What surprises me about the tech and developer discussion around embedding data onchain (and OP_RETURN is just a corner of that), is how little of the discussion refers to the ethics.
There's an obvious point, and an obvious (in my opinion, incorrect) counterpoint.
The obvious point is that permissionlessness is central to Bitcoin's nature, and that implies *ethically* you cannot tell people what kinds of transactions are OK, and what are not. There are very substantial *technical* arguments as to why it can't really be prevented, but they are secondary to the ethical one: you don't have the *right* to tell people what transactions they can do.
The obvious counterpoint is that posting anything to the blockchain has a cost for *all* users. That's why we spent 4 years arguing about the limit on the size of blocks. I have no ethical right to tell someone not to publish or mine a block of size 10GB, but it doesn't take long to realize that the costs this imposes on other participants, is too large. In case you think, this argument was straightforward, the big blockers were wrong, don't forget that the resolution, for better or worse, was a compromise: average block size today is often 2x the size before. It was a really difficult argument.
So the counterpoint wins and we have to discuss whether embedding data should be allowed? I say, no, this a fundamentally different discussion. It is not a discussion of *how much computational resource is used in total*, but rather a discussion of *what individual users are using the computational resource FOR*, and that crosses the line into being ethically unacceptable, unequivocally.
I say that the technical awkwardness, or even impossibility, of restricting this behavior in the Bitcoin system is just a byproduct of trying to make Bitcoin do the opposite of what Bitcoin was designed for - censorship resistance.
