A considerable portion of the conversations surrounding Bitcoin in the past year has concentrated on its usage or how it ought to be utilized. The whole Ordinals/Inscriptions frenzy over the last year has generated a chorus of Bitcoin enthusiasts essentially wailing like children regarding how other participants choose to utilize their own bitcoin.
This is entirely removed and disassociated from the fundamental philosophy of Bitcoin’s creation: to serve as an open-access, permissionless network. To be something you cannot be prevented from utilizing. A significant amount of the “technical discussions” over the preceding year outside the developer community has heavily centered on technical solutions that can be employed to prevent other Bitcoin users from utilizing Bitcoin.
I find it astonishing that so many individuals in this realm have made such modifications, which are ultimately unattainable without also undermining the applications of Bitcoin they randomly designate as the “approved” variants, which they obsess over. It’s ridiculous. Bitcoiners are actively trying to devise methods to censor fellow Bitcoiners simply because they disapprove of how they use Bitcoin.
There are two main justifications for this. 1) That inscriptions are hindering individuals’ capacity to establish a new full node. This is inaccurate; the limitation of initial node synchronization is not bandwidth (where inscriptions have caused minor increases in the data required), but rather the validation of the data. Inscriptions do not require verification. The greater the volume of inscriptions, the lower the verification costs become, as nodes merely download it and verify nothing related to the inscription data when confirming those transactions. 2) That it is raising fees. Rising fees are unavoidable and a consequence of a limited blocksize cap.
Here is what Satoshi expressed in 2010 to someone lamenting about fees:
“It’s only when you’re sending a really large transaction that the transaction fee ever comes into play, and even then it only amounts to something like 0.002% of the total. It’s not money drained from the system, it merely goes to other nodes. If you’re upset about incurring the fee, you could always flip the script and run a node yourself and perhaps someday earn a 0.44 fee yourself.”
These points are fundamentally flawed and entirely miss the emphasis. If you can prevent an individual from using Bitcoin, then Bitcoin has failed its essential value proposition. There is nothing that can govern the use of a Bitcoin that genuinely operates as intended except for economic pressures from fees. If anything apart from that can inhibit your access to the system, it is ineffective. It is not censorship-resistant. It has failed.
Individuals who are dissatisfied with the externalities of use cases that impact their own should take constructive action, such as focusing on how to modify their own applications of Bitcoin in a manner that they continue to work effectively in the midst of others using it for different objectives.
Conversely, numerous Bitcoiners are merely pleading with authorities to halt the “bad actors” from utilizing Bitcoin. The fact that this continues to be at all a point of contention in the discourse is simply disheartening at this stage. It’s also one of the factors hindering advancements in Bitcoin that could modify their use cases to effectively operate amid others’ actions.
It’s time to mature and cease whining about how others are managing their own assets, and instead concentrate on how to achieve what you desire with your own.
This article is a Take. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.