Tony 🥩 ⚡ on Nostr: I was thinking about ordinals some more today after my post from yesterday. Unless ...
I was thinking about ordinals some more today after my post from yesterday. Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this opens up a whole new attack vector for a well capitalized opponent of bitcoin.
Let me explain. Before if you wanted to consume space on a block you had to buy and transmit bitcoin. Since there is a fixed amount and since the size was directly correlated to the transaction itself, there was no feasible way to flood the system. You'd have to buy all the bitcoin and then send it through the system.
With ordinals, the space you consume is not directly correlated with the financial transaction itself. It can be produced at will and is not itself finite like the underlying asset. You can send a tiny amount, but still consume most of the block. This opens up the possibility of a denial of service attack.
The block below is mostly consumed by just 12 ordinals at an average of $21 in fee each. At today's prices you can consume a whole block for $252. If the US government decides they want to shut down bitcoin by making it unusable, they could perform a denial of service account by filling up the blocks with ordinals.
If they spent $25 million (which is nothing for governments), they could fill up 99,206 blocks. At an average of 10 minutes/block, that's almost 2 years to process. At 10x that amount, they could shut it down for 20 years.
Let me explain. Before if you wanted to consume space on a block you had to buy and transmit bitcoin. Since there is a fixed amount and since the size was directly correlated to the transaction itself, there was no feasible way to flood the system. You'd have to buy all the bitcoin and then send it through the system.
With ordinals, the space you consume is not directly correlated with the financial transaction itself. It can be produced at will and is not itself finite like the underlying asset. You can send a tiny amount, but still consume most of the block. This opens up the possibility of a denial of service attack.
The block below is mostly consumed by just 12 ordinals at an average of $21 in fee each. At today's prices you can consume a whole block for $252. If the US government decides they want to shut down bitcoin by making it unusable, they could perform a denial of service account by filling up the blocks with ordinals.
If they spent $25 million (which is nothing for governments), they could fill up 99,206 blocks. At an average of 10 minutes/block, that's almost 2 years to process. At 10x that amount, they could shut it down for 20 years.