Post ASM9mne35PINX6BB8y by waxwing@x0f.org
 (DIR) More posts by waxwing@x0f.org
 (DIR) Post #ASM9mne35PINX6BB8y by waxwing@x0f.org
       2023-02-02T15:53:34Z
       
       1 likes, 1 repeats
       
       Some brief thoughts on Ordinals ...I heard about this ages ago and I didn't like it at all. But not for the reason most people are complaining today!So let me first say, that complaining about block space usage is to me, nonsense. It was nonsense back when Luke et al were complaining about Satoshi Dice and it's nonsense today. The entire point of the system is to be permissionless. So, sorry, Bitcoin doesn't care if you don't want jpegs, dice rolls or bible verses on chain.(1/n)
       
 (DIR) Post #ASM9moN4O1J9mjF8Jk by waxwing@x0f.org
       2023-02-02T15:57:27Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       The market will find balance in this: block space is tremendously valuable, over time that will be seen with a lot of demand; immutable 'transcription' will be very expensive, for whatever purpose whether simple money transfer or something more complex; tradeoffs using little data on chain with slightly-less-than-100%-immutability of record off chain will probably be more common, but, again, the market will figure that out. Full blocks and backlog will cause "champaign" to be popped :)(2/n)
       
 (DIR) Post #ASM9moruXLyhKNflOC by waxwing@x0f.org
       2023-02-02T16:04:03Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       (Btw ... who remembers that only a month ago the debate was all about whether we need to add tail emission to bitcoin because of no fees and miner death spiral or something? 😆 ).Side note: no, taproot did not open a backdoor to more block size. Segwit did that, 6 years ago. A 3.7MB block was mined (with 1 tx) about a month after activation back in 2017. Taproot removed a limit on witness inside a tx (input) because of a sighashing change, it didn't change the resource limit per block.(3/n)
       
 (DIR) Post #ASM9mpZ9wYZZUVuIng by waxwing@x0f.org
       2023-02-02T16:12:54Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       So, why *I* am unhappy about the Ordinals project: it confirms in people's mind, a terrible cognitive error.If there's one thing I always have tried to get across to people in the various talks, podcasts whatever I've given over the years it's this: satoshis *do not exist*. There is no serial number attached to them; they do not exist in code. It's like asking 'where are the inches on this 15 inch stick'. Utxos exist, sats (or bitcoins), don't. Abstract? Yes, but in a sense, critical.(4/n).
       
 (DIR) Post #ASM9myzitAAWjVP8xE by waxwing@x0f.org
       2023-02-02T16:15:40Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Critical because: it's why bitcoin has what I call "intrinsic fungibility", even if it has actually really poor practical fungibility.Each utxo you receive as a payment does *not* have a fixed history tracing back to a block in which it was mined. It was created ex nihilo; its creation was only limited by permission (owner(s) of inputs authorizing) and by a consensus non-inflation rule. There *is* history but it's fuzzy - it fans out backwards (multiple inputs) in each historical tx. (5/n)
       
 (DIR) Post #ASM9n6bCcDJAJlzfqS by waxwing@x0f.org
       2023-02-02T16:19:03Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       That last fact is a direct consequence of the fact that satoshis do not have watermarks/serial numbers. Years ago an academic in the UK published a paper trying to argue for something like Ordinals - i.e. FIFO on satoshis:https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/making-bitcoin-legal.pdfSo the gist is, if you *choose* to apply an arbitrary rule (FIFO or LIFO) to a mapping from ins to outs in a tx, *then* suddenly that instrinsic fungibility is "lost", in that every utxo you receive has a precise history. (6/n)
       
 (DIR) Post #ASM9nG1Pa8cXXfKERk by waxwing@x0f.org
       2023-02-02T16:21:41Z
       
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       This is not just a *bad* idea; it's also stupid. For ordinary payments, it creates an arbitrary choice of *which* input from Alice, that paid Bob in output 1, is "the" input that paid him, and so allows a fixed tracing through history of something that is not, actually, fixed by protocol. But it creates even more nonsense in say, coinjoin, where Alice is paying Alice, but her output is considered to have come from Bob or Carol.So we come to the point - it's really complete drivel, but.. (7/n)
       
 (DIR) Post #ASM9nOehTwnkJplinQ by waxwing@x0f.org
       2023-02-02T16:24:32Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       ... it's *precisely* the kind of drivel that the state actors want to hear. It tells them that we can perfectly identify the origin of money, so we can block and control all we want. The Ordinals project, even if its creator perfectly understands that the assignation of serial numbers is arbitrary and ex-protocol, is, if it becomes popular, going to embed in the minds of politicians and other idiots, that we can perfectly trace the history of your bitcoins.But ... it can't be prevented. (8/8?)