The Ordinals Debate Unveils a Battle for Decentralization and Transaction Costs BCHers Were Right.
The Bitcoin community is once again at the center of a heated debate, with Ordinals taking the spotlight as the latest source of contention. On Twitter, discussions are rife with arguments both for and against the protocol. Some developers are advocating for the outright censorship of transactions through software upgrades, echoing the tactics employed during the Bitcoin and Bitcoin BCH split in 2017.
Back then, Bitcoin Core BTC developers and social media managers implemented censorship, a practice that persists to this day. Now, supporters of Bitcoin Core are attempting to censor legitimate full Bitcoin transactions, arguing that the rising fees imposed by Ordinals are necessary for miners to cover their electricity costs. However, critics argue that developers should not wield the power to censor transactions, fearing a slippery slope toward increased censorship.
The crux of the issue lies in the Ordinals' impact on Bitcoin transaction fees due to the 1Mb legacy limit and 4Mb SegWit limit. In contrast, Bitcoin Cash BCH resolved this problem by adopting 32Mb blocks, dismissing concerns about network centralization with the availability of high-speed internet connections and affordable 20TB hard drives.
Bitcoin Cash has something similar to Ordinals it is called CashTokens.
The CashTokens protocol already has a decentralized exchange, good NFT projects, and a lot of tokens out in the wild. I tested with Furu tokens because that token will have utility. I also used in the past BCHBulls a leverage trading platform from my private keys without the need for centralized exchanges.
To swap my BCH for Furu I paid a transaction fee of 2500 satoshis in total, if I were to make the same transaction in Bitcoin Ordinals it would cost me at least 0.00565 in total. Even if Bitcoin Cash was the same price as Bitcoin the fee would still be around $1 in total while with BTC it would be today $250 or more.
I already pay for my internet service around $60 a month for a 300Mpbs connection, by utilizing CashTokens I just saved enough money to pay for a 15TB hard drive and run the BCH node for 10 years so that BCH won't be centralized at all.
The Ordinals war.
The war will come once developers in their campaign to censor Ordinals create software to try to censor those transactions but in the end what can a bunch of non-mining nodes do to stop mining nodes from including those transactions and disabling any software that affects miners' bottom line transaction revenue. In the end, this could end up creating yet another fork and if the ETF is implemented by that date it could also have unattended consequences beyond just the Ordianal protocol.
This will in the end prove that BCHers were right the way to scale is to include everyone's financial needs in a decentralized way scaling on-chain with blocks that go hand in hand with current technology availability.