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1073 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 30 Dec 2023 \ on: Inscriptions: A Guide for the Ideological Maxi bitcoin
Nah, this ain't it. I went in with an open mind but he's straw-manning the anti-inscription folks. Or at least the ones that think like me.
Of course I know points 1, 2, and 3. In fact, I started studying bitcoin more deeply because I was interested in its capability as an immutable, decentralized, and uncensorable data storage system. I even built a testnet system to automatically chunk a file and store it in multiple OP_RETURNs. And yet, despite this I decided that storing data on bitcoin is bad and didn't follow through with my idea. Why?
Because all machines are designed for a purpose. Bitcoin was designed to be a financial transactions network, not a data storage system. If you design a system for a specific purpose, you should make it so that it can't be used for other purposes---especially if said use disrupts the original purpose. Which is happening.
Sure, this might just come down to a disagreement in vision (point 4). Some may see Bitcoin as a more general decentralized data ledger. Fine, if that's what you think. But just understand that there are tradeoffs. And I think scaling up bitcoin as a monetary network is more important to the world than scaling it up for jpegs.
On point 5, i'm not really sure if anyone seriously claimed that inscriptions are a state attack on bitcoin. That would be silly. For all the ESG FUD out there, why would the state attack bitcoin in such a way that increases the mining incentives? The closest claim I can think of is that fiat printed money is fueling the purchase of these silly jpegs.
Overall though, I agree with him that censorship is not the answer. I think over time market forces will drive the inscriptions out because it's a horribly inefficient way to store data. But that's not going to make me stop criticizing inscriptions, or taking what steps I can to fight it.
Spam filtering is not censorship. We should first agree on that. Watch Giacomo Zucco's recent videos on ordinals and censorship.
If filtering this spam is censorship, then Bitcoin is a censorship machine because it literally is designed to filter certain tx and spam. Core has always had and maintained spam filters. For some reason Core devs stopped doing this in recent years (since taproot).
Spamming the chain so that no one can use it for financial tx (its purpose), could actually be a very effective attack.
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