Much of the discussion about Bitcoin in the past year has focused on how to use it. Or how it should be used. The whole Ordinals/Inscriptions craze over the past year has created a horde of Bitcoin users who are basically screaming like children about how other users decide to profit from their 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 stopped from using it. Much of the “technical discussion” over the past year outside the developer community has focused largely on the technical mechanisms that could be used Prevent other Bitcoin users from using Bitcoin.
It’s baffling to me that so many people in this space have made such changes, which are ultimately impossible to make without hindering the uses of Bitcoin they arbitrarily put on the “approved” list, such a massive focus on their part. It’s crazy. Bitcoin users are trying hard to figure out how to censor other Bitcoin users because they don’t like the way they use Bitcoin.
There are two basic justifications for this. 1) Patterns hurt people’s ability to run a new full node. This is not true, the bottleneck in upstream node synchronization is not bandwidth (as sprites resulted in small increments of requested data), but data verification. Inscriptions do not need to be verified. The more patterns there are, the lower the verification costs, because nodes only download and verify anything that includes logging data when validating those transactions. 2) They increase fees. Increased fees are inevitable, as a result of the maximum block size.
Here’s what Satoshi said in 2010 to someone complaining about fees:
“Only when you send a really large transaction do the transaction fees kick in, and even then they only amount to approximately 0.002% of the amount. The money is not taken out of the system, it just goes to other nodes. If you are sad about paying the fees, You can always turn the tables and run the node yourself and perhaps one day charge a fee of 0.44 yourself.
These arguments are completely broken, and completely miss the point. If you can prevent someone from using Bitcoin, then Bitcoin has failed to offer its fundamental value. There is nothing that can regulate the use of Bitcoin that actually works the way it is supposed to except the economic pressure from fees. If anything other than that can prevent you from using the system, it’s not working. It is not censorship resistant. You failed.
People who are upset about the externalities of use cases affecting their lives should do something productive, like focus on how to adapt their own uses of Bitcoin in a way that makes it still work properly vis-à-vis people who use it for other purposes.
Instead, many Bitcoin users are simply crying out to their mom and dad to get the bad guys to stop using Bitcoin. The fact that this is still somewhat of an argument present in the conversation is sad at this point. It is also one of the contributing factors to Bitcoin’s improvements He could Adapt their use cases to work properly in the face of others’ procrastination.
It’s time to grow up and stop crying about what other people do with their own property, and instead focus on how to do what you want with your own property.
This article is a takes. The opinions expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.