You know what...

I support it. Bitcoin needs use cases. Runes and ordinals will see another surge and then wither away like all shitcoins do. It will not be an open end onslaught on mempools from here on out, the gambling and narrative cycles come and go and people wise up. Or they won't, what do I care. I have the choice to not use Core anymore and to not offer my nodes resources for this.

Yet I will because SSD and RAM space got cheap and this isn't 2018 anymore. This ain't a blocksize war, it's a RAMsize war. Miners can include or ignore any TX they wish, it's fair game on that front too. Miners, what kind of animal are they anyways?

I like to believe, naively, that rich miners will hold on to their corn for longer and are more resilient to downside price manipulation, shutting off rigs doesn't need to happen anymore. That increases the scarcity, arguably the decentralization of holding too and it has a healthy impact on the power dynamics between the wall street bros and the miners as well. Forced selling won't

.

More use cases for bitcoin are good at this point because it's primary use case has not come to fruition while the world keeps changing. On-chain transactions clearly cannot be the baselayer of a new global monetary system built outside of governments control, you will never be able to buy groceries in the store with an on-chain TX. That's okay, we have L2s now, clearly a sector of development that won't go away. The biggest pain that comes along with the Lightning Network is the channel opening & closing in high fee environments but again, at some point it's not for everyone to start and to maintain a lightning node like it's not for everyone to mine bitcoin anymore.

Yes yes, good luck with your Bitaxe, 'somebody has to win the lottery', it's cool but you're not buying and using it because you are politically forced to do so, it doesn't do you any good but education, entertainment, hot air and dreams (those are all good things btw). My point is, if you can afford a toy like this, you have the resources to open lighting channels when the mempool is buzzing again.

Quality has value. Bitcoin is the strongest and most secure network humans ever made and it costs energy and/or time and/or money to run and also to use it. There are lightning node banks and there will be more that charge you a little lovely fee to use their service, some for you to be no-kyc and you will be happy.

You want to be your own Swiss bank today? Buy bitcoin, run a full-node. You want to be a bank FOR Others tomorrow? Spin up a lightning node.

Bitcoin won't be 'captured', it just grows another head like a hydra and don't forget that the EU indeed is swinging at it right now, they want to restrict billions of people from using it at all.

If on-chain and a self-custody lightning node is too expensive for you, go ahead, run a cashu mint, feel very sovereign... As long as you don't run your own power plant don't pretend you're in control here anyways. Work with what you got and do it well, explore new avenues, stay on your toes. Always secure yourself first, then keep going and help others.

Have a nice first of May.