When I first heard about ordinals and inscriptions in early February, my initial reaction was that ordinal theory was harmless astrology and that inscriptions were the real problem because monke jpegs are a waste of blockspace.

My perspective is now reversed. While I might not like monke jpegs on the timechain, if someone wants to purchase blockspace in a free market, it is what it is and strictly monetary transactions will have to make themselves more compelling to miners to crowd out more “frivolous” uses of blockspace.

There might even be some ancillary benefits to having a buyer of last resort for blockspace or for using it to protect data that might otherwise be censored.

Ordinals, a completely fictitious framework for identifying individual satoshis within utxos, have given people the ability to ascribe ownership claims to digital objects stored in blockspace. With the claim to ownership comes the obvious ability to then trade those objects.

Ordinal theory not only promotes a collective delusion that individual satoshis exist (as opposed to being an abstraction used as a unit of account to measure the value of utxos), and that they can be identified and “attached” to arbitrary data in blocks.

In short, inscriptions are just one way of filling up blockspace and are neutral in and of themselves. When combined with ordinal theory, the two of them become a vehicle for unmitigated shitcoinery