Original title: From Analysis of Luke Dashjr Scheme to Thoughts on the Nature of Blockchain
Original author: Faust Wuyue
Original source: Geek Web3
The Ordinals protocol is a system for numbering satoshis (SATS, the smallest unit of Bitcoin), or a derivative protocol that uses Bitcoin UTXO as a data storage medium. It is essentially a colored currency set;
Luke Dashjr wants to solve the problem of junk data brought by BRC-20 and Ordinals to the Bitcoin main network. He wants to reduce the burden on Bitcoin and ensure its simplicity and decentralization. It is not about BRC-20 itself. Absolute negation;
Judging from Lukes plan alone, as long as there is a mining pool willing to package Ordinals and BRC-20 transaction data, both can survive on the Bitcoin network, but the UX will be significantly worse (the BRC-20 transaction pending processing delay will be longer) ); but this also shows the potential and opportunities of Bitcoin Layer 2;
If utopian slogans such as Dollar Alternative and Code is Law can be continuously falsified over time, then what is the significance of the existence of Bitcoin and blockchain? What problem does it really solve?
Recently, Bitcoin community veteran Luke Dashjr’s radical remarks about BRC-20 have triggered discussions among countless people. Luke believes that BRC-20 and the Inscription protocol bypass the data size limit of Bitcoin blocks and forcefully stuff a large amount of junk data into the blocks. This approach will cause unnecessary burdens on the nodes because it It will increase the nodes expenditure on network speed bandwidth and storage capacity. If this situation continues for a long time, it will continue to reduce the degree of decentralization of the Bitcoin network and eventually disintegrate this most decentralized blockchain ecosystem that relies on it. of fine traditions.
In fact, Lukes worries are not groundless. On February 1 this year, the Bitcoin network saw its largest block in history with a size of 3.96 MB, simply because this block contained an NFT called Taproot Wizards.This phenomenon was identified by Luke Dashjr and others at the time, which would keep the block size of Bitcoin high and thus increase the hardware equipment requirements of full nodes. An important part of decentralization is precisely to reduce the user’s node operating costs. .If Bitcoin in the future becomes like Solana and Sui, people can only run nodes in third-party computer rooms. This will not be a tragedy for the Bitcoin community and even the entire Web3.
While increasing node bandwidth/storage overhead and weakening decentralization,Large blocks themselves will also have an impact on security, because the larger the block, the slower it propagates within the network, the worse the data consistency of the nodes, and the higher the orphan block rate and ledger bifurcation rate.The Conflux team has emphasized this point many times before, and the Ethereum Foundation has also been evaluating the impact of the increase in block size on security after the launch of EIP-4844. This kind of thing will inevitably influence the whole body.
Putting aside the negative impact of BRC-20 and Ordinals on the underlying security and decentralization of the Bitcoin network,The matryoshka approach of placing derivative assets in Bitcoin UTXOs is also a new risk. This essentially transfers the security issues that derivative assets themselves need to solve directly to the Bitcoin network.If the total value of these derivatives exceeds the value of assets/computing power required to ensure the security of the Bitcoin network, the problem of top-heavy, too-heavy upper layer may arise, and this risk point has become increasingly apparent in POS Ethereum. Explicit. Previously, Thief, a celebrity in the technology circle, also expressed concerns about this issue in interviews.
But what is interesting is that although Luke expressed a negative attitude towards BRC-20 and various inscriptions in some remarks, and said that if the new version of the node client code is released and widely adopted, BRC-20 and Ordinals may disappear by then, but when When others pointed out that Bitcoin Layer 2 can be used as the new destination of BRC-20 to avoid burdening the Bitcoin main network, Luke affirmed this view and did not make an absolute ideological rejection of BRC-20. .Later, Luke himself said bluntly: It is not necessary to eradicate all inscriptions to bring benefits to the Bitcoin network.
Ultimately, Luke’s dissatisfaction seems to lie in the risks that data inflation caused by various derivatives brings to the Bitcoin main network. Rather than “killing them all” of these derivatives themselves, he wants to expel “uninvited guests” like Ordinals. To facilities outside the Bitcoin main network, this just brings opportunities to Bitcoin Layer 2 itself. However, Lukes radical approach itself has caused controversy among many people. His behavior not only involves disputes over the right to speak in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but also reflects the essential difference in product design philosophy between BTC and ETH - manyA few years ago, Vitalik had disagreements with Luke and others on similar matters, which indirectly led to the formers determination to start a chain of his own.
In the following, we will conduct a technical analysis of the Ordinals protocol and Lukes solution, and briefly elaborate on the respective problems of the Satoshis represented by Luke and the speculators represented by BRC-20 players. .If Web3 is not as grand and wonderful as some people say, then what is its value?
