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

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2023 17:49:43 +0000

On Sun, Sep 03, 2023 at 06:01:02PM +0200, vjudeu via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > Given the current concerns with blockchain size increases due to inscriptions, and now that the lightning network is starting to gain more traction, perhaps people are now more willing to consider a smaller blocksize in favor of pushing more activity to lightning?
>  
> People will not agree to shrink the maximum block size. However, if you want to kill inscriptions, there is another approach, that could be used to force them into second layers: it is called cut-through, and was described in this topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=281848.0
>  
> Then, if you have "Alice -> Bob -> ... -> Zack" transaction chain, and for example some inscriptions were created in "Alice -> Bob" transaction, then cut-through could remove those inscriptions, while leaving the payment unaffected, because the proper amount of coins will be received by Zack, as it should be.

You are incorrect: cut-through transactions will not meaningfully affect
inscriptions. While it is true that with fancy cryptography we can prove the
Alice -> ... -> Zack chain, that does not change the fact that Alice -> Bob ->
Zack was mined in the blockchain, and those transactions exist. Anyone running
a full archival node will still have those transactions, and can provide them
(and all their inscription data) to anyone who needs it.

This is not unlike how in Bitcoin right now many people run pruned nodes that
do not have any archival inscription data. Them running those nodes does not
prevent others from running full archival nodes that do make that data
available.

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org