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Inscription Disablement Controversy Settled: Luke Dashjr Proposal Rejected, What's Next?

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Original Title: "Inscription Ban Controversy Settles: Luke Dashjr's Proposal Rejected, Where Does the Controversy Go?"

Original Source: Chainfeeds

On January 7th, the proposal "datacarriersize: Match more datacarrying #28408" initiated by Bitcoin Core client developer Luke Dashjr was rejected after being discussed by multiple Bitcoin Core developers. The proposal was put forward by Luke Dashjr in September 2023, with the main goal of updating the Bitcoin Core software to enable effective use of updated data carrying methods to limit the development of plaintext.

After reading multiple comments on the proposal, ChainFeeds summarized the views of supporters and opponents. Supporters mainly emphasized the congestion problem currently faced by the Bitcoin network, especially the poor memory pool state and increasing number of junk transactions caused by script transactions. Opponents believe that the proposal cannot effectively solve the problem of junk mail because miners are unlikely to adopt this strategy due to income issues. In addition, the controversy also involves the complexity of proposal implementation and the potential code complexity it may bring.

Supporters

Supporters believe that the proposal is not related to the inscription itself, but to the network congestion it causes. Bitcoin node Léo Haf pointed out that "the current memory pool state is very bad, and the number of spam transactions has exceeded 200,000, and it seems that this number is still rising. These spam transactions have seriously hindered the actual application of Bitcoin." The security issues used by the inscription are also the main arguments of supporters. This vulnerability not only increases costs and prolongs transaction processing time, but may also become a potential carrier of DDoS attacks. In addition, the degree of decentralization of the network will also be affected, and nodes with less computing resources may have difficulty meeting the growing demand, leading to a more centralized network topology. Another worrying trend is that if too much and too large data continues to be stored on the Bitcoin chain, most block files may only contain endless BRC-20 json data at some point.

From the perspective of network participants, first of all, users who own a certain amount of Bitcoin are faced with high fees, which essentially prevents them from accessing the network normally. Secondly, for nodes, these transactions increase the operating costs of nodes, but there is no additional value for Bitcoin itself. Finally, for small miners, there is no benefit to the inscription, because reviewing these transactions will only encourage the development of private memory pools.

On the other hand, supporters also argue that this proposal only limits the amount of data carried in OP_RETURN, which has always been the "intention" of -datacarriersize. Supporter wizkid057 stated that "spam filtering has been done at different levels of code for over a decade, and what this PR does is simply apply the existing datacarriersize limit to another form of data transmission."

Opponents

Opponents, on the other hand, firmly believe that the proposal cannot effectively solve the problem of spam emails. First of all, miners are unlikely to adopt this strategy because Bitcoin Core miners using this PR update will lose a considerable amount of fees. Casey Rodarmor, founder of Ordinals, pointed out that glyph transactions have generated at least $100 million in transaction fees in the past ten months.

Bitcoin developer Sjors Provoost emphasized that "if only Ocean Pool uses this PR, it will not have any impact on the entire system. And if it is widely adopted, evasion will become easy and will lead to more complex code."

Bitcoin Optech contributor Murch believes that although inscriptions are foolish, compared to other ways of embedding data in the blockchain, inscriptions have less negative impact on the use of witness areas. However, there is a problem that the patch of this PR cannot prevent the relay operation of inscriptions, and supporters of inscriptions can still maintain the relay operation by ensuring that a small part of the nodes on the network do not filter inscriptions. Moreover, the income of miners who choose to filter inscriptions will decrease, and miners who ultimately run the patch will still process blocks including inscriptions. Therefore, he believes that the change of this PR does more harm than good.

Of course, whether or not it is possible to write code to detect embedded data has also become an important point of debate. Blockstream developer Lisa Neigut stated that excluding Ordinals transactions from Bitcoin by adding filters is a rather complex method.

Finally, Bitcoin Core developer Ava Chow closed this PR and stated that in the current situation, it is difficult to come up with a conclusion that satisfies everyone, so there is no need to continue the discussion. Luke Dashjr has been criticizing the inscription since November last year, but in fact, his negative view of the inscription is mainly due to concerns about the potential risks of the Bitcoin mainnet, rather than completely eradicating the inscription. From the proposal, it can also be seen that Luke Dashjr expects most nodes to comply with this PR and does not exclude mining pools willing to package inscription data, although this may cause some inconvenience to users, but it may also stimulate some development opportunities for Bitcoin Layer2.