Selling a JPEG is a scam because nothing is actually owned. On Bitcoin, there are only UTXOs and the satoshis appended to them, the rest is illusion. A JPEG once hashed into the chain is owned by the ledger itself, by conservation, by every validating node.

An inscription, however, can still have meaning even if its content has no monetary resale value. Again, writing an obituary into the op_return field is not a scam if the purpose is permanence. The service being sold is not ownership of data, but the guarantee that it will never be forgotten, memory preserved through energy expenditure.

What most call a “non-monetary” transaction still carries thermodynamic cost. If satoshis are spent to commit bits to the ledger, then value exists by definition, because the value is conservation itself.

The real disagreement is not about the content of transactions, but about who decides what deserves to be conserved, what humanity considers worthy of permanence in the only ledger that remembers forever.