Oddbean new post about | logout
 I see it like this:

What is our purpose or objective? 

We want bitcoin to be the world’s money because when the world adopts a hard money, there will be fewer wars, no inflation stealing people’s retirements, and more long-term thinking. 

Yes, runes and ordinals create demand for block space, but does that help us further our goal?

What are the pros?

The extra money paid to miners does incentivize more investment in mining and increase the network hashrate. In theory this provides more security to the network. 

What are the cons?

It seems these fees are encouraging mining pool centralization through back channel payments (“MEVil”). 

Higher fees are preventing people around the world from using bitcoin as money. Transactions for lower value amounts will be delayed or won’t be feasible. 

My conclusion 

I view these “innovations” as a net negative because I don’t believe these new protocols increase bitcoin’s use as money and I don’t see the benefit to growing the hashrate artificially.