You call it censorship because you disagree with the content of those transactions, which is subjective. Some peeps don't disagree.
Also, ordinals aside, some rich actor could spam Bitcoin without jpegs. Just move sats back and forth between their wallets, paying high fees to block everyone else. Is that spam? Should you block these transactions? I see them as valid. And we need better ways to deal with that situation than filtering whatever the miner sees as spam.
You didnt answer the question.
If a Government pays miners with fiat, to mine empty blocks (or move sats back and forth, as you describe it), and their express purpose for doing so is to make Bitcoin unusable, do you still regard this behaviour as legitimate?
If so, I contend you are either being obtuse, or you are an enemy of the long term success of Bitcoin.
When the inflation bug occured in Bitcoin, ~10 years ago, which allowed anyone to mint an almost infinite supply of Bitcoin, did we regard this behaviour as legitimate, purely because it was possible, within the bounds of the current code base?
No. We recognised that it facilitated behaviour that was totally destructive to the long term health of the network, and we fixed the bug.
'Leaving it to the free market' would have been disasterous in this circumstance.
Point being, 'leaving it to the free market' doesn't always fix everything.
Bitcoin is not perfect.
It takes wisdom to know when things are best left alone, and when a light touch of intervention is required, to maintain the integrity of a most precious vessel.
If a government pays miners to mine "useless" blocks, I think they should mine them.
The goverment will run out of money eventually (either depleting their resources or hyperinflating).
I don't find the inflation bug similar to the current situation, since it was actually a bug, not a feature.
The permissionless, open and censorship-resistance characteristics are features of Bitcoin, not bugs to be fixed.
Let me clarify, I don't care if ordinals are blocked, I don't care if the US gov's transactions are blocked. But if we start this path, where does it stop?
Maybe my transaction is next.
