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tl;dr below
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It wasn't designed to stop people from storing images, but I doubt Satoshi had monkey pictures or png wizards in mind when he/she/they were working to fight government bail outs.
The question is whether the design needs to be changed and what changing it would mean to the purpose of bitcoin. Would prohibiting ordinals stop bitcoin from being sound money or the most secure computer network on earth? Would it prevent bitcoin from being fungible, transportable, divisible, etc?
What would the impact on ordinals be if they were prohibited? Would it prevent them from being created in other ways? Would it mean that miners won't eventually make more money from rising fees as the blockchain becomes more adopted anyway? Would prohibiting ordinal inscriptions actually be censorship as some say it would be, or would it just be putting things in their proper place?
Ordinals may be technically permissible, but just because something is permissible doesn't mean that it's beneficial. A house can be used by hoarders to hoard a bunch of unnecessary things, but is that the best use of the house? Or to put the analogy into a more relatable context, would people be OK with hoarders storing their things in the middle of the highway, forcing others to have to swerve around them? Hoarders have a right to use the highway just as anyone else does, but how are they using it?
Various changes that the bitcoin network has undergone over the years have had their detractors, but have the changes that have been made over the years to the network stopped bitcoin from being bitcoin? Would prohibiting ordinal inscriptions stop bitcoin from being immutable money? If so, how? If not then what is the issue with having a restriction on them? What is it stopping them from being other than stopping them from being a nuisance/obstruction?
Free speech is not free. You can't yell fire in a crowded theater just because you have the permissionless ability to push words out of your mouth. I'm sure at some point you could, but they enacted a rule against that for a reason. They prevented the block size from increasing for a reason.
People being ok with ordinals being on the network just seems to me like people being ok with a kid not cleaning up their room when their room is in the middle of the road. The answer isn't necessarily to get them to clean up their room (as great as that would be for them) but more so to move their room out of the highway (great for everyone else).
I don’t know that ordinals/nfts/etc don't have a place or utility in this world... this is open source software, after all... but I think they need their own space. You can't take a shower in a parakeet cage, you can't go swimming in a baseball glove, you can't rollerskate in a buffalo herd, and maybe you can't inscribe a wizard png in an international monetary ledger.
/my2sats
tl;dr
Would prohibiting ordinal use on the network change bitcoin in any demonstrablely fundamental way or not? Would bitcoin not be bitcoin without ordinals? Would ordinals not be ordinals without bitcoin? Which is necessary and which is not?
Ordinals/NFTs may or may not have a place or utility in this world but maybe they need their own space (i.e. layer 2 or 3?)
But any insight on where I might be wrong in any of that^ would be helpful.
