Inscription and the popularity of BRC-20 have caused high fees for Bitcoin network congestion, which has been discussed in the Bitcoin developer community.
On May 8, Bitcoin core developer Ali Sherief initiated a discussion on the Bitcoin development mailing list, expressing whether Bitcoin developers should take action in the face of such "valueless" transactions, and gave a possible option, namely "introduce a runtime option to drop all non-standard Taproot transactions immediately".
At present, many developers have participated in the discussion. A few people think that this type of transaction should be directly reviewed. Some people think that this is the way the system works without intervention. There are also suggestions for appropriate adjustments or diversion to L2, etc., Wu said. as follows:
Ali Sherief (Discussion Initiator): “Recently, due to projects such as BRC-20 occupying a large amount of transaction volume, the real Bitcoin transaction price is too high, which has caused massive congestion in the Bitcoin transaction pool. Rare since December 2017. These nearly worthless tokens threaten the normal use of the Bitcoin network as a peer-to-peer digital currency. Should action be taken if transaction volume does not slow down in the next few weeks? The Bitcoin network is Developers, miners and users have a tripartite structure, and miners are often the main body that causes the system to be abused, so the current harmony of Bitcoin transactions has been disturbed. We should consider taking action to narrow the loopholes in BIP 342, and through BIP and Bit commits to the CoinCore codebase to achieve this. Another alternative would be to implement "censorship" at the node level and introduce a runtime option to immediately purge all non-standard Taproot transactions, which is easier to implement but requires At least the next launch. We need to find a solution for everyone, and while some will be critical, we have a responsibility to make sure this congestion doesn't happen again."
Link:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2023-May/021620.html
Michael Folkson: "Miners include high-fee, consensus-compliant transactions in blocks. If users don't like the transactions miners include, they have two theoretical options: a consensus rule change or a policy change. The former requires a Soft fork, is difficult to achieve and has limited effect; the latter does not require consensus rule changes, but it is still possible to bypass the P2P network and submit transactions directly to miners. The design decision of BIP 342 has its technical reasons, and data cannot be simply divided into useful and useless. Policy or Consensus rule changes are infeasible. Availability of transactions has nothing to do with using Taproot or Pre-Taproot addresses, it has to do with limited block space and market demand. Blind policy or consensus rule adjustments can be counterproductive.”
Link:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2023-May/021625.html
Erik Aronesty: "Bitcoin's main goal may only be a currency use case, rather than being a global ledger for everything. It can provide a permanent incentive mechanism for non-economic transactions to keep it off-chain (L2)."
Link:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2023-May/021635.html
Luke Dashjr: "Action should have been done months ago. Spam filtering has been a standard feature of Bitcoin Core since its inception. It would be a mistake not to extend the existing filters to Taproot transactions now. We can Fix that, or try a more limited approach like OP_RETURN (which is what "Ordisrespector" does). Since this is a bugfix, it doesn't even have to wait for a major release."
Link:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2023-May/021631.html
Peter Todd: "Miners are the beneficiaries of this craze. Even with restrictions, miners have a way around it. Many people like me will not run nodes to review those transactions."
Link:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2023-May/021634.html
jk_14 (Jaroslaw): "The flood of Spam transactions is not the root cause, but the high transaction fees. It is recommended to solve the long-term security budget of Bitcoin to reduce transaction fees."
Link:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2023-May/021641.html
Aleksandr: "There are two ways, either set this type of transaction to only occupy up to 10% of the block capacity, or change the structure so that the transaction fee of these transactions will be more expensive, and push these transactions to L2 such as Lightning Network."
Link:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2023-May/021670.html
learn more:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2023-May/date.html
Other points of view:
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Samson Mow stated that the hype around Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens is unsustainable and will fade away in a few months; essentially paying huge fees directly to Bitcoin miners, which is impossible Persist; Samson Mow argues that they clog the web like spam, that Bitcoin's mass adoption is due to its use as a savings technology and a means of transaction, not because "people make JPEGs and stick them in the chain ".
Enrico Rubboli, CEO of Bitcoin layer 2 sidechain Mintlayer: The technology behind Ordinals is "deeply flawed" and doesn't follow "the axioms of the core Bitcoin community." Ordinals could lead to additional regulatory scrutiny of bitcoin, as the new BRC-20 tokens could be considered unregulated securities.
AngelBlock founder Alex Strzesniewski: I see a lot of backlash from BTC maximalists, but I don't think anyone should use their platform to try to censor transactions and try to discern valid and invalid transactions on any network.
F2pool: Ordinals is a useful exploration of Bitcoin applications, helping to unlock greater value in the Bitcoin network.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/ordinals-good-or-bad-for-bitcoin-supporters-and-opposers-raise-voice
