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Well written and this is fun btw. Strong arguments to be sure. You’re right that Bitcoin encodes moral principles. The supply cap, signature verification, and PoW all instantiate “thou shalt not steal.”
But here’s the distinction: those principles define what Bitcoin is, not what Bitcoin allows. They’re constitutional, not regulatory.
The 21M cap and signature requirements are about Bitcoin’s nature as sound money. They don’t require ongoing interpretation. But filtering transactions by content means case by case moral judgments about what’s immoral, and that necessarily varies.
Bitcoin’s moral architecture is complete in its monetary properties. Adding content morality moves from “this is what money should be” to “this is what money should allow.” That’s a different category.
Your node, your conscience. But I see those as fundamentally different types of moral statements.
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100% this is fun!
I would argue that a large part of the definition of what Bitcoin IS directly flows from what it allows and what it rejects regarding transaction construction. Transactions must be denominated in Bitcoin's base monetary units, not in USD, or ETH, or anything else. Yes, that is definitional of what Bitcoin is and is not, but it is also regulatory of what Bitcoin allows to be stored in a block. Likewise, the block-size limit is a regulation on what Bitcoin allows, but one that serves to protect what Bitcoin is: a decentralized, sound, digital money.
Even the early datacarrier limits that have been adjusted over time were regulatory in order to preserve Bitcoin's purpose of being money, rather than a decentralized file-storage database.
And to be clear, we are not talking about filtering transactions by what sorts of things you are spending your money on. A payment to a hooker and a payment to a church are indistinguishable, so it isn't possible to filter one or the other out on the basis of moral qualms about prostitution or supporting a particular church. Nor should it be, since money should be fungible in order to function properly as money. But I think we should be able to acknowledge there is a massive difference between using Bitcoin for its intended purpose as money to BUY an NFT, even if you or I think NFTs are stupid, vs using Bitcoin for an unintended purpose to STORE an NFT.
