Too many of the discussions about Bitcoin in the past year have been focused on how to use it. Or how it should be used. The whole Ordinals / Inscriptions mania over the past year has created a crowd of Bitcoiners pretty much shouting like children about how other users decide to use their own bitcoin.
This is completely separate and apart from the entire design philosophy of Bitcoin in the first place: to be an open system without permission. To be something you can't stop using. So much of the “tech talk” over the past year outside of the developer community has focused heavily on technical techniques that can be used stop other Bitcoin users from using Bitcoin.
It's mind-boggling to me that so many people in this space have made such changes, which is ultimately impossible to do without disrupting the use of Bitcoin. they arbitrarily put on the “approved” list, so much focus on them. It's insane. Bitcoiners are actively trying to figure out how to censor other Bitcoiners because they don't like how they use Bitcoin.
There are two main rationales for this. 1) That scripts hurt people's ability to bootstrap on a new full node. This is false, the bottleneck of initial node synchronization (where writes have slightly increased the data required) is not bandwidth, it is data validation. The writings do not need to be verified. The more writes, the cheaper the verification costs, because nodes just download and verify nothing including the write data when verifying the transactions that. 2) That it raises taxes. Fee increases are inevitable, resulting in a finite block size cap.
Here's what Satoshi said in 2010 to someone complaining about taxes:
“The transaction fee only ever comes into play when you're placing a very large transaction, and even then it only works out to something like 0.002% of the amount . It is not money withdrawn from the system, it just goes to other nodes.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 one day rake in the 0.44 fee yourself.”
These arguments are simply broken, and miss the point completely. If you can stop someone from using Bitcoin, Bitcoin has failed in its fundamental value proposition. There is nothing that can regulate the use of Bitcoin that actually works as it is supposed to except economic pressure from taxes. If anything else stops you from using the system, it won't work. He is not against censorship. It has failed.
People who are confused about the external use cases that affect them should do something productive, like focus on how to change their own use of Bitcoin in a way they still work properly against people who use it for other purposes.
Instead, many Bitcoiners are just crying to mommy and daddy to make the bad guys stop using Bitcoin. The fact that this is still to any extent an argument present in the conversation is just sad at this point. It is also one of the factors that contribute to the development of Bitcoin could change their use cases to work correctly against other stops.
It's time to grow up and stop whining about what other people are doing with their own property, and focus instead on how to do what you want with yourself.
This article is a Take. The views expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
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