This days the bitcoin community is super busy fighting over this OP code. When things like this happen I usually ask myself where the dark side is hiding because it is always not in the place we are looking. The DS is cunning, stealth and master of lies, it has a characteristic though, it let you think that being with it is being right, superior, incorruptible.

There are people that always recognize where the DS is, others that are completely unaware of it and others that are sometimes aware of it and sometimes fall for it and get deceived(temporarily). I humbly put myself in the third option and so to say that I got initially fooled by it also this particular time.

So where is hiding in this debate? What we know for now is that No one of the "factions" tells the whole truth.

In fact if spam filters do not work and are impossible to apply because no one knows really how to differentiate real monetary transactions from data please explain to me how mempool.space is doing it; because there I can clearly select data transactions and get them told apart from the others one.

So what we know is that spam filters works, are they 100% effective? Of course not but they work and work well enough to make a difference and discourage the majority of exploiters. But and there is a but here if all the energy of the core devs has to be spent in developing spam filters then you know...On the other end if we permit everything and yields to every request that some groups of individual asks and this also in what may be interpreted in a sort of "ransom" way, bitcoin will not end well.

What we seems to have here apart from all the technical views is a problem of polarization of views and opinions.

We have two factions with polar opposite apparently irreconcilable views that are fighting each others to the detriment of all bitcoin ecosystem and more so since they are all "bitcoiners" more or less, but with different views. Of course they are actively participating and succeeding, I might say, in destroying what they are trying to protect.

So we have bitcoiners with different views that are fighting between them to the extent that if one of the factions would manage to "win" we may risk of having bitcoin destroyed or seriously fucked up. One faction want to open everything and change everything as fast as possible and transform bitcoin scripts in a touring complete language; the other want to close everything and police every transaction to the last byte to see only the "holy" ones allowed on chain. I think that we can all see the problem here and were this would lead bitcoin if one of them win and I can say to you that the end won't be pretty.

So where is the Dark side hiding?

Of course Mr.Loop and the supporters of his faction know that for them it is hiding in the other side that we may call the Mr.Mechanic faction. One side will say that the other is "corrupted" by the dark side of the force and war will surely ensue with core devs sort of in the middle with some of them taking side also.

So again where is the Dark side hiding?

It is hiding in the polarization, it is dividing the community to win it and do its things that are the dark-ification of bitcoin and so its ultimate destruction because what the DS infects it sooner or later uglify and self destroy 100% no exceptions. Dark side wants you to take side, to be partisan of one faction and one faction only so it can control you because you lost yourself in the "holy" cause.

What is the solution then? We can try to answer a question first, what was bitcoin made for? Data or Money?

Bitcoin was invented for a monetary purpose no one would deny it; it was not made nor intended as a distributed general purpose data storage system so if we try to transform it into that it will not be bitcoin anymore. You cannot have an hybrid: you are the best monetary asset or you are the best data storage system you cannot have both in the same thing because it will shit like a monetary assets and shit even more like a storage system. What will happen then? No one will use it anymore for both use cases.

When the bitcoin community will reach an agreement over that question then this all thing will come to an end and solutions will came forward and get implemented, till then pray for you money. If you invested in bitcoin going on with this polarization DS stuff will bring bitcoin to a monetary value of zero, not now, not next year, but look no too far away in the future.

I do not know Mr. Loop personally but from what I might know what I see is a decent, intelligent fellow and I can surely say the same things for Mr.Mechanic too, I didn't know him personally but from what I saw in his last video I can surely say so.

So What to do?

People need to speak to each others, came to a table and speak, speak about everything and also about what bitcoin is for.

Then may be Mr. Loop may begin to invest his time and money differently, if he feels to invest in things that require a data storage system he may engage his resources in building "bitdata" a new protocol that would become the bitcoin of data storage system and it will be the best at it, the number one, no second best. It might also communicate with bitcoin for the monetary part if that would be necessary, they might be united in a sort of second layer, I leave to his superior intelligence the details. In the same spirit the other faction may concentrate the limited developer time and manpower of the core devs in strengthening the bitcoin monetary capabilities instead of wasting it in other less useful things and one of this useful things might be the spam problems also but with moderation and wise thinking. Again i leave this to theirs superior intelligence and smartness.

The future of bitcoin depend on his community of users, entrepreneurs and developers, they need to speak with each others and recognize what is bitcoin good for and use other solutions for the things that it was not created for. Trying to build a fit for every use system is not a win strategy in fact it is the opposite. You might find a way to do email with http but...