Ordinals are now identified as a vulnerability

Bitcoin Core developer, Luke Dashjr, told his 83,300 followers in a recent tweet on X that inscriptions are exploiting a vulnerability in Bitcoin Core to spam the blockchain. Since 2013, Bitcoin Core allows users to set a limit on the size of extra data in transactions that they relay. Inscriptions bypass this limit and this makes them a “vulnerability.”

Dashjr says that Bitcoin Core is still vulnerable in the upcoming v26 release and the developer hopes to finally fix the issue before v27 next year.

Integrating Ordinals into Bitcoin can be likened to the act of spraying neon graffiti on revered ancient monuments like the colosseum or the pyramids. These structures stand as architectural marvels and testaments of historical significance. Imagine them suddenly covered in flashy, modern neon spray paint.
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In a similar vein, the introduction of Ordinals into Bitcoin feels like a significant misstep. It disrespects and distorts the foundational principles of Bitcoin, turning a groundbreaking financial innovation into a cluttered display of digital extravagance. This transformation not only undermines the original vision of Bitcoin but also challenges the very essence of what made it a monumental breakthrough in the digital world.

Well, we first need to get everyone to agree that we need to fix this oversight that is being exploited then begin arguing about the fix. Right now there are still people who either say "it will go away on its own" or claim "there should not be any fix at all".

Source: https://lightning.engineering/posts/2023-05-16-taproot-assets-v0.2/
https://cointelegraph.com/news/lightning-labs-launches-updated-protocol-bitcoin-brc20-congestion

I hope everyone here agrees with me that writing Ordinals/BRC20 in the blockchain using JSON is a massive space monster. (You might also believe that Ordinals are negative in their entirety and should be removed. Well there's another thread on this board for saying that.)

OP, but the problem, Ordinals/NFT users want to store their dick pics and fart sounds in a bank vault, not in a museum. They believe it's part of the attraction, and part of what makes them "more valuable".

This is what happens when Ethereumtards take over Bitcoin development. If Ethereum had a role that was to keep Bitcoin away from all the nonsense, since all the nonsense would be hosted on the so called Ethereum blockchain, now that isn't enough for them so they have to ruin Bitcoin by bringing the nonsense into the actual Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin Core should just block all this stuff, most nodes are Bitcoin Core nodes. Im not sure if Taproot was even needed. The more stuff you add the more window of opportunity for various blockchain spam use cases would show up, it's one of those things. Bitcoin already did what it had to do before any of that was implemented. As far as miners being happy because it raises fees, well, segwit lowered fees and it was rolled in.

I'm genuinely curious how Bitcoin will see global adoption in this case if 500k extra transactions are "hurting" the network that badly.

not for people that don't like paying big fees. they just want fees to go back down to reasonable levels but the problem is there is nothing in the bitcoin protocol that defines what a reasonable fee is. it could be anything.

Crypto sees 5th week of outflows on 'poor' BTC sentiment: Coinshares

Institutional investor sentiment over digital assets took another beating last week, with “poor sentiment” around Bitcoin leading to yet another week of outflows of digital asset investment products.
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Institutional BTC shedding

Butterfill noted that Bitcoin investment products have seen $112 million worth of outflows so far this year, with 90% of the sum coming in May alone, while short-Bitcoin products have seen $34.8 million worth of outflows over May.

Butterfill, however, noted that it is “unclear why there is such coordinated negative sentiment for both long and short investment products.”

In S**tcoin Spring, any pointless cryptocurrency with a Twitter account can enchant thousands of traders into playing meme coin musical chairs. Throwing money at the wall and reason out the window, they let greed get the best of them. Sometimes literally.
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It’s a story that showcases the dark psyche encouraged by those one-off tales of meme coin riches. For every lucky speculator up 5,000,000% on pepecoin (PEPE), there are thousands of gamblers losing money to insiders and trading bots. Some fall for malicious tokens designed to steal all the money in their wallets, not just the poker chips they’d anted up.
GREED could have been one of those. To get GREED, over 43,000 Twitter accounts this week authorized one man in Croatia to tweet on their behalf. A further 55,306 wallets signed an intentionally sussy-looking transaction that, in theory, might have let him drain their wallets.

But the creator of the GREED experiment doesn’t plan to steal their money (nor can he; his developers never built that code). Even so, Ivor Ivosevic, better known as Voshy to the Solana community, very much will s**tpost from those Twitter accounts.

In an interview with CoinDesk, Voshy said he wants to teach crypto traders a lesson, one that focuses on internet security – with maybe a dash of morality and sensibility, too. The thing’s called GREED, after all.

Has any wallet company ever closed down before or experienced issue that affected holders Bitcoin?

And no doubt you'd then be calling for more intervention to censor that too.  Where does it end? 

It could be argued that the vision was how no one would be in a position of power to intervene and prevent others transacting.  But what you propose is that someone in power should intervene and prevent others from transacting.  

Now imagine I'm in charge of one of your nation's security agencies or the treasury/taxation authorities.  In such a position, I wouldn't like how you're transacting without me knowing exactly who you are and what you are doing with your money.  Maybe you're funding terrorists or failing to pay your taxes.  How about I apply pressure to those same someones in power to prevent you from transacting in Bitcoin until you'll completed all the necessary KYC/AML and other privacy-crippling hurdles?  Things go to dark places very quickly when you consider the implications of what it is you're asking for here.  Censorship for some could easily escalate to censorship for all.

Personally, I take the view that your ideals are far more dangerous to Bitcoin's longevity than a bit of short-term congestion.  Bitcoin is neutral.  That means sometimes people will use it in ways you may not agree with.  But that's simply the price of freedom.

