using BTC as money"! Whereas they are clearly using BTC as cloud storage not a payment system.
So in their lies, preventing abuse and fixing an exploit becomes "censorship".
And as I've always said, we have been preventing such abusive transactions for as long as Bitcoin existed. For example for a long time you could use the dummy item in a OP_CHECKMULTISIG of P2SH script to inject an arbitrary size data to the chain and we've been preventing that abuse through standard rules and nobody ever called it "censorship" because nobody was using it to spam attack the chain.
He can do whatever he wants from Bitcoin source code and fork it but he must do enough research about past Bitcoin forks that mostly have died since 2017 fork wave.
Ordinals gained attention, capital flow and got success for their project because their project parasites on Bitcoin blockchain. If it migrates from Bitcoin blockchain from a so called Ordinal Bitcoin-forked blockchain, this project will die sooner than how the Ordinals founder thought.
He can try but if Ordinals project fails and dies, he does not lose anything and can launch another shitcoin project in the future.
How Many Bitcoin Forks Are There? You will be surprised!!!
I know you will never agree with me on this but I still think its disingenuous to say Ordinals is a "malicious attack." Malice, in this instance, suggests setting out with the specific intention of harming the host chain, which is not the motive of those seeking to capitalize on the Ordinals/Runes phenomenon. Harming the chain (with the term "harm" being highly subjective) is just a byproduct of their ecosystem.
Sure, many Ordinals people set out to make the most money possible through any means necessary while not giving a shit about blockchain bloat, fees, network health, etc., but the goal was profit and not harming BTC.
To the more fair-minded Ordinals enjoooyers, they recognize the vitality of Bitcoin is inherent to the overall success of their "investments," so it would go against their financial interests to actively want to "harm" bitcoin.
What's the extent of the supposed "harm" being done, anyway? Sure, it was a pain in the ass when Ordinals transactions clogged the mempool for weeks or even months on end. But as was expected, most Ordinals collections were not built with the long term in mind -- they were built to make as much money as possible and them scram, and thus people have forgotten about them. So the sheen of Ordinals being the "new thing" has worn off and thus it poses only a fraction of the problem to bitcoin it once did.
TL;DR - Ordinals was not an "attack on Bitcoin"; it was simply a brilliant narrative capitalized on by shameless influencers. Now the narrative is old and degens have moved on to the next thing.
Plus read his post, https://x.com/LeonidasNFT/status/1964225563725291732?t=tQBdTCaD_CV-tWzbnpD4JQ&s=19
"DOG Army"? LAUGHABLE SHITCOINERS.
He's obviously clout-chasing and virtue-signaling. We might be plebs, but we definitely know which people/individuals to listen to, AND DON'T listen to, within the Bitcoin community.
Yeah I did read it, which is what made me come to the conclusion that he's just totally full of shit. He was already full of shit, but what I mean is, he will never ever do this, because its Bitcoin that gives his assets any value at all. I do not think "Leonidas Chain" would have much success in the future. He's just creating hoopla for the sake of engagement.
Agreed. The guy just says anything; he is incapable of experiencing shame, empathy or remorse.
In first place, i doubt he actually have enough resource or technical skill to perform fork and maintain it.
IMO clogged mempool for months and force Bitcoiner to pay very high fee for their monetary transaction is serious harm towards Bitcoin usability. I still remember paid $3 for TX fee and a week later the TX fee recommendation have raised to $10.
He is just bluffing, that statement came as a response to Luke tweets and some other knots supporters trying to silence the Bitcoin core release. Leonidas knows fully well that regardless of their fight, opinion and judgment, decentralization and censorship resistance comes before anything. He is hiding behind the community power to feel relevance, more like a child looking for trouble when he knows his mum is going to support him. Even the knot at policy level isn't growing as many expected. Beside, one can use knot and decide not to filter any transaction and feels the vibe of running core.
The ordinals market feels like a ghost town where nobody leaves, the volume isn't lively, sooner or later this fight will soon fade off. As for spammers, they will get tired eventually after exhausting all their Bitcoin trying to pay for what cannot be spend later in the future.
?
By Bitcoin's technical design, high fees will tend to happen in the Bitcoin network. Whether it was caused by financial transactions or dick pics/fart sounds, calling it "harmful" is obviously an argument that's "taking out of context". Because it's not "harmful", it's simply how the network works because of the way it was designed. Who said decentralization will be cheap? The cost has to go somewhere, to be paid by "someone" because running the network will never be free.
Perhaps the right word to use is, "annoying"?
It was harmful to businesses that rely (relied) on cheap or at least consistent fees, and high fees are harmful to Bitcoin's competitiveness as a currency. Yes, obviously people are still using Bitcoin, otherwise fees would be low, and no harm is caused to the network itself. However, yes high fees are extremely annoying to those attempting to use BTC as a currency.
It may have been inconvenient to businesses and some users during those times of network congestion, which is both a positive and a negative - a conversation for another topic, but for what Bitcoin actually is, to say it was "harmful" to usability would mean we should hard fork to bigger blocks? I believe that would be more harmful to the Bitcoin network itself.
Perhaps the community should start to adopt a second-layer protocol built on top of Bitcoin like, RGB? I believe a stablecoin will deploy in RGB.