Think about the essence of blockchain from Luke Dashjr's "radical rhetoric".

Author: Faust& Foggy Moon, geek web3

· The Ordinals protocol is a system for numbering satoshi (SATS, BTC smallest unit), or a derivative protocol with BTC UTXO as the data storage medium, which is essentially a set of “dyed coins”;

· Luke Dashjr wants to solve the problem of “junk data” brought by BRC-20 and Ordinals to the BTC mainnet, which is to reduce the burden on BTC and ensure its simplicity and decentralization, rather than an absolute negation of BRC-20 itself.

From the perspective of Luke’s solution alone, as long as one mining pool is willing to package Ordinals and BRC-20 transaction data, both of them can survive on the BTC network, but the UX will be significantly worse (the pending delay of BRC-20 transactions will be longer), but this also shows the potential and opportunities of BTC Layer 2;

If utopian slogans such as “Alternatives to the Dollar” and “Code is Law” can be falsified over time, what is the meaning of BTC and blockchain? What exactly is the problem it really solves?

Recently, Luke Dashjr, a veteran of the BTC community, has sparked a lot of discussion about BRC-20. Luke believes that BRC-20 and the inscription protocol bypass the data size limit of BTC blocks and forcibly stuff a large amount of “junk data” into the block, which will cause unnecessary burden on nodes, because it will increase the overhead of nodes in terms of network speed, bandwidth and storage capacity, and if this situation continues for a long time, it will continue to reduce the decentralization of the BTC network, and eventually dismantle the fine tradition on which the “most decentralized blockchain ecosystem” depends.

In fact, Luke’s worries are not unfounded. On February 1 of this year, its “largest block ever” appeared within the BTC network, with a size of 3.96MB, simply because the block contained an NFT called Taproot Wizards. **This phenomenon was identified by Luke Dashjr and others at the time, which will make the block size of the BTC remain high, which in turn will increase the hardware requirements of full nodes, and an important part of decentralization is precisely to reduce the cost of running the node for users. If the BTC of the future becomes like Solana and Sui, and people can only run nodes in third-party data centers, this will be sad for BTC community and Web3 as a whole.

While increasing node bandwidth/storage overhead and weakening decentralization, the large block itself will also have an impact on security, because the larger the block, the slower the propagation speed within the network, the worse the data consistency of the node, and the higher the orphan block rate and ledger bifurcation rate, the Conflux team has emphasized this point many times before, and the ETH Foundation has also been evaluating the impact of the larger block size on security after the EIP-4844 is launched, which will inevitably “lead to the whole body”.

Aside from the negative impact of BRC-20 and Ordinals on the underlying security and decentralization of the BTC network, the “matryoshka” practice of putting derivative assets in the BTC UTXO is also a new risk, which is essentially the security problems that the derivative assets themselves need to solve, directly transferred to the BTC network to bear, if the total value of these derivatives exceeds the value of the assets/computing power required to ensure the security of the BTC network, there may be “top-heavy, overweight upper” This risk point has become more and more explicit in the POS ETH shop. Previously, the “celebrity in the technology circle” Xiang Ma also expressed his concern about this issue in an interview.

But interestingly, although Luke expressed a negative attitude towards BRC-20 and various inscriptions in some of his remarks, and said that if the new version of the node client code is released and widely adopted, BRC-20 and Ordinals may disappear by then, but when others pointed out that BTC Layer 2 could be used as a new home for BRC-20 to avoid burdening the BTC mainnet, Luke affirmed this view and did not “ideologically” about BRC-20 on the absolute negation. Later, Luke himself said bluntly: ** It is not necessary to eradicate all the inscriptions in order to bring benefits to the BTC network. **

In the final analysis, Luke’s dissatisfaction seems to be that the risk of data inflation caused by various derivatives to the BTC mainnet is not so much that these derivatives themselves are “wiped out”, but more that he wants to expel “uninvited guests” such as Ordinals to facilities outside the BTC mainnet, which brings opportunities to BTC Layer 2 itself. However, Luke’s radical approach itself has also sparked controversy among many people, not only involving disputes over the right to speak in BTC ecology, but also reflecting the essence of the product design philosophy between BTC and ETH - Vitalik disagreed with Luke and others on similar matters many years ago, which indirectly led to the former’s determination to make a chain of his own. **

In the following, we will analyze the technical aspects of the Ordinals protocol and Luke’s solution, and briefly explain the respective problems of the “Satoshi Nakamoto” represented by Luke and the “speculators” represented by the BRC-20 players. If Web3 isn’t as grand and beautiful as some people say it is, what exactly is it worth? **

Briefly analyze the principle of the Ordinals protocol

From a purely technical point of view, the Ordinals protocol is a system for numbering satoshis (SATS, BTC smallest unit), or a derivative protocol based on BTC UTXO as the storage medium. ** Ordinals assigns a serial number to each satoshi and appends additional data (text, images, code, etc.) to make each satoshi a unique NFT, a process called “inscription”.

