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I think JPEGs on the timechain are stupid. But the idea that they're going to hurt Bitcoin seems so weak to me. Like the US dollar can withstand people scribbling on it but Bitcoin can't? In fact, the idea of Bitcoin as a glorious digital monument with some graffiti scribbled on it represents humanity pretty well. That's kind of us in a nutshell. Seems on-brand. Perfectionists trying to keep their little gardens tidy while trolls come in and find ways to mess with them anyway. NFTs and memecoins already had their peak fad moments. People now know that they're non-scarce gambling toys rather than investments. It's just echoes of that peak now. The only thing that concerned me about the ordinals/runes period was the rapid UTXO bloat, not the blockspace usage, since the latter already has a consensus limit on it. And if Bitcoin transactions can't outprice JPEGs in the long run, then it's just not that valuable. Bitcoin currently does about 1% of the gross settlement volume of Fedwire. That's peanuts. Imagine if it reaches a point where it does even like 10% of Fedwire. What would you pay to move a full bitcoin globally, permissionlessly, in 10 minutes, in a world where it's no longer a niche thing?

Replies (20)

Then why bitcoin fix satoshi dice? Do you think bitcoin could survive with satoshi dice?
Lyn Alden's avatar Lyn Alden
I think JPEGs on the timechain are stupid. But the idea that they're going to hurt Bitcoin seems so weak to me. Like the US dollar can withstand people scribbling on it but Bitcoin can't? In fact, the idea of Bitcoin as a glorious digital monument with some graffiti scribbled on it represents humanity pretty well. That's kind of us in a nutshell. Seems on-brand. Perfectionists trying to keep their little gardens tidy while trolls come in and find ways to mess with them anyway. NFTs and memecoins already had their peak fad moments. People now know that they're non-scarce gambling toys rather than investments. It's just echoes of that peak now. The only thing that concerned me about the ordinals/runes period was the rapid UTXO bloat, not the blockspace usage, since the latter already has a consensus limit on it. And if Bitcoin transactions can't outprice JPEGs in the long run, then it's just not that valuable. Bitcoin currently does about 1% of the gross settlement volume of Fedwire. That's peanuts. Imagine if it reaches a point where it does even like 10% of Fedwire. What would you pay to move a full bitcoin globally, permissionlessly, in 10 minutes, in a world where it's no longer a niche thing?
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>And if Bitcoin transactions can't outprice >JPEGs in the long run, then it's just not that >valuable. The demand for *arbitrary* data is gigantically larger than monetary data. Bitcoin the money will never be able to compete with that, and expecting it to do so is just stupid. Especially if we take the time dependency into account. The monetary use case proves its value in the Long Run (as fiat systems gradually start to fail one by one in the future). But by the time we reach the point we actually need it, it could well be already dead - because it was just dominated by garbage in the meantime and ppl stop running nodes for this type of junk.
↩ replying to Lyn Alden
My point is: it would take decades for Bitcoin to reach its (full) monetary potentisl, since fiat currencies fail gradually across the world. At the same time it would take only a few years of constant spam for Bitcoin to be abandoned by disillusioned node runners. It could fail wayyy before it even reaches your $300trillion market cap. The gambler's ruin fallacy
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More stuff on block chain means more data means more storage required for nodes means only very rich people with access to large data pools like AWS are capable of running nodes. We are watching bitcoin centralization unfold in front of us in real time.
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↩ replying to Lyn Alden
The bigger issue than size is utxo bloat. Which admittedly OP_RETURN doesn't really do anything to fix in either direction, because after a modest size is reached, the segwit discount makes it cheaper to bloat the utxo set than to use OP_RETURN anyway. The current uproar is definitely not an existential argument. I'm glad it's shining more light on Knots though, which I was already using anyway, and also on the governance issues around having a monopoly on node development. We need alternatives that are maintained in a robust manner, precisely to offset any centralization of power in the hands of whoever controls a given github account. And sure, you can always just not upgrade your software...for awhile. Eventually security fixes come out, and then you get to decide whether to stay vulnerable or to do whatever that cabal has told you to do. Not an ideal situation.
One of the smartest ideas behind Bitcoin is keeping the network small and efficient. JPEGs and heavy data clog the timechain and raise storage needs — that’s not what Bitcoin was built for. If we wanted that, we could just tokenize files and let Google or another giant host them. The real value of Bitcoin is decentralization — validating transactions without trusting a centralized company. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose entirely.
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↩ replying to Zach⚡️
Node runners: making changes that will inevitably lead to contiguous blobs of CSAM stored in blocks will bring unnecessary scrutiny from governments and likely make it a moral and legal liability since I can reasonably be described as someone hosting and distributing CSAM. With this in mind, it might be prudent not to make this contentious change on the next revision of Core. Lyn: I don’t think JPEGs will kill bitcoin, in a way it is a reflection of our society. 🫠 Like wut??