121 sats \ 2 replies \ @0207a984de 9 Dec 2023 \ on: On Ocean Mining Pool, Inscriptions and Luke bitcoin
I think as a user of Bitcoin, and not as some kind of censorship police, I would simply look at the decision and ask, "Does this make me more happy to use Bitcoin?"
Does supporting inscriptions make me more happy to use Bitcoin?
No. I don't use inscriptions. I prefer to make regular transactions more frequently and cheaply.
Does supporting censorship of transactions related to known theft addresses make me more happy to use Bitcoin?
No. It reduces my faith in Bitcoin's neutrality.
I think both these statements can be true. I think there is a difference between spam and free speech. Of course there is a slippery-slope argument to be made about where the line is drawn between what we consider to be trash and valuable speech. Especially in today's political climate.
But I think there is a line. And while we should tread carefully, every system is vulnerable to becoming inundated with unwanted noise which actually becomes a censorship mechanism itself.
Imagine twitter, full of bots (okay, it already is) but like imagine it 1,000,000 times worse. Literally unusable. You never see relevant posts. You need a signal-to-noise system to even have free speech.
Imagine a forum, full of spam posts about viagra. Sure, it's free speech. It's great the forum doesn't block them. But spam is spam, and people can't even get their real opinions heard.
Inscriptions are hindering the free-flow of censorship-free transactions. I think there is an argument to be made that keeping a tidy, noise-free system is an important function to free speech.
And that we don't dictate the content of the message. But we do dictate a DDOS attack of content which hinders freely flowing messages of any type hurts the system more than helps it.
I think this way of explaining things was well done.
With high fees there is at least something positive in this noise is it forced me to look into Liquid.
So in the absolute I think this noise is putting forward a problem which would have occurred anyway in the future.
Yet we are being forced to use Liquid or Lightning by basically spamming the network. I would have preferred a more natural way of using Bitcoin, like creating transactions to... transact.
reply
To peg onto this, if everyone is censored then are some point there will be uncensored transactions because the currency is locked up. Unlocking the currency may be necessary to settle a financial argument. Or the financial argument will settle some other way.
It's either useful or useless. Tap dancing for the audience. Dodging rotten tomatoes. Avoiding the gaffe. Or skillful navigation, ahead.
reply