Brief analysis of the principle of Ordinals protocol
From a technical perspective alone,The Ordinals protocol is a system for numbering satoshis (SATS, the smallest unit of Bitcoin), or a derivative protocol that uses Bitcoin UTXO as a storage medium.Ordinals assigns a serial number to each Satoshi and adds additional data (text, pictures, codes, etc.) to turn each Satoshi into a unique NFT. This process is called engraving. Based on Ordinals, BRC-20 has launched an issuance method similar to ERC-20 fungible tokens. However, the BTC script is not Turing complete and cannot implement a complex smart contract system like Ethereum. Taking the simplest transfer function as an example, derivative assets based on the Ordinals protocol need to write the following content in the script:
You can see that this is a plain text interaction. The Bitcoin network itself does not perform any calculations or status settlement on the transaction content of BRC-20. The messages that users see such as BRC-20 transfer success are the final results obtained by nodes that agree with the Ordinals protocol after parsing and calculating the original scripts on the BTC chain.
If you only have 100 ORDI, but the number is written as 10,000 when transferring, you can still send the transaction to the Bitcoin network, but the relevant nodes and browsers will not interpret it as a valid transfer.
So Ordinals essentially just treats the Bitcoin network as a network disk with permanent data and unchangeable data. Only metadata, operation statements, etc. are engraved on the chain, but the calculations and status settlement of all operations are all located on the data index website off the chain. in the server. This idea is almost the same as EverPay, a project in the Arweave ecosystem.
Taken together, Ordinals has the following problems:
1. There is no unified consensus state computing layer.The data parsed by different wallets, browsers, etc. are not necessarily the same. It has happened many times before that user assets have different display results on different wallets.
2. Rely on centralized Indexer infrastructure.According to blockchain standards, this application does not have strict requirements for security and is unreliable.
3. Narrow usage scenarios.A series of complex DeFi activities in Ethereum cannot be completed based on the simple Ordinals protocol. Even current Ordinals transactions can only be completed through pending orders instead of using the popular AMM. Therefore, products like Ordinals seem to be better implemented on Ethereum.
4. Internet pollution.The form of Ordinals operation on Satoshi, such as thousands of users operating only $0.1 worth of money in a short period of time but paying a $10 transfer fee, is very similar to a dust attack in the eyes of BTC fundamentalists. In the eyes of these users or developers, BTC is mainly used for value storage and transfer, while Ordinals activities seriously interfere with normal network operations.
5. Increased user costs.Various inscriptions have raised the fees on the Bitcoin mainnet, affecting other users, and the new infrastructure introduced by BRC-20 and Ordinals requires users to understand and use new wallets, new tools, etc.
Luke’s solution
Facing the problem of BRC-20 and Ordinals,Luke did not directly modify the consensus layer, but modified the Spam Filter (policy) module so that nodes directly reject Ordinals transactions when receiving P2P broadcast messages.In the policy, there are multiple isStandard() series functions to check whether all aspects of the transaction meet the standards. If not, the transaction received by the node will be quickly discarded.
In other words, Ordinals can eventually be put on the chain, but most nodes will not put such data into the transaction pool, which will prolong the delay in transmitting Ordinals data to the mining pool willing to package it on the chain.But if a mining pool broadcasts a block containing a BRC-20 transaction, the nodes will still recognize it.
Source: https://twitter.com/BenWAGMI/status/1732423859092247013
Luke has submitted the policy modification in the Bitcoin Knots client, and he also wants to add the same submission to the Bitcoin Core client. In policy.cpp, he added a new parameter named g_script_size_policy_limit, which limits the script size in multiple places.
In the previous client, there was no limit on the script size of Pay-to-Taproot (that is, the transaction type used by Ordinals), which was finally added here.
Among them, the default value of g_script_size_policy_limit is 1650 Bytes, which will limit many scripts used in Ordinals. The following figure shows the size of an NFT-related script:
However, since this parameter is only used for the Spam Filter module, not the consensus module, nodes can modify the size of this parameter to receive transactions with larger scripts. Although these transactions do not meet the expectations of Core developers, they can still be accepted by Bitcoin’s consensus protocol.In other words, as long as there is a mining pool willing to package Ordinals-related transaction data, Ordinals can still survive on the Bitcoin network, but the UX for related users will be worse than it is now.(Response latency will become longer than now).
This method cannot completely eliminate Ordinals on-chain activities and will not introduce any hard forks. Although there will definitely be nodes that do not comply with the new policy, since the policy did not exist before, as long as there are nodes that comply after the update, the number of Ordinals activities can be reduced.
Lukes expectation is that most nodes will comply with the policy he proposed. This update is generally flexible. As long as there is a mining pool willing to package BRC-20 and Ordinals data, the latter two can still continue on the Bitcoin main network, but the related user experience will become very poor. But as long as Bitcoin Layer 2 starts quickly, BRC-20 and Ordinals can also take off on Layer 2.
