The second part is fair and a decent point, but the conversation between whether Bitcoin is a system for monetary transactions versus a place to store jpegs is not "individuals arbitrating what transactions are valuable." It is a question of what *is* a transaction in the first place.

This is why i think the court analogy is very apt:

By saying the courts should be restricted only to arbitration and judicial judgement protecting people's rights, and that we should not allow people to rent it out for parties and concerts, is not someone dictating which is valuable, its making a clear engineering/design choice to protect the *purpose* of the system. If the system doesn't have a purpose and isn't designed to protect or ensure a particular use case, it will serve *none* of them well.

This is exactly why Bitcoin explicitly did not go the Ethereum route.

"A jack of all trades is a master of none."

I'm in this for the explicit purpose of designing and protecting a master system of sound money and that axiomatically requires valuing it for monetary security and exchange over storing somebody's jpegs.