Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Concern about "Inscriptions".

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2023 07:30:32 +0200

> and I would like to understand why this problem has not been addressed more seriously

Because if nobody has any good solution, then status quo is preserved. If tomorrow ECDSA would be broken, the default state of the network would be "just do nothing", and every solution would be backward-compatible with that approach. Burn old coins, and people will call it "Tether", redistribute them, and people will call it "BSV". Leave everything untouched, and the network will split into N parts, and then you pick the strongest chain to decide, what should be done.

> However, when it comes to inscriptions, there are no available options except for a patch produced by Luke Dashjr.

Because the real solution should address some different problem, that was always there, and nobody knows, how to deal with it: the problem of forever-growing initial blockchain download time, and forever-growing UTXO set. Some changes with "assume UTXO" are trying to address just that, but this code is not yet completed.

> So, I wonder why there are no options to reject inscriptions in the mempool of a node.

Because it will lead you to never ending chase. You will block one inscriptions, and different ones will be created. Now, they are present even on chains, where there is no Taproot, or even Segwit. That means, if you try to kill them, then they will be replaced by N regular indistinguishable transactions, and then you will go back to those more serious problems under the hood: IBD time, and UTXO size.

> Inscriptions are primarily used to sell NFTs or Tokens, concepts that the Bitcoin community has consistently rejected.

The community also rejected things like sidechains, and they are still present, just in a more centralized form. There are some unstoppable concepts, for example soft-forks. You cannot stop a soft-fork. What inscription creators did, is just non-enforced soft-fork. They believe their rules are followed to the letter, but this is not the case, as you can create a valid Bitcoin transaction, that will be some invalid Ordinals transaction (because their additional rules are not enforced by miners and nodes).