Since Taproot Wizard's infamous 4MB block, bitcoiners have been on fire, scrambling to try and stop signups. Registrations are definitely It's not good for bitcoin, but the way bitcoiners try to stop them will be far worse than any damage the signups could have caused.
Inscriptions work by embedding images or other data into the bitcoin blockchain by using a hack in the bitcoin script. Basically, they put the data in an unreachable block of code followed by the actual spending conditions so that the user can claim the ordinal/nft. It's a pretty clever trick, but it has broken many of the assumptions under which many bitcoiners operated. Previously, the main way to embed data in bitcoin was OP_RETURN, which is basically an opcode intended exactly for embedding data, but it had two problems for nft people: it makes the coins unusable and, depending on the mempool policy, It is limited to 80 bytes. Enrollments have the advantage that their only size limit is the block size, and since their data is in the token, not the output, they benefit from token discounting, allowing them to embed 4 times as much data. This broke many assumptions of bitcoiners that the theoretical 4 MB block would never happen because it would be foolish to only have witness data; However, the nft people found a way to monetize it. Now this is commonplace and we have seen tons of signups, which increases fees and block sizes.
However, now that it is happening and common, we cannot stop it.
In retaliation, bitcoiners are proposing ways to “stop” enrollment and these will cause much greater damage than enrollment will cause. Almost all proposals to stop signups boil down to preventing these transactions from entering the mempool. The mempool is the battleground for bitcoin transactions and we must preserve it. The mempool only works if it is the main way to get transactions with the highest fees for miners. If we lose that guarantee, people will move to centralized systems and we may never get the mempool back. Filtering spam transactions from the mempool will not stop registrations; At best, it will delay them a week. , they already have communication channels with the mining pools and if we disconnect them from the mempool, the only pools that will receive these fees will be the pools aligned with Shitcoin. This has already happened to many shitty networks where their mempool was removed for one reason or another and now the main way to broadcast a transaction is through a centralized API. This basically creates a permissioned network, where even if anyone can run a node, if they don't have access to the transaction streaming API, they can't access bitcoin. We are currently seeing Congress push harder and harder to regulate nodes, miners, and wallets as money transmitters, and losing the mempool will make this problem a thousand times worse. There are also serious security issues with not being able to do trustless rate estimation if we lose the mempool, but that's outside the scope of this post.
Additionally, filtering transactions based on “spam” metrics can lead us down a dark path. The cheapest way to transact in bitcoins is No the most private. Today, the most popular way to get privacy for your on-chain bitcoin is to do a coinjoin. Coinjoins are not necessarily economic transactions, you are simply spending for yourself along with a group of other people. If we set the precedent that you have to justify the usefulness of your transaction so that it isn't considered spam, people will soon find a way to exploit this to try to exclude coin combinations and other privacy techniques from mempools as being spam.
We've seen a lot of shit bubbles over the last decade and this one is no different. Shitcoiners will eventually run out of suckers to buy into their scam and things will go back to normal, but we can't shoot ourselves in the foot by trying to stop things prematurely, when we can just wait them out.
#SaveTheMempool
This is a guest post by Ben Carman. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of btc Inc or bitcoin Magazine.
