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TLDR/non-crypto summary: Bitcoin's developers made changes recently that allow much larger transactions, with blocks up to 4MB in size on the Bitcoin blockchain

TLDR/non-crypto summary: Bitcoin's developers made changes recently that allow much larger transactions, with blocks up to 4MB in size on the Bitcoin blockchain in support of "BRC-20" tokens, which is Bitcoin's feature reduced version of Ethereum's ERC-20 token. These same developers block attempts to increase the block size in Bitcoin, which would allow more throughput and transaction capacity. The increased demand for Bitcoin transactions from BRC-20 combined with the limited block size caused transaction fees to skyrocket, making Bitcoin too expensive (again) to be used for normal retail use. The article points out that 80% of these giant "BRC-20" transactions were coming from a single individual/entity in control of one private key. Effectively one individual caused the backlog in Bitcoin with sky high transaction fees.

nullc 3y ago
Wow. That is a take my breath away level of untruthfulness. > in in support of "BRC-20" tokens, which is Bitcoin's feature reduced version of Ethereum's ERC-20 token It appears that BRC-20 is primarily affiliated with Calvin Ayre, the person backing "Bitcoin SV" and the conman pretending to be the creator of Bitcoin -- the three main entities connected to it are all funded by Ayre and they've been bragging pretty loudly about their disruption of Bitcoin ( https://nitter.it/B2029org/status/1655611301412982784 https://nitter.it/B2029org/status/1655611301412982784 ). I've heard speculation that the attacks are either a marketing pitch for "Bitcoin SV" (e.g. create congestion on Bitcoin then pivot to the unauditable centralized BSV blockchain, which always has room cause it's easy to scale centralized systems) or an effort to get Bitcoin community members to propose protocol changes to block the flood in order to substantiate the allegations in either of the Ayre-affiliated 6 billion dollar or hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars lawsuits. I'm not aware of any previous active Bitcoin developer that had anything to do with BRC-20 tokens, if you know of any I'm sure the bitcoin community would be very interested in learning of it. > changes recently that allow much larger transactions, Unless you are referring to increasing the capacity of blocks back in 2017, no change to the consensus rules that allowed larger transactions has happened. You can easily verify this for yourself by starting up an older copy of Bitcoin and observe that it accepts everything fine. In any case, this "BRC-20" crap is mostly only embedding 89 bytes of data ( https://twitter.com/jratcliff/status/1655669410206457865#m https://twitter.com/jratcliff/status/1655669410206457865#m )-- it doesn't need any larger transactions. It happens to stuff it into the most recent transaction type, but there is no reason that it couldn't put 89 bytes of data into pretty much any other kind of transaction. I think the false claim that BRC-20 was made possible by recent changes is mixture of confusion and an intentional deceptive cooperation cracking move, intended to direct even more harassment at project contributors but it's just not true.
- willmadden 3y ago
  Nothing I said was untruthful. The Taproot upgrade made the witness data discount from Segwit available to be used by inscriptions. This is what led to the explosion in BRC-20 transactions that are clogging up the mempool. According to this research, it's all coming from a single entity.
  - nullc 3y ago
    > Nothing I said was untruthful. Not so, the very first sentence of your post was a flagrant untruth. > Bitcoin's developers made changes recently that allow much larger transactions, with blocks up to 4MB in size on the Bitcoin blockchain in support of "BRC-20" tokens, Okay, go ahead link to this "recent change" in support of "BRC-20" tokens. -- gonna be pretty hard in light of the fact that BRC-20 activity appears to be primarily (perhaps exclusively) by parties connected to the multiple billion dollars in lawsuits against bitcoin developers, and the fact that old versions of bitcoin are just as happy with the same transactions and the limits on transaction size are the same at least since 2017 or earlier. > what led to the explosion in BRC-20 transactions The BRC-20 transactions are just embedding 89 bytes of data (see link). They're a spam attack of a sort which has always been possible and is nearly impossible to block, I'm not aware of any basis under which you can argue anything "led to" it other than an attacker being willing to spend millions of dollars a day to DOS attack the the network.
    - willmadden 3y ago
      Segwit expanded the blocksize by allowing extra space for digital signatures at a discounted price. Taproot allowed BRC-20 to take advantage of this discounted data, which immediately led to the backlog. Whether that was the intent of the developers or not is not the point of my comment. The statement is factual. You are arguing about intent and who is to blame for the backlog. My comment has nothing to do with this other than pointing out that the OP shows it is coming from a single entity. If you assume “good intentions”, BRC-20 is stupid and makes no sense. It’s a reduced feature set ERC-20 token with far less throughput capacity that causes harm to the Bitcoin ecosystem. I agree this could be an adversary with an incentive to take market share away, it could be someone speculating that a token on Bitcoin could be an opportunity for profit, or likely both.
drexlspivey 3y ago
> TLDR/non-crypto summary: Bitcoin's developers made changes recently that allow much larger transactions, with blocks up to 4MB in size on the Bitcoin blockchain in support of "BRC-20" tokens, which is Bitcoin's feature reduced version of Ethereum's ERC-20 token. This is completely false. 4MB blocks are possible since segwit in 2017 and BRC-20 has nothing to do with bitcoin, it’s just some third party protocol that assigns meaning to random data stored in the blockchain. You can append random crap to your transaction and store it in the blockchain if you pay the fee, nothing has changed. The limit is still 4MB every 10 minutes.
- willmadden 3y ago
  What about my reply is false? Ordinal inscription transactions are huge and stored on-chain. This caused the backlog.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 3np 3y ago
    2017 is hardly "recently" in bitcoin terms. It's also easy to interpret your comments as implying BRC-20 was a motivating factor for 4MB blocks, which as others pointed out would be nonsense. nullc breaks it down here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36119707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36119707

