Well, what’s there to say about the rest…

Ordinals were first proposed in 2012 and are a pure out-of-band concept on how to track individual sats. I’m not a fan, since it substantiates the notion that bitcoins are non-fungible. Not sure why he would be referring to the concept as a protocol change that should be resisted, when nothing about the protocol changed. Inscriptions are a slightly cheaper way to publish data on the blockchain than were popular before, but then witness data is one of the less terrible places people have been dumping data over the years. At least we can skip it during IBD for pruning nodes up to the assumed-valid block.

I remember that “blocks can be up to 4 MB, but will probably fall somewhere in the range of 1.7–2.3 MB even at full segwit adoption” was a clearly communicated expectation before segwit activation—and we’ve been landing at 2–2.2 MB in average in the past couple weeks. Since we can’t change the past, it doesn’t seem fruitful to debate how segwit should have been done differently, it’s easy to have an opinion seven years after it was proposed and five years after it was activated. Maybe the energy would be better spent on championing a proposal to remove the witness discount or to reduce the block weight limit, if he is convinced that blockspace is too abundant and it’s too disturbing that other Bitcoin users might have found a use for this censorship-resistant network that he doesn’t approve of.

I don’t share the concern that nobody would keep a full copy of the whole blockchain, because the blockchain might be growing at 2×, at most 3×, the rate than before. Firstly, it’s a bit funny how that echos a popular Bcasher talking point from the segwit activation debate about witness data. Secondly, it feels a bit over the top while there are thousands of people running home nodes to self-host various services and hundreds of companies maintaining full copies of the blockchain in the interest of their business all the while a 1 TB SSD meanwhile costs $44. I don’t find Inscriptions particularly interesting, but if they push the equilibrium for low-end feerates up a bit, I much prefer that over alternative ideas how to ensure long-term Bitcoin mining incentives.—And if anyone was expecting blockspace to always stay as cheap as it was in the past year, I don’t see how they got that idea.

Finally, the whole spiel about Bitcoin Core having a monopoly on full node software and that being both good and bad. Bitcoin Core doesn’t have an automatic update for a reason. Users decide what Bitcoin is by choosing what software they run. If you don’t want to run the new version, don’t. If you don’t want certain features, patch them out or pay someone to patch them out for you. If you can do it better, either start contributing to the project or find collaborators and make a better full node. The code is right there, and everything we do is right there in the public: all of our IRC discussions, our code contributions, our review comments, our mailing list posts, our conference talks, our podcast appearances, our blog posts, our Q&A contributions, our forum comments, and our efforts to make our work more accessible to additional engineers as well as the meetups we help to host. I’m sure if the activities of Bitcoin Core contributors at best amount to an attack on Bitcoin, one could find ways to surface that.

That someone would spend years to work on a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal to either attack Bitcoin or to stroke their ego clashes with my perception that the opensource contributors I know seem keenly self-interested in the success of the Bitcoin project, yet sober enough to see where there are still kinks in the foundation. This and recent calls that the job of working on Bitcoin shouldn’t even exist, or that Bitcoin is finished baffle me. It seems to me that people don’t understand how software ages and how much better the Bitcoin network could be even without changing the protocol any further.

So yeah, I may have taken more away from that.