Shin crushing it:
Bitcoin is a decentralized and censorship-resistant network built around independent participants maintaining and verifying their own copy of the database, storing its historical transaction record.
Its entire purpose for existing is to function in a manner that prevents anyone from being shut out of the system, or prevented from using it. That is its raison d’être.
People will use Bitcoin for things that it wasn’t intended for, or things that some people disapprove of, or some things that almost everyone will agree is abhorrent. These things will happen because Bitcoin works, _you can’t stop people from using it. _
The debate in recent years (op-return, knots, inscriptions, ordinals, spam, JPEGs etc)...
"has just been an argument between people advocating trying to stop people from using Bitcoin in certain ways, and people explaining the futility of that."
So what do we do about that? There is nothing to do but adapt. Blockspace is a competitive free market, it is Darwinian. Different use cases are very much like organisms, existing in an environment called the blockspace market.
Here's the fundamental trade-off that Bitcoin (and Bitcoiners) struggle with, and for which all of these above phenomena are experimental attempts to deal with:
"The denser you make transactional use, i.e., the more transactions you try to facilitate off-chain, the more you introduce new restrictions or trust requirements. "
If each use case is to be looked at like an organism in a Darwinian environment, each use case’s ability to tolerate higher fees is the equivalent of an organism’s ability to adapt to a new environment. If a use case can’t pay higher fees when the blockspace market gets more competitive, then it effectively dies. It becomes an evolutionary dead end.
Here's the key takeaway, making most conversations about filtering and blah-blah stop this, blah-blah stop that irrelevant
"You cannot stop people from using Bitcoin, even if you don’t like how they are using it. If you could, then Bitcoin would be a failed project that cannot even deliver on one its core value propositions: censorship resistance."
Conversations around how to stop certain use cases, or users, is an exercise in futility, and quite frankly a comedy show. It completely ignores the reality of what Bitcoin is, how it works, and the underlying fundamental dynamics of multiple use cases existing together in a competitive system built around a scarce resource: blockspace.