You may have missed Who triggered this change and Why. Hint, Citrea.
Discussion
I agree Lopp is a bad actor, especially after his bullshit quantum proposal.
I’m not here saying what is right or what is wrong regarding protocol. I’m just objectively saying that all transactions are inscriptions, and there literally is no second best medium to Bitcoin.
I know that, that is why I am trying to argue with you to have in your analysis the consideration that spam has 0 value. And even if someone is paying for it, it does not make it valuable, it makes it a scam. Thats what they are after. Jpegs are spam on the Bitcoin monetary network. See also what Nick Szabo is writing about the cost inferred on all node runners, not only the one that pays for a particular transaction. The big picture goes beyond the physics of the system.
These are the inscriptions.
This is the Bitcoin Monetary Network. They are not the same.
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.
Memecoins are shitcoins and a scam. They have some small value becuase some scammed people paid for them. 99.9% regret it after they get rekt and/or rug pulled.
Bitcoin is different and that is why it is valued at $2.2T currently. Again its not hard to come to consideration that spam has 0 value. Also no one was arguing against to possibility to put hashes up to 40 or 80 Bytes in OP_RETURN. 100 000 Bytes of spam is an attack on Bitcoin.
Fees plus spam filters are better than just fees.
Bitcoin is thermodynamically sound money, not thermodynamically fucked up spam and csam.