Too much of the discussion surrounding Bitcoin over the past year has focused on its uses. Or how it should be used. The whole Ordinals/Inscriptions mania of the past year has created a crowd of Bitcoiners who are essentially screaming like children about how other users decide to use their own Bitcoin.
This is completely separate from the entire philosophy of Bitcoin’s design in the first place: to be a permissionless, open-access system. Be something its use cannot be stopped. Much of the past year’s “technical discussion” outside the developer community has focused heavily on technical mechanisms that can be used to prevent other Bitcoin users from using Bitcoin.
It’s mind-boggling to me that so many people in this space have made such changes, which are ultimately impossible to make without also crippling the use of Bitcoin that they arbitrarily put on the ‘approved’ list where they have such a huge focus have on. It’s insane. Bitcoiners are actively trying to figure out how to censor other Bitcoiners because they don’t like the way they use Bitcoin.
There are two primary rationalizations for this. 1) That inscriptions harm people’s ability to start up a new full node. This is incorrect, the bottleneck in the initial node synchronization is not the bandwidth (where inscriptions caused a small increase in the data needed), but the verification of the data. Registrations do not need to be verified. The more inscriptions there are, the cheaper the verification cost is, because nodes just download them and do not verify anything related to the inscription data when validating those transactions. 2) That it increases costs. Increasing fees is inevitable and the result of a finite block size limit.
This is what Satoshi said to someone complaining about fees in 2010:
“Only when you send a very large transaction do the transaction costs come into play, and even then it amounts to approximately 0.002% of the amount. It’s not money being sucked out of the system, it’s just going to other nodes. If you’re sad about paying the fee, you can always turn the tables and run a node yourself and maybe one day rake in a 0.44 fee yourself.
These arguments are simply broken and completely miss the point. If you can prevent anyone from using Bitcoin, then Bitcoin has failed in its core value proposition. There is nothing that can regulate the use of a Bitcoin that actually functions as it should, other than the economic pressure of fees. If there is anything else stopping you from using the system, then it won’t work. It is not censorship resistant. It failed.
People who are concerned about the externalities of use cases that affect their own use should do something productive, like focus on adapting their own use of Bitcoin in a way that it still functions well when people use it for other purposes .
Instead, many Bitcoiners simply cry to mom and dad to get the bad guys to stop using Bitcoin. The fact that this is still an argument present in the conversation to some extent is just sad at this point. It is also one of the factors contributing to improvements in Bitcoin could adapt their use cases to function well when others get stuck.
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 To take. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.