Appreciate your thorough and thoughtful answer 🙏

This reply gets deep; be warned 🫂

I’m thinking less about ordinals than about op-returns and the like. My knowledge of blockchain data is limited, but my understanding is that someone could easily put a URL to a CSAM website, or something comparably evil, in their transaction data.

To be blunt (and rational), I don’t want that shit on my computer.

And I’m confident that this stance is fully compatible with my earnest endorsement of free speech, as freedom of speech has its “equal and opposite” counterpart of “freedom of consumption”.

You also mentioned the moral importance of validating the wealth and transaction ledger of “the entire world”. If Bitcoin were indeed adopted by the entire world, it would be easy to assume that individuals, companies, and governments all run nodes, and do so with implied legality.

But we haven’t hit hyperbitcoinization, so for the moment, a node runner is validating the wealth and transactions of a small percentage of human activity, albeit an important one, with many freedom fighters and humanitarians being protected by this altruism. This is all the more reason that running a node should be protected by law and constitution.

Brave men have gone to war to protect their families freedom. Heroic women have walked the streets of Iran, with their hair flowing free, to help free their fellow humans from oppression.

I am in deep awe and admiration of these people. It’s difficult to imagine a life like that, and I can’t fathom making the choice between standing up for my child’s future and risking that my child could grow up without a father. Money has a huge effect on society, and money also isn’t the most important thing.

I don’t know where the line would exist for me, in a truly oppressive environment. I’m lucky to live where I do. Where running a node is not illegal, and where investing in self-sovereignty and human flourishing is respected rather than punished.

But at the same time, I’m watching the news. I’m seeing privacy intruded on and coinjoins rejected. A trend toward “KYC or FBI”. FOSS software devs and operators at risk, and privacy tools stigmatized. It makes me nervous.

My prayer is that enough sane people speak loudly enough, that the right to these tools becomes enshrined in law, so that Bitcoin really can “fix this” with so many of the things that are fucked up in the world…