Ordinals was a much-needed shakeup of the culture as it outed the uncritical parrots rather quickly. Bitcoin is more akin to a discovery than an invention, so the network has emergent properties such as posting files and images on a censorship-resistant timechain. Whilst some got apoplectic about NFTs and 'pizzaposting,' I saw unbounded potential as a freedom tool—historical documents, ghost guns, recipes, "forbidden images" like Tank Man...Bitcoin isn't just money, and this realization was humbling for me. I've seen seemingly rational people No True Scotsmansing other bitcoiners and calling for censorship of ordinals, and that was disheartening.

I do think a big part of this cultural change is the advent of alternative platforms like Nostr that aren't algo-driven salt farms. Twitter and Reddit seem to breed hostile communities, and they may be a large part of why the virtue signalers were controlling the narrative for a long time. From here on out, I can see builders and entrepreneurs being more experimental with the network since it has become more apparent than ever that Bitcoin is more than a financier's playground and the people of the legacy platforms are having the narrative slip away from them