If you ask me my views, they will be nearly indistinguishable from those of, for lack of a better term, ideological Bitcoin maximalists. I loathe the state, have no particular respect for authority, and believe that Bitcoin is the path away from the debauched debasement of our lives and civilization that fiat currency has wrought.

However, I do not consider myself an ideological Bitcoin maximalist, with the primary reason being that ideology often does not survive contact with reality.

This is the unenviable position that ideological Bitcoin maximalism, and the insipid culture accompanying it, finds itself in at the present moment: an uncomfortable contact with a reality with which it does not comport.

Ideological Bitcoin maximalism has a lot of good things going for it. It is because of those things that this blog post was written. This post contains advice for ideological Bitcoin maximalists, advice which will hopefully help them stop scoring own goals and committing unforced errors. In other words, how they can stop being losers.

Let me start by saying that this post is not written to defend ordinals and inscriptions. They do not need defending. The cat is out the bag, and nobody can put it back in.

Now, for the advice.

My first piece of advice is that whining about inscriptions makes you, and Bitcoin, look weak. Simultaneously believing that Bitcoin is unstoppable internet money and thinking that a bunch of retards publishing JPEGs on-chain is any kind of problem is a contradiction. We both know the truth that, push come to shove, the former is true and the latter is false. Bitcoin is unstoppable internet money, and the JPEGs are a non-issue. But, by espousing both beliefs, you weaken any argument you might make that Bitcoin can resist the state.

For all the whining on Twitter, nobody has been able to make so much as a dent in ordinals and inscriptions. So, given that, and given that we have important work to do in destroying fiat, maybe you should stop whining about something you can't change, and adjust to the new, and possibly uncomfortable reality that NFTs have come to Bitcoin? This will no doubt not be the last time that people start doing unpleasant things on Bitcoin, so it would be a good exercise to start accepting it now. You can then refocus your efforts on more important things, like spreading Satoshi's good word and helping as many people as possible learn how to use Bitcoin.

Also, strategically, all press is good press, and complaining about inscriptions just makes more people learn about them, and makes the inscribers extra keen to nakadashi JPEGs into the blockchain, just to make you look like idiots. If normies like doing something, then you're not going to make any friends, or make any headway on anything, by scolding them for doing it.

If you still insist on complaining about inscriptions, at least take a moment to learn about them, so you can ditch your worst and least compelling arguments. These include:

• Anyone can right-click save the JPEGs. Literally every degenerate buying inscriptions knows this. Literally every single one. Nobody is buying inscriptions based on the delusion that they are buying access. Accepting this and updating your worldview will bring it closer to reality, and less likely to be destroyed by it.

• Inscriptions aren't real, they're just a collective hallucination. I've been saying basically exactly this since day one, that ordinals and inscriptions are an opt-in lens with which to view Bitcoin. Behaving as if this is some kind of damning revelation makes you look like a moron. Additionally, it shows that you misunderstand one of the most fundamental things about humans, civilization, and culture: Everything important is just social conventions. Bitcoin is, in fact, just a social convention. Or, put another way, it's not the software or data that matter, it's the social conventions around it. Inscriptions are no different.

• You can just store the data off-chain. People value on-chain data. It makes inscriptions scarce, and dramatically improves reliability and user-safety. Every other NFT ecosystem uses off-chain data, and uninformed users delegate trust to whoever happens to be pinning the files on IPFS, and they might stop at any time. On-chain data is a vast improvement in trustlessness, which, I am told, is highly valued by ideological maxis.

• Inscriptions are illegitimate. There's an obvious difference between things that are illegitimate, like