The crisis of faith in blockchain behind Luke Dashjr’s behavior
So how should we evaluate Luke Dashjrs behavior? Is this really just a battle between big blocks and small blocks? Admittedly, if you look at all this from a technical and product perspective, it seems that Luke is just defending the long-standing minimalist philosophy and decentralization concept of the Bitcoin community. This conservative approach, which is completely different from Ethereum, has always been An indispensable part of the blockchain world.
Some people also believe that Bitcoin itself is a huge experimental field for community governance, and Luke Dashjr only represents one of the forces. Bitcoin does not belong to one person, but is a multi-party game among miners, exchanges, developers, and users. The resulting mixed product, no matter how Luke targets BRC-20, those dazzling inscriptions will find a suitable home within the Bitcoin ecosystem.
However, this article does not want to discuss more about the above two points. It intends to raise issues that most people are not aware of:
If we examine the recent Luke Dashjr incident from an ideological perspective, it is not difficult to abstract it into a conflict between the technical faction and the trading faction. The previous war of words between Blast and Polygon zkEVM has already divided the two major The conflicts between the factions are undoubtedly obvious, and Luke Dashjr further intensified the differences between the two, making people think about the ownership of Bitcoin and even the blockchain itself:Who can represent the Bitcoin ecosystem?Are they the OG contributors who claim to be the successors of Satoshi Nakamoto, or are they the speculators who enjoy speculating on currencies all day long?
If you look at it from the perspective of Luke and other OGs in the Bitcoin community, most BRC-20 enthusiasts are profit-seeking people who turn a deaf ear to whats going on outside the window and only focus on making money on the chain. These selfish The interests of those who do not seem to be worth protecting, and expelling BRC-20 from the Bitcoin network will be beneficial to the long-term interests of the BTC ecosystem, which is more important than satisfying the greed of currency speculators.
But thinking about it on the other hand, those who completely negate the value of BRC-20 and Ordinals and do not take into account the interests of Web3 mainstream users seem to be equally selfish and lack of thinking.If they always think that what is noble and right is itself unrealistic and hypocritical,So standing on the commanding heights and despising those vulgar people, is it just a joke?
In the final analysis,The financial market itself does not contain morality. It is difficult to say who behaves more morally and who behaves immorally. Everything is determined only by mechanisms and rules (as Soros said),Permissionless, which is highly praised by the blockchain, does not deny the existence of air coins such as BRC-20. So, is it also a violation to simply run against those inscription players under the banner of the unreachable Bitcoin Fundamentals? Permissionless spiritual behavior? If you think about it from this perspective, is Lukes behavior really worthy of recognition? Have those who support him or oppose him ever reflected on this behavior?
Although countless people have made passionate descriptions of the grand vision that blockchain can bring, and have praised the so-called Satoshi Nakamoto spirit and Trustless maximalism more than once,But why have the replacement for the dollar and the next generation Internet dreamed up by Satoshi Nakamoto, Gavin Wood and others not yet arrived, but what came first was a series of things that cannot be considered elegant?Is this due to the extremely poor UX and usage threshold of the “decentralized network” itself?
For something that is not user-friendly and can almost never compete with Web2 in terms of user experience, what scenarios can it bring to people that Web2 does not have? If it is difficult for it to obtain product advantages that Web2 does not have, can the so-called trustless Slogan really be accepted by most people? Simply talking about those unattainable Trustless and mass adoption that do not require human governance, but not wanting to be kind to the wooly party members who are among the mainstream user portraits. Is this attitude itself a kind of Kong Yiji-style hypocrisy and selfishness?
Perhaps technology supremacists are indeed qualified to laugh at the profit-seeking BRC-20 players. It can be argued that the blockchain should not be reduced to an on-chain casino, but we should seriously consider the meaning of the blockchain. If it is not as grand and respectable as Satoshi Nakamoto said, and many of the utopian ideas it advocates have been continuously falsified over time, then the so-called code is law and Mass Adoption or even Behind Web 3.0, is there hidden a major crisis of faith comparable to Nietzsches Death of God?If the so-called Satoshiism is just a castle in the air similar to Marxism, then should we reflect on what problems Web3 can really solve?
Source: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/49059750
Perhaps we cannot give a direct answer to the above question, but there is no doubt that the forkable and diverse community attributes of the blockchain itself will eventually give people a higher right to choose than in real politics. In this imperfect world In the Web3 world, there will not be only one version of the chain. Compared with real sovereign countries, this Blockchain, which can create multiple nations according to the wishes of different groups, will eventually become a supplement and optimization to real democratic governance, rather than simply being a dollar substitute For unrealistic and boring slogans like Web2 Gravedigger, in many cases, solving the real problems at hand is far more important than being immersed in some beautiful illusions that exist forever tomorrow.
