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> Filtering based on structural limits is objective. Filtering based on whether data belongs here requires ongoing human judgment about what’s legitimate Bitcoin use. that's why filters are dynamic. i would go further and say that we need isolated custom filter scripts and plugins. free market of network policy. for example i can make a plugin that delays the propagation of blocks by weight of the txs that doesnt fit into my filtering policy. simulating a slow connection. making it more likely to be a stale block. > On Taproot: if policy prevented inscriptions before and Taproot removed that barrier, then the Bitcoin community achieved consensus to expand what’s allowed. Calling it an exploit now is reframing a consensus change as a bug. that's why i used to phrase "excuse", the goal of size limit policy being removed had nothing to do with that use case. its a side effect of poor decision making, and lack of attention on the codebase by normal plebs as i said "changing the multiplier of gravity will have untended side effects". and script size limit was a policy, not a consensus. > On the money argument: inscriptions are paying full freight in fees. They’re expensive. If someone wants to pay $50 to inscribe data, they’re not attacking the fee market, they’re participating in it. > The timechain isn’t storage by design, agreed. But fee markets should make storage economically prohibitive, not developer policy deciding what counts as storage versus payment. its called an exploit, because its an exploit. if i start using your nostr relay to spam chunks of a blob data as posts, then im exploiting your relay. if i use my bank's transaction history to encode and store random blob data, then im exploiting their database. if i use youtube as cloud storage by encoding blob data into videos, thumbnails and video title and descriptions, then im exploiting the youtube. they are attacking because script space is not intended as storage space. talking about some policy like "objective" or "subjective" is miss-leading as well. policy is policy. if consensus said "max script size is x, and max op_return size is y, or tx size has to be idk an odd number". then you wouldn't be able to make the same argument. because consensus is consensus. with consensus, if you disagree, you either have to split and lose or accept what the majority says. in consensus "yes" and "no" can't exists together on the same chain. in policy you dont have to split, you can add any rules you want as long as you are staying inside the frame of consensus. different policy rules can exists in parallel in the free market of network policy. its free speech, just like i can choose what to gossip with others physically, i can choose what to gossip with other nodes around me. in a community culture might not be a written rule, but it protects it. and lack of it would ruin it. > Where does content filtering stop once we accept it as legitimate? blob data on the timechain is not legitimate. there is no category. its simple. there aren't many financially viable ways to store blob data on the chain. if we filter some as they get popular, eventually there will be no p2p way to store blob data. unless core creates another opening again. but until then hopefully core will be irrelevant in the free market node software. if they can have tools to decode it, then you can filter it.

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You make compelling points, especially on policy as free market competition between nodes rather than centralized mandates. Individual nodes choosing their own filtering rules is fundamentally different from advocating everyone should filter the same way. On the exploit framing, I understand the analogy to using YouTube for storage or a bank database for encoding data. But there’s a key difference. Those are private platforms with terms of service. Bitcoin is a permissionless protocol. The question isn’t whether inscriptions are the intended use, but whether Bitcoin can remain permissionless while enforcing intended use. Now on consensus versus policy, you’re right that policy allows parallel rules without chain splits. That’s valuable. But when the debate becomes not just what policy individuals choose, but what policy should be standard or what pools should be boycotted for not filtering, we’ve moved from free market policy to prescriptive policy. Your vision of a free market of network policy with custom filter scripts and plugins is actually more aligned with permissionless principles than mandating everyone filter the same way. Let nodes compete, let fee markets work, let the best approach win. Where we might agree: individual sovereignty in filtering. Where we differ: whether there’s a collective responsibility to filter or whether that emerges naturally from individual choice.