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Ordinals and inscriptions aren’t using bitcoin the money. They are merely using #Bitcoin  *nodes* to store their garbage, and the bitcoin *name* to sell it to people. It makes perfect, and necessary, logic to build, optimize, and restrict the #Bitcoin  system to only allow and facilitate the bitcoin *money.* This isn’t a contradiction, it isn’t censorship, it’s necessary to defining what the protocol even does. Any other arguments you want to have about the difficulty, feasibility, or foolishness of making or trying to reverse changes or certain data that is already included are valid. But the above point is true no matter what side you take.

Replies (22)

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I agree that we need to protect the main use case of Bitcoin as money, but changes to the protocol in order to do this need to be taken very seriously and we need to think if it’s long term needed at all. The majority of people that are using Bitcoin for data storage are trying to resell what they are inscribing for a profit. The hype will eventually die off and so will the expectation of profit. If the free market can solve our problems, doing nothing may be the best thing we can do. There’s a small minority of these people actually trying to store data in an immutable way, but as NOSTR as a protocol grows I think these people will naturally move here to do this. Just my 2 sats hope I wasn’t rambling
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Should there not be #Bitcoin, storing #ordinals sounds like asking a highly reputed bank to keep my groceries in their safes for a hefty fee. I'm willing to pay millions of money units to store a few cucumbers in certain bank safes–those with unique serial numbers; what's wrong with that? I guess they will eventually gain some value and I could sell one or two to the next collector of banked cucumbers. View quoted note →
I'm suprised you of all people have this take. I have heard your voice countless times in my hears laying out why the only sensible use of a blockchain is money, i.e. people only have one worthy use for a decentralized inefficient database. Blockspace is blockspace. Money just happens to be the only worthy use case for block space in the long run. There is absolutely 0 need to enforce that directly. The free market naturally self corrects malinvestments. Doing so just makes bitcoiners look desperate, insecure and petty.
I know everyone was praising taproot, but the question I have not being super technical and only seeing the unintended consequences of ordinals is did it actually make bitcoin better money? I’m seeing the ordinal downside without the upside.
↩ replying to Paul
Ordinals aren’t that big of a downside, and there are a lot of important capabilities of taproot that make it really good to have. In fact with something like BitVM, we may have options for scaling that we hadn’t thought possible. I’ve always felt the room for incredibly large scripts was important in the long run. Maybe some has a different opinion but I still think that.
From the perspective of a money-only user of Bitcoin, ordinal transactions are inefficient in space. They use more block space than strictly necessary. From the perspective of a single-sig user, multisig transactions are likewise inefficient in space. Additional programmability takes block space (at minimum in the unlocking). But both ordinals and multisig transactions must be efficient in fees, in order to be mined. Fees are the equalizer. Value for value. The fee market is the guarantor of censorship resistance. A censored party can increase their fee rate to incentivize miners. This increases hash rate, punishing the censor with reduced profitability. If we abandon fees as the exclusive arbiter of efficiency, we also give up our engine of censorship resistance.
I agree. Also consider that decoupling the components that make up the whole system might be the only way towards scaling things up on the long run. It doesn't need to be a perfect system, it only needs to be anti-fragile.