Why can’t we block inscriptions technically?

Why is it not possible to block inscriptions using technology?

Author: Ben Carman, Bitcoin Magazine; Translation: Song Xue, LianGuai

Since the notorious Taproot Wizard 4mb blocks, Bitcoin enthusiasts have been working hard to prevent engravings. Engravings are definitely detrimental to Bitcoin, but the ways in which Bitcoin holders are trying to stop them are causing even more damage than the engravings themselves.

The way engravings work is by using techniques in the Bitcoin script to embed images or other data into the Bitcoin blockchain. Essentially, the data is placed in an inaccessible code block, followed by the real spending conditions, so that users can claim ordinality/NFT. This is a clever trick, but it breaks many assumptions that Bitcoin holders follow.

Previously, the main way of embedding data in Bitcoin was OP_RETURN, which was basically an opcode completely dedicated to embedding data, but it posed two problems for NFTs: it rendered the tokens unusable and memory pool policies limited it to 80 bytes. The advantage of engravings is that their only size restriction is the block size, and since their data is in the witness and not in the outputs, they benefit from the witness discount, allowing them to embed 4 times more data. This breaks many assumptions of Bitcoin enthusiasts that the theoretical 4mb blocks would never happen because only the witness data is silly, however, NFT people have found a way to tokenize it. As it has become common now, we have seen a large number of engravings, which in turn drive up fees and block size.

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However, since it has already happened and is commonplace, we cannot stop it.

In response, Bitcoin supporters are proposing methods to “stop” engravings, which would cause even more severe damage than engravings themselves.

Almost all proposals to stop engravings can be summed up as preventing these transactions from entering the memory pool. The memory pool is the battlefield of Bitcoin transactions, and we need to protect it. The memory pool can only function when it is the primary way for miners to get high fee transactions. If we lose this guarantee, people will turn to centralized systems, and we may never get the memory pool back. Filtering out spam transactions from the memory pool will not stop engravings, at most it will only delay them for a week. They have already communicated with mining pools through reverse channels, and if we cut them off from the memory pool, the only mining pools that would receive these fees are the ones producing junk coins. This situation has happened in many junk coin networks, where their memory pool has been terminated for some reason, and now the primary way to broadcast transactions is through centralized APIs. This essentially creates a permissioned network, where even if anyone can run a node, if you don’t have access to the transaction broadcast API, you cannot access Bitcoin. We are currently seeing Congress increasingly working to regulate nodes, miners, and wallets as money transmitters, and losing the memory pool would make this problem a thousand times worse. If we lose the memory pool, we cannot perform trustless fee estimation and there will be serious security issues, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

Furthermore, filtering transactions based on the “spam” indicator may lead us down a dark path. The most economical way to transact in Bitcoin is not necessarily the most private. Currently, the most popular way to achieve Bitcoin privacy on-chain is through CoinJoin. CoinJoin is not necessarily an economical transaction, it is essentially just spending together with others. If we set such a precedent that you have to prove the usefulness of your transaction to avoid being deemed spam, people will soon find a way to exploit this and attempt to deem CoinJoin and other privacy techniques as spam by excluding them from the mempool.

In the past decade, we have seen many garbage coin bubbles, and this time is no exception. Garbage coin creators will eventually run out of fools to buy into their scams, and everything will return to normal, but we must not shoot ourselves in the foot by trying to prematurely prevent things from happening, as we can only wait for things to play out.

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