Hello everyone. I'm not an expert at all but did purchase about 0.7 BTC worth of ORDI earlier this week, so am very interested in this discussion.

My initial reasoning for purchasing the coin on the ordinals website was that, finally, bitcoin was [now] going to throw off its shackles and [eventually] give many more people many more reasons to buy it; which would also mean that [eventually] there'd be many more people not buying ethereum.

There is a clear and present danger that ethereum will usurp bitcoin as the number 1 coin, in terms of market cap. I am of the opinion that if this happens, bitcoin will slowly fade away into insignificance. I hope that I'm wrong about that, but my concerns about it meant that I was initially delighted to hear about brc-20/ordinals.

I don't know if or how it can happen, but my opinion right now is that bitcoin developers must find ways to deflate the erc-20 bubble, or bitcoin will lose prominence at a rapid rate of knots.

I don't believe that the original whitepaper for BTC should be left unchallenged and unchanged forever in the future, any more than the US constitution should be left unchallenged and unchanged forever [since the 1780s]. Not unless someone here believes that Jesus wrote that white paper. 

I'm open to being ridiculed. I just want to learn and protect my investments. Thanks for reading.

Are new NFTs and meme tokens good for Bitcoin?

When the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published the original Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) white paper back in 2008, he envisioned the cryptocurrency as a peer-to-peer digital payments system and the ultimate form of "sound money." Some even imagined that one day, Bitcoin might replace the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency.

Flash-forward to 2023, and we're starting to see some unexpected innovations coming to Bitcoin's ecosystem that seem to contradict this original premise -- among them, highly speculative meme tokens and new non-fungible tokens (NFTs). What's concerning it that these innovations are leading to higher transaction fees, network congestion, and complaints about market disruptions. What's going on here, and what impact should it have on your decision to buy Bitcoin?

The "new" Bitcoin

Perhaps the easiest way to describe what's going on here is that it is a battle between the "old" Bitcoin and the "new" Bitcoin. The old Bitcoin is the cryptocurrency originally proposed by Nakamoto. The core purpose of its blockchain is to handle digital currency transactions. From this perspective, blocks on its blockchain should only contain transaction data -- nothing more. Proponents of the new Bitcoin, though, believe that the core Bitcoin blockchain should be used for more than just digital currency transactions. Why not the creation of NFTs or even meme tokens, such as those found on the Ethereum (CRYPTO:ETH) blockchain?

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Real-world impact

According to one blockchain analytics service, 65% of all Bitcoin transactions on May 7 were related to BRC-20 tokens. Put another way, 65% of the traffic on the Bitcoin blockchain this past Sunday involved people swapping in and out of meme tokens. Things got so out of hand, in fact, that Binance (CRYPTO: BNB) -- the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world --- had to put a temporary halt on Bitcoin withdrawals.

The important point here is that we are starting to see disruptions in the way Bitcoin is used, and these are causing higher fees and network congestion. In El Salvador, where Bitcoin is legal tender and used for everyday purchases, the transaction fees for withdrawing $100 in Bitcoin are now reportedly as high as $20. Think about that: If your bank charged you $20 every time you took $100 out of the ATM, you might start looking for a different bank.

Of course, the innovators who brought us Ordinals and the new BRC-20 tokens will describe how much functionality and utility they are bringing to Bitcoin. Perhaps they will tell you how they are helping Bitcoin reach wider mainstream adoption. And they will claim that they helped to create a billion-dollar market opportunity literally overnight. Fair enough.

But I can't help thinking about that 65% figure. Are two-thirds of Bitcoin transactions now just related to speculating in meme tokens? Please, nobody tell Gary Gensler this. As soon as the Securities and Exchange Commission chairman finds out that crypto enthusiasts have turned Bitcoin into a speculative meme-token playground, it's game over. And that's a primary concern of mine. How can anyone reasonably describe Bitcoin as "sound money" when people are playing with meme tokens in the background and inscribing funny pictures into its blockchain?

Should you invest in Bitcoin?

At one point, I thought the new NFTs might be a good thing for Bitcoin's future valuation. However, with the arrival of BRC-20 meme tokens, I've started to change my mind. Many of the most popular Bitcoin BRC-20 tokens are clearly designed to be meme tokens. The top tokens in this category by market cap now include a pizza-themed token, a frog-themed token, and a token that calls itself, yes, "meme." Now that larger, more mainstream cryptocurrency exchanges are starting to list these tokens for trading, this problem could get bigger as more people get in on the meme-token mania.

For now, I remain bullish on Bitcoin long term. But, in the short term, I'm taking a close look at what's happening with NFTs and meme tokens. If the primary purpose of Bitcoin -- to act as a peer-to-peer digital cash system -- is being hindered by high fees, congestion, and other forms of market friction, then it might be time to pump the brakes. If Bitcoin is trying so hard to become Ethereum, why not just invest in Ethereum?

We may not like "their" use case, but Bitcoin was designed to be permissionless and censorship-resistant. That means anyone can use it in the way they want as long as their use case is following the consensus rules. From a technical viewpoint, what changed?

There are more, which don't require KYC, such as  robosats.

If you’re selling it to a person you don’t really have full privacy because who you are selling it to knows you. And if you decide to make use of a Bitcoin ATM, and the ATM happens to have cameras that monitors users, then it’s also possible that you don’t have any privacy at all.

So, I think the only platform here that is 100% anonymous when you are making use of it is localbitcoin.com, because with LocalBitcoin you just send to the buyer or to the seller and they don’t really know who you are, and before sending to them you just rely on the ratings and reviews that you have seen on their profile to do business with them. And your privacy will be maintained when you make use of this means.

Almost all fiat-to-BTC traders would require you to upload ID,even if they are using a platform like Bisq.
Trust is everything in this business.