BRC-20 is based on Ordinals and introduces an ERC-20 fungible token issuance method. However, BTC script is not Turing complete and cannot implement a smart contract system as complex as ETH Fang. Taking the simplest transfer function as an example, derivative assets based on the Ordinals protocol need to be written into the script as follows:

It can be seen that this is a plain text interaction, BTC the network itself does not perform any calculations and state settlements on the transaction content of BRC-20. The BRC-20 transfer success and other messages seen by users are the final results obtained by those nodes who agree with the Ordinals protocol after they parse + calculate the original scripts on the BTC chain.

If you only have 100 ORDI, but the number is written as 10,000 at the time of transfer, you can also send the transaction to the BTC network, but the relevant nodes and browsers will not parse it into a valid transfer.

Therefore, Ordinals essentially only treats the BTC network as a permanent data and immutable network disk, and only metadata, operation statements, etc. are engraved on the chain, but the operation and state settlement of all operations are all located in the server of the off-chain data index website. This line of thinking is almost identical to EverPay, a project in the Arweave ecosystem.

Taken together, Ordinals has the following problems:

1. There is no consensus state computing layer. **The data parsed by different wallets, browsers, etc. is not necessarily the same, and there have been many times before that user assets have different display results in different wallets.
2. Rely on centralized Indexer infrastructure. **By blockchain standards, this kind of application has no strict security requirements and is unreliable.
3. Narrow use cases. **None of the complex DeFi activities in ETH can be done based on the simple Ordinals protocol, and even the current Ordinals transactions can only be done through pending orders, rather than using popular AMMs. So, it seems that a product like Ordinals would be better implemented on ETH.

**4. Internet pollution. **Ordinals’ operation of Satoshi, such as thousands of users operating only $0.1 worth of money and paying a $10 transfer fee in a short period of time, is very similar to a dust attack in the eyes of BTC fundamentalists, who see the BTC as mainly for storing value and transfers, and Ordinals activity seriously disrupts the normal operation of the network.

5. Increased the cost of use for users. **Various inscriptions have inflated the fees of the BTC mainnet, affecting other users, and the new infrastructure introduced by BRC-20 and Ordinals requires users to understand and use new wallets, new tools, etc.

Luke’s solution

In the face of BRC-20 and Ordinals problems, Luke did not directly modify the consensus layer, but modified the Spam Filter(policy) module to make the node directly reject Ordinals transactions when receiving P2P broadcast messages. **In policy, there are multiple isStandard() series functions to check if all aspects of the transaction meet the criteria, and if not, the transaction received by the node is quickly discarded.

In other words, Ordinals can eventually be on-chain, but most nodes will not put such data into the transaction pool, which will extend the delay of Ordinals data being delivered to mining pools that are willing to package it on-chain. However, if a mining pool broadcasts a block containing a BRC-20 transaction, the nodes will still accept it.

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Luke has already submitted policy changes in the Bitcoin Knots client, and in the Bitcoin Core client, he wants to add the same commit. In policy.cpp, he added a new parameter called g__size_policy_limit, which limits the size of the script in several places.

In the previous client, there was no limit on the size of the Pay-to-Taproot script (i.e. the type of transaction used by Ordinals), which was finally filled in here

Among them, g__size_policy_limit default value is 1650 bytes, which will limit the script used in many Ordinals, the following figure shows the size of an NFT-related script:

However, since this parameter is only used for the Spam Filter module, not the consensus module, nodes can modify the size of this parameter to receive transactions from larger scripts. While these transactions do not meet the expectations of Core developers, they can still be accepted by the BTC consensus protocol,** i.e., as long as a mining pool is willing to package Ordinals-related transaction data, Ordinals will still survive on the BTC network, but the UX of the users involved will be worse than it is now (the response delay will become longer than it is now). **

This approach does not completely eliminate on-chain activity from Ordinals and does not introduce any hard forks. Although there will be nodes that do not comply with the new policy, since there was no policy before, the number of Ordinals activities can be reduced as long as there are nodes that comply with the update.