nullc 3y ago

Wow. That is a take my breath away level of untruthfulness. > in in support of "BRC-20" tokens, which is Bitcoin's feature reduced version of Ethereum's ERC-20 token It appears that BRC-20 is primarily affiliated with Calvin Ayre, the person backing "Bitcoin SV" and the conman pretending to be the creator of Bitcoin -- the three main entities connected to it are all funded by Ayre and they've been bragging pretty loudly about their disruption of Bitcoin ( https://nitter.it/B2029org/status/1655611301412982784 https://nitter.it/B2029org/status/1655611301412982784 ). I've heard speculation that the attacks are either a marketing pitch for "Bitcoin SV" (e.g. create congestion on Bitcoin then pivot to the unauditable centralized BSV blockchain, which always has room cause it's easy to scale centralized systems) or an effort to get Bitcoin community members to propose protocol changes to block the flood in order to substantiate the allegations in either of the Ayre-affiliated 6 billion dollar or hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars lawsuits. I'm not aware of any previous active Bitcoin developer that had anything to do with BRC-20 tokens, if you know of any I'm sure the bitcoin community would be very interested in learning of it. > changes recently that allow much larger transactions, Unless you are referring to increasing the capacity of blocks back in 2017, no change to the consensus rules that allowed larger transactions has happened. You can easily verify this for yourself by starting up an older copy of Bitcoin and observe that it accepts everything fine. In any case, this "BRC-20" crap is mostly only embedding 89 bytes of data ( https://twitter.com/jratcliff/status/1655669410206457865#m https://twitter.com/jratcliff/status/1655669410206457865#m )-- it doesn't need any larger transactions. It happens to stuff it into the most recent transaction type, but there is no reason that it couldn't put 89 bytes of data into pretty much any other kind of transaction. I think the false claim that BRC-20 was made possible by recent changes is mixture of confusion and an intentional deceptive cooperation cracking move, intended to direct even more harassment at project contributors but it's just not true.

willmadden 3y ago
Nothing I said was untruthful. The Taproot upgrade made the witness data discount from Segwit available to be used by inscriptions. This is what led to the explosion in BRC-20 transactions that are clogging up the mempool. According to this research, it's all coming from a single entity.
- nullc 3y ago
  > Nothing I said was untruthful. Not so, the very first sentence of your post was a flagrant untruth. > Bitcoin's developers made changes recently that allow much larger transactions, with blocks up to 4MB in size on the Bitcoin blockchain in support of "BRC-20" tokens, Okay, go ahead link to this "recent change" in support of "BRC-20" tokens. -- gonna be pretty hard in light of the fact that BRC-20 activity appears to be primarily (perhaps exclusively) by parties connected to the multiple billion dollars in lawsuits against bitcoin developers, and the fact that old versions of bitcoin are just as happy with the same transactions and the limits on transaction size are the same at least since 2017 or earlier. > what led to the explosion in BRC-20 transactions The BRC-20 transactions are just embedding 89 bytes of data (see link). They're a spam attack of a sort which has always been possible and is nearly impossible to block, I'm not aware of any basis under which you can argue anything "led to" it other than an attacker being willing to spend millions of dollars a day to DOS attack the the network.
  - willmadden 3y ago
    Segwit expanded the blocksize by allowing extra space for digital signatures at a discounted price. Taproot allowed BRC-20 to take advantage of this discounted data, which immediately led to the backlog. Whether that was the intent of the developers or not is not the point of my comment. The statement is factual. You are arguing about intent and who is to blame for the backlog. My comment has nothing to do with this other than pointing out that the OP shows it is coming from a single entity. If you assume “good intentions”, BRC-20 is stupid and makes no sense. It’s a reduced feature set ERC-20 token with far less throughput capacity that causes harm to the Bitcoin ecosystem. I agree this could be an adversary with an incentive to take market share away, it could be someone speculating that a token on Bitcoin could be an opportunity for profit, or likely both.

drexlspivey 3y ago

> TLDR/non-crypto summary: Bitcoin's developers made changes recently that allow much larger transactions, with blocks up to 4MB in size on the Bitcoin blockchain in support of "BRC-20" tokens, which is Bitcoin's feature reduced version of Ethereum's ERC-20 token. This is completely false. 4MB blocks are possible since segwit in 2017 and BRC-20 has nothing to do with bitcoin, it’s just some third party protocol that assigns meaning to random data stored in the blockchain. You can append random crap to your transaction and store it in the blockchain if you pay the fee, nothing has changed. The limit is still 4MB every 10 minutes.

willmadden 3y ago
What about my reply is false? Ordinal inscription transactions are huge and stored on-chain. This caused the backlog.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 3np 3y ago
  2017 is hardly "recently" in bitcoin terms. It's also easy to interpret your comments as implying BRC-20 was a motivating factor for 4MB blocks, which as others pointed out would be nonsense. nullc breaks it down here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36119707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36119707