Hi guys,
I think everyone on this list knows what has happened to the Bitcoin mempool
during the past 96 hours. Due to side projects such as BRC-20 having such a
high volume, real bitcoin transactions are being priced out and that is what is
causing the massive congestion that has arguable not been seen since December
2017. I do not count the March 2021 congestion because that was only with
1-5sat/vbyte.
Such justifiably worthless ("worthless" is not even my word - that's how its
creator described them[1]) tokens threaten the smooth and normal use of the
Bitcoin network as a peer-to-pear digital currency, as it was intended to be
used as.
If the volume does not die down over the next few weeks, should we take an
action? The bitcoin network is a triumvirate of developers, miners, and users.
Considering that miners are largely the entities at fault for allowing the
system to be abused like this, the harmony of Bitcoin transactions is being
disrupted right now. Although this community has a strong history of not
putting its fingers into pies unless absolutely necessary - an example being
during the block size wars and Segwit - should similar action be taken now, in
the form of i) BIPs and/or ii) commits into the Bitcoin Core codebase, to
curtail the loophole in BIP 342 (which defines the validation rules for Taproot
scripts) which has allowed these unintended consequences?
An alternative would be to enforce this "censorship" at the node level and
introduce a run-time option to instantly prune all non-standard Taproot
transactions. This will be easier to implement, but won't hit the road until
minimum next release.
I know that some people will have their criticisms about this,
absolutists/libertarians/maximum-freedom advocates, which is fine, but we need
to find a solution for this that fits everyone's common ground. We indirectly
allowed this to happen, which previously wasn't possible before. So we also
have a responsibility to do something to ensure that this kind of congestion
can never happen again using Taproot.
-Ali
---
[1]:
[https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/05/pump-the-brcs-the-promise-and-peril-of-bitcoin-backed-tokens/](https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/05/pump-the-brcs-the-promise-and-peril-of-bitcoin-backed-tokens/?outputType=amp)_______________________________________________
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