Too much of the discussions around Bitcoin in the last year have been focused on how to use it. Or how it should be used. The entire Ordinals/Inscriptions mania over the last year has created a mob of Bitcoiners essentially shrieking like children about how other users decide to make use of their own bitcoin.
This is completely detached and disconnected from the entire philosophy of Bitcoin’s design in the first place: to be an open access permissionless system. To be something you can’t be stopped from using. So much of the “technical discussions” over the last year beyond the developer community have focused heavily on technical mechanisms that can be used to stop other Bitcoin users from using Bitcoin.
It is 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 uses of Bitcoin they arbitrarily put on the “approved” list, such a massive focus of theirs. It’s insane. Bitcoiners are actively trying to figure out how to censor other Bitcoiners because they do not like the way they use Bitcoin.
There are two primary rationalizations for this. 1) That inscriptions are hurting people’s ability to bootstrap a new full node. This is false, the bottleneck of initial node syncing is not bandwidth (where inscriptions have made small increases in the data needed), it is verification of the data. Inscriptions don’t need to be verified. The more inscriptions there are, the cheaper verification costs are, because nodes just download it and verify nothing involving the inscription data when validating those transactions. 2) That it is increasing fees. Increasing fees are inevitable, and a result of a finite blocksize cap.
Here is what Satoshi said in 2010 to someone complaining about fees:
“It’s only when you’re sending a really huge transaction that the transaction fee ever comes into play, and even then it only works out to something like 0.002% of the amount. It’s not money sucked out of the system, it just goes to other nodes. If you’re sad about paying the fee, you could always turn the tables and run a node yourself and maybe someday rake in a 0.44 fee yourself.”
These arguments are just broken, and completely missing the point. If you can stop someone 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 how it is supposed to except economic pressure from fees. If anything but that can stop you from using the system, it doesn’t work. It is not censorship resistant. It has failed.
People upset about the externalities of use cases that affect their own should do something productive, like focus on how to adapt their own uses of Bitcoin in a way that they still function properly in the face of people using it for other purposes.
Instead, many Bitcoiners are simply crying to mommy and daddy to make the bad men stop using Bitcoin. The fact that this is still to any degree an argument present in the conversation is just sad at this point. It’s also one of the contributing factors to improvements to Bitcoin that could adapt their use cases to function properly in the face of others stalling.
It’s time to grow up and stop crying about what other people are doing with their own property, and focus instead on how to do what you want with your own.
This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.