theres a civil war brewing in bitcoin and almost nobody's talking about it

on one side you've got luke dashjr and the bitcoin knots crowd saying ordinals and inscriptions are spam. a bug. a vulnerability exploiting segwit and taproot in ways they were never meant to be used. they want to filter it out. protect the chain. keep bitcoin pure.

on the other side theres people saying.... wait, isn't that censorship? isn't the whole point that bitcoin is permissionless? if someone pays the fee and the transaction is valid, who are you to say its spam?

adam back had an interesting take on this. early on he said "you cant stop jpegs on bitcoin. complaining will only make them do it more. trying to stop them and theyll do it in worse ways."

but then more recently hes shifted... now hes calling it a "jpeg industry" thats spamming the chain and saying maybe new rules should apply.

heres what i think everyones missing.

this isnt really about jpegs or ordinals. its about what bitcoin is for.

is it a narrow monetary network that should only carry financial transactions? or is it a permisionless protocol where anyone can do anything as long as they pay the fee?

the knots side says: bitcoin has limited block space. every byte used for a monkey jpeg is a byte not used for someone in argentina escaping inflation.

the other side says: thats not how markets work. if the argentinian needs it more theyll pay more. thats literally what fee markets are for.

both arguments have merit. thats what makes this hard.

what i keep coming back to is something adam said early on.... high fees drive adoption of layer 2 and force innovation.

maybe the spam isnt the enemy. maybe its the pressure that pushes us to actually build the future we keep talking about.

or maybe we're just watching bitcoin slowly become something it was never supposed to be.

i genuinly dont know.

do you?