bitcoin-dev

Purely off-chain coin colouring

Purely off-chain coin colouring

Original Postby Aymeric Vitte

Posted on: February 2, 2023 16:06 UTC

The discussion revolves around the idea of off-chain data storage for NFTs and the use of third-party platforms such as IPFS, Arweave etc.

The limitations of these platforms are highlighted as they cannot guarantee permanent availability of stored content. The proposal suggests using a well-known third party like GitHub, Twitter or Wayback Machine, which would assure the availability of snapshots even if they get censored or disappear. The focus is on storing only hashes, signatures and addresses in Bitcoin, while the NFT content is stored elsewhere. Furthermore, the third-party platform can store proof that the NFT exists and provide a small copy of the NFT electronic art, with the buyer getting the full version after the deal is done and receiving the decryption key. The proposal suggests making changes to the OP_RETURN max size, which is currently limited and cannot even store '+'. It is suggested to align it with the script size limit to overcome this limitation. Deviant practices could occur if the limit is not increased, but it is important to keep proposals simple rather than super-complicated. In response to the proposal, Peter Todd expresses his disagreement with moving inscriptions entirely off-chain, citing the benefits of publishing data on-chain and taking advantage of the large network of archival Bitcoin nodes to publish and store data indefinitely. He believes advocating the use of off-chain data models like nostr is reckless since it does not have a clear data persistence model and is difficult for others to archive messages completely. Moreover, Todd highlights the existence of the RGB protocol, which implements off-chain custody proofs and allows for the implementation of NFTs. Digital assets can be transferred with O(log_2(n)) scaling, allowing billions of transfers per second. However, he notes that this is irrelevant to Ordinals, which will never have such a large market. Overall, the discussion revolves around the advantages and limitations of on-chain and off-chain data storage for NFTs and the need to keep proposals simple.