Inscriptions: A Guide for the Ideological Maxi \ stacker news ~bitcoin

Inscriptions: A Guide for the Ideological Maxi rodarmor.com/blog/inscriptions-a-guide-for-the-ideological-maxi/

3715 sats \ 9 comments \ @k00b 30 Dec 2023 bitcoin

zaps forwarded to @rodarmor (100%)

1073 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 30 Dec 2023

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.

145 sats \ 0 replies \ @badabing 30 Dec 2023

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.

1128 sats \ 2 replies \ @jurraca 30 Dec 2023

I agree with most of this, but also think all parties are missing the main fail of inscriptions. It's simple: the art is bad.

Ordinals/Inscriptions had an opportunity to give bitcoin an aesthetic that was its own and lived up to its unique spirit. Instead we got art copy pasted from ethereum, and a whole set of derived aesthetics. Yea degens gonna degen. But if inscriptions had been the vehicle for a new wave of digital art (perhaps borne of the values Rodarmor professes), the debate would have been very different imo.

inb4 "but art is subjective" : sure, but copying aesthetics from the eth NFT crowd isn't even subjective, it's lazy and derivative.

Digital art has a bright future ahead of it, but I haven't seen anything interesting come out of inscriptions. Where the digital artists at, for real?

103 sats \ 0 replies \ @badabing 30 Dec 2023

My man. 95% is shitcoin minting, it's not even jpegs. Bitcoin has become a shitcoin scamcasino.

205 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 30 Dec 2023

If Casey is right, once financial transactions are competitive with inscriptions, art quality should improve.

565 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 7 Jan

Ha! Just got around to reading this.

Inscriptions aren't real, they're just a collective hallucination. I've been saying basically exactly this since day one, that ordinals and inscriptions are an opt-in lens with which to view Bitcoin. Behaving as if this is some kind of damning revelation makes you look like a moron. Additionally, it shows that you misunderstand one of the most fundamental things about humans, civilization, and culture: Everything important is just social conventions. Bitcoin is, in fact, just a social convention. Or, put another way, it's not the software or data that matter, it's the social conventions around it. Inscriptions are no different.

Preach! Oh it feels so good when other people say it.

This whole thing doesn't go very far in steel-manning the opponents of ordinals, as far as I'm concerned, but it sure does a nice job of destroying certain idiotic takes. Glad I got to it.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitByBit21 30 Dec 2023

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @CUMDUMPSTER 30 Dec 2023

deleted by author

105 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 30 Dec 2023

All the ordinals people agree that BRC-20 is a scam and garbage as is any token regime built on inscriptions.