Mostly harmless spam for now. But only a matter of time till they are abused by griefers. With which will come pressure from authorities and ISPs to shut down nodes.

Messy

I fear underage stuff making it's way to all nodes and the media coming after bitcoin.

A temporary blockspace consumer while blockspace is cheap that highlights the importance of small blocks.

Meh

At 4:30 am Jimmy? This is the most violent thing I’ve seen you do.

Still learning, but seems like:

1) can’t be prevented at this stage

2) will compete for block space and fees like every other transaction

3) capped at 4mb / block regardless

With this in mind, I view it as mostly harmless and the market will decide if images are worthy of spending sats. I doubt it will take off to the level of NFTs on ETH/SOL given those were major grifts with worthless tokens and BTC is actually worth holding onto.

On one hand, providing robust demand for blockspace is good. On the other, it encourages out-of-band payments to pools which in its current state are unable to be verified by miners, to ensure they are compensated fairly.

If I am understanding correctly, the transaction fee for ordinals is same as using lightning channel 4 times to avoid onchain foot print. If so we don't need to worry as demand for lightning channels will outcompete ordinals economically as we can use lightning channels thousand times more, hence that much cheaper on the long run.

Very dangerous. Imagine the repercussions if someone put something pedophile on the Bitcoin blockchain. Everyone and their dog would cry for Bitcoin being banned in that case.

There has been some debunking of the worst scenarios thought:

https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1622226926369705984

Still a bit apprehensive on it.

I learned that witness discount was not great.