Luke’s expectation is that most nodes will adhere to his proposed policy. This update is generally flexible. As long as one mining pool is willing to package BRC-20 and Ordinals data, the latter two can still survive on BTC mainnet, but the user experience will be poor. However, as long as BTC Layer 2 is launched quickly, the BRC-20 and Ordinals can “wind and water” on Layer 2.

Luke Dashjr’s Hidden Blockchain Faith Crisis

So what should we say about Luke Dashjr’s behavior? Is all this really as simple as a “big block vs. small block” battle? Admittedly, if you look at all this from a technical and product perspective, it seems that Luke is only defending the BTC community’s long-standing philosophy of minimalism and decentralization, which is completely different from the conservative thinking of ETH, which has always been an “indispensable part of the blockchain world”.

Some people also believe that the BTC itself is a huge experimental field of community governance, and Luke Dashjr only represents one of the forces, and the BTC does not belong to one person, it is a hybrid product formed by the multi-party game between miners, exchanges, developers, and users, no matter how Luke targets BRC-20, those dazzling inscriptions will find a suitable home in the BTC ecosystem.

But this article is not intended to dwell on these two points, and is intended to lead to issues that most people are not aware of:

If we look at the recent “Luke Dashjr” incident from an ideological point of view, it is not difficult to abstract it into a conflict between the “technocracy” and the “transactional faction”, which has already revealed the contradiction between the two factions, and Luke Dashjr has further exacerbated the disagreement between the two, making people think about the BTC and even the “ownership” of the blockchain itself: who can represent the BTC ecosystem? Is it the OG contributors who are under the banner of Satoshi Nakamoto’s successor, or the speculators who are tireless in coin trading all day long?

If you look at it from the perspective of BTC community OG such as Luke, most BRC-20 enthusiasts are mercenary people who “don’t listen to what’s going on outside the window and only make money on the chain”, and the interests of these “selfish” people don’t seem to be worth defending, and expelling BRC-20 from the BTC network is conducive to the long-term interests of the BTC ecosystem, which is more “important” than satisfying the greed of coin speculators.

But on the other hand, those who completely deny the value of BRC-20 and Ordinals, and do not take into account the interests of “mainstream Web3 users”, seem to be equally selfish and thoughtless.

In the final analysis, the financial market itself does not contain morality, it is difficult to say whose behavior is more ethical and whose behavior is immoral, everything is determined only by mechanisms and rules (as Soros said), and the Permissionless advocated by the blockchain does not deny the existence of “air coins” such as BRC-20, so simply under the banner of unattainable “BTC fundamentalism” to squeeze those inscription players, Is it also a violation of the spirit of Permissionless? If you think about it from this perspective, is Luke’s behavior really worthy of recognition? Did those who supported or opposed him reflect on this act?

Although countless people have made passionate descriptions of the grand vision that blockchain can bring, and have more than once admired the so-called “Satoshi spirit” and “trustless maximalism”, why is it that the “dollar alternative” and “next-generation Internet” fantasized by Satoshi Nakamoto and Gavin Wood and others have not yet arrived, but a series of things that “cannot be elegant” have come first? Is this due to the poor UX and barrier to use of the “decentralized network” itself?

For something that is not user-friendly and can almost never compete with Web2 in terms of user experience, what scenarios can Web2 not bring to people? If it is difficult to obtain the advantages of products that Web2 does not have, can the so-called “trustless” Slogan really be accepted by most people? , but don’t want to be kind to the wool party in the portrait of mainstream users, Is this attitude itself a kind of Kongyi-style hypocrisy and selfishness?

Perhaps techno-supremacists are in a position to ridicule BRC-20 players for their mercenary nature, arguing that blockchain shouldn’t be reduced to an “on-chain casino”, but we should think more seriously about what blockchain means. If it is not as grand and respectable as Satoshi Nakamoto said, and many of the utopian ideas it advocates have been falsified over time, then is there a major crisis of faith comparable to Nietzsche’s “death of God” hidden behind the so-called “code is law”, “Mass Adoption” and even “Web 3.0”? If the so-called “Satoshi Doctrine” is just a kind of empty castle similar to Marxism, then should we reflect on what exactly the problems Web3 can solve? **

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We may not be able to give a direct answer to the above questions, but there is no doubt that the bishoppable and pluralistic community nature of the blockchain itself will eventually give people a higher freedom of choice than in realpolitik, and in this imperfect Web3 world, there will not be only one version of the chain. Compared with the sovereign state in reality, this Blockchain, which can build a pluralistic “country” according to the wishes of different groups, will eventually become a supplement and optimization on top of the real democratic governance, rather than simply as an unrealistic and boring slogan such as “dollar substitute” and “Web2 gravedigger”. **