Challenge is helpful for growth.

In 2017, the dust attack and spam on network helps us to have a better capacity of Bitcoin network to handle transactions today.
In 2023, the Ordinals attack can force Bitcoin developers and community to build new solution and reach to a new consensus to make a better capacity for it. It's good, not harmful in long term.

Waiting transactions in mempools are low transaction fee rates. People don't join fee race too much as I see. Fee rates are about 10 sat/vbyte are good enough and if you can wait for weekends, you can use lower fee rates like 3 to 5 sat/vbyte.

https://mempool.space/

It is different than 2 or 3 years ago with low Segwit adoption, people joined fee rate race and use very high rates like 50 sat/vbyte or 100 sat/vbyte.

"good enough" for whom.. since when?
you do know that a third of the worlds hourly minimum wage is below a tx fee currently.. right?

do you really think that paying an hour of labour to move money is "good enough"
im british. but even i can see outside of my local expectation and think about international concerns of an international currency

anyway. lets see if things really have got better or worse since segwit..


2016(pre segwit) the average btc was ~$450
meaning 0.00000100 was  $0.00045
so an average 2in 2out tx (374byte) at 100 sat/byte =$0.1683

2022(pre ordinal) the average btc was ~$17000
meaning 0.00000005 was  $0.00085
meaning 0.00000010 was  $0.0017
 the average transaction size was 650bytes
at 5sat/byte was $0.5525
at 10sat/byte was $1.105

the data/stats for 2022 show the average transaction cost for 2022 was more like $1.17
not 55c nor 17cents
..
as for saying
"just pay more join the fee war"
"just wait longer, upto a couple days for confirm"
"just wait for weekends to make a payment"

are all silly delay, excuses to not get the fee's sorted and the transactions per block sorted. by instead saying "yea dont use bitcoin as much or be prepared to wait or pay more"

those silly excuses are not good to tell people to do in a payment system

especially when its ethos is a payment system for the unbanked whereby the unbanked population see $1 as many hours of minimum wage

---

the solution is not "pay more".. "wait longer".. "use another network"

the solution is:
leaner transactions
fee mechanism that punishes the spammers not the lean/genuine spenders
remove the byte-miscounting cludge and open the 4mb for genuine payment data not dead 'weight'

result is more genuine transaction payments per block. meaning people pay less per tx but more get access per block

in my opinion, the new utility made people just test what it is and how it works, and hence such interest and spam on the network. Sooner or later it will calm down, the volume of this type of transactions will drop by 99% and everything will return to normal, because as you yourself pointed out "just another bullshit"

High fees will also push such transactions to other chains (like BSC).

If the fees rise, what will force the person to use the main network while the possibility of using the lightning network? Or any solutions for the second layer? Just like it happened with polygon.
The problem of fees is considered a problem by increasing the alert, which is the real transactions that must be conducted on the network, and therefore the more users increase, the more this problem appears, but its solution will be by developing more and more solutions. As for spam, it is temporary and linked to a specific trend such as NFT, and it is not sustainable growth.

So we have a collection of entities interested in spamming Bitcoin, that are now observing how its possible to do so in a sustainable way... Since there is a market willing to pay for the spam in detriment of genuine transactions...

There is yet no known method for discouraging this spam without introducing censorship other than the transaction fee. So no improvements. You just have to accept that these are perfectly valid and currency-based transactions, unless you want Bitcoin to switch to a pro-censorship network.

How can you distinguish spam on a protocol level to punish it?

Nothing, we just pay more and I might start mining again with all those juicy fees! 
If the fees stay high it means there is still usage, so people keep paying, just as how it happens with ETH, it will be bad for the ones doing transactions on the chain but at the same time it will have a positive effect on pushing more LN adoption. One more positive fact is that it is driving franky1 mad, as seen above!


Highly unlikely to see any change, after the block size war nobody will try to open that can of worms again, especially since it would mean actually acknowledging a bit of what big blockers were saying is true. The only other thing is to ban ordinals, but that opens another box, this time it's Pandora's turn. So, the users will have to adapt or at least wait till the hype will die, which I assume will be faster than most expect.

Everyone's warranted to their own say, in any case I see this issue with Bitcoin Ordinals as having both good and bad sides to it.

For instance, since this spams the mempool and jacks the transaction price high, at least in the future coz the effects aren't that much apparent nowadays, this will cause huge problems for the growth of the network and the industry itself, might even cause a huge collapse as more and more people switch to a different network that is not as congested as bitcoin could be in the future.

There's also the story of the past where a certain challenge (which I forgot the details of really) urged the whole network to improve upon itself and better cater to the general public, I can see this being the more apparent outcome in this situation but the former could still pose some truth, especially nowadays.

Just an update

The mempool is now getting towards 500 MBs of unconfirmed transactions, and it isn't even one of those times when the market is crazy and people are in panic moving BTC back and forth.



This is crazy already! I have never seen the mempool at 500 MB, Maybe I wasn't just observant in the past. Imagine what will happen during a serious bull run or dump!

And those who said that transaction fees will keep low because people will not join the fee race, Just look at the fee rate right now, and it's just getting started @tbct_mt2 @