The Original Title: "INSCRIPTIONS: THE CURE IS WORSE THAN THE DISEASE"

The Original Author: BEN CARMAN

The Original Translation: Luccy, BlockBeats

Editor's Note:Since the launch of the Ordinals protocol, Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr has been opposed to it and even tweeted that he would fix the "vulnerability" in the Inscriptions. This statement sparked a heated discussion in the community, and various Bitcoin OGs also expressed their opinions.

BEN CARMAN is a developer at Suredbits and also works on Bitcoin and Lightning Network. He also believes that Inscriptions are "garbage" for Bitcoin, but he does not agree with excessive opposition and intervention to stop Inscriptions. He believes that Inscriptions will eventually be proven to be a bubble like other shitcoins. BlockBeats has translated the original article as follows:

Since the infamous Taproot Wizard 4mb block, Bitcoin enthusiasts have been working hard to prevent inscriptions. Inscriptions are certainly detrimental to Bitcoin, but the way Bitcoin holders are trying to stop them is much more severe than any damage inscriptions may cause.

The inscription embeds images or other data into the Bitcoin blockchain using a trick in Bitcoin script. They essentially put the data into an inaccessible code block, followed by the actual consumption conditions, so that users can claim the original NFT. This is a rather clever trick, but it breaks many of the assumptions that Bitcoin users had previously.

Before, the main method of embedding data into Bitcoin was to use OP_RETURN, which is essentially an opcode specifically designed for embedding data. However, for NFTs, there are two problems: it makes the coin unspendable and is limited to 80 bytes according to the memory pool policy. The advantage of inscriptions is that their only size limit is the block size, and because their data is in the witness rather than the output, they benefit from the witness discount and can embed four times the data. This breaks the assumption of many Bitcoin users that a theoretical 4MB block will never occur because having only witness data would be foolish. However, NFT enthusiasts have found a way to monetize this. Now it has become a common phenomenon, and we have seen a large number of inscriptions occurring, driving up fees and block sizes.

However, since it has already happened and become commonplace, we cannot stop it.

In order to retaliate, Bitcoin users have proposed some "blocking" methods for inscriptions, which will bring more serious damage than inscriptions. Almost every proposal to block inscriptions boils down to preventing these transactions from entering the memory pool. The memory pool is the battlefield of Bitcoin transactions, and we need to protect it. The memory pool is only effective when it is the preferred way to send the highest fee transactions to miners. If we lose this guarantee, people will turn to centralized systems, and we may never be able to recover the memory pool. Filtering out junk transactions from the memory pool will not block inscriptions, at most it will only delay them for a week. They have established backchannel communication with mining pools, and if we cut them off from the memory pool, the only mining pools that can get these fees will be those aligned with Shitcoin.

This has already happened in many shitcoin networks, where for various reasons their memory pools have been closed, and now the main way to broadcast transactions is through a centralized API. This essentially creates a permissioned network, where even though anyone can run a node, if you don't have access to the transaction broadcast API, you won't be able to access Bitcoin. We are currently seeing Congress increasingly trying to regulate nodes, miners, and wallets as money transmitters, and losing the memory pool would make this problem 1000 times worse. If we lose the memory pool, there will be serious security issues as we won't be able to perform trustless fee estimation, but this is beyond the scope of this post.

In addition, filtering transactions based on the "spam" indicator may lead us down a bleak path. The most economical way to trade in Bitcoin is not necessarily the most private. Nowadays, the most popular way to obtain Bitcoin privacy on the chain is to perform Coinjoin. Coinjoin is not necessarily an economic transaction, you just spend it with others. If we establish such a precedent that you must prove the usefulness of your transaction to avoid being considered spam, people will soon find a way to use this and try to exclude Coinjoin and other privacy technologies from the memory pool because they are considered spam.

Over the past decade, we have witnessed many shitcoin bubbles, and this time is no exception. Supporters of shitcoins will eventually deceive all fools, and things will return to normal. However, we should not try to stop things prematurely and cause confusion. We just need to wait for them to resolve themselves.