Much of the discussion surrounding Bitcoin in the past year has focused on how to use it. or how it should be used. The whole Ordinals/Inscription mania of the last year has created a horde of Bitcoiners who are essentially screaming like babies at how other users decide to use their own Bitcoin.
This is completely separate and disconnected from the entire design philosophy of Bitcoin in the first place: to be an open access permissionless system. To be something You cannot be prevented from using. Much of the “technical discussion” over the past year outside the developer community has focused heavily on the technical methods that can be used. Prevent other Bitcoin users from using Bitcoin.
It’s amazing to me that so many people in this space have made such changes, which are impossible to do without crippling the use of Bitcoin, that they arbitrarily put on the “allowed” list, their Such a big focus. This is insane. Bitcoiners are actively trying to figure out how to censor other Bitcoiners because they don’t like the way Bitcoin is used.
There are two primary rationales for this. 1) Those inscriptions are hurting people’s ability to bootstrap a new full node. That’s wrong, the bottleneck of initial node syncing isn’t bandwidth (where inscriptions add a small amount of data needed), it’s data verification. Inscriptions need not be verified. The more inscriptions, the cheaper the verification costs, because nodes simply download it and do not verify anything that contains the inscription data when validating those transactions. 2) That it is raising fees. Increasing fees is inevitable, and results in a limited blocksize cap.
Here’s what Satoshi said to someone complaining about the fees in 2010:
“It’s only when you’re sending a very large transaction that a transaction fee ever applies, and even then it works out to something like 0.002% of the amount. This is not money taken out of the system, it just goes to other nodes. If you’re sick of paying fees, you can always turn the tables and run a node yourself and maybe get the 0.44 fee yourself someday.”
These arguments are simply broken, and completely missing the point. If you can prevent anyone from using Bitcoin, then Bitcoin has failed in its original value proposition. There is nothing that can regulate the use of Bitcoin that actually works on how it works except the economic pressure of fees. If anything but it can prevent you from using the system, it doesn’t work. It is not censorship resistant. It has failed.
People worried about the externalities of use cases that affect their own should do something productive, such as how to adapt their own uses of Bitcoin in a way that makes them use it for other purposes. Works properly in people’s face.
Instead, many bitcoiners are just crying to mommy and daddy so the bad guys can stop using bitcoin. The fact that this is still an argument that exists in the conversation to any extent is just sad at this point. This is one of the factors contributing to the improvement in Bitcoin can do Optimize their use cases to work properly in front of stalling others.
It’s time to grow up and stop whining about what other people are doing with their property, and instead focus on what you want to do with your own property.
This article is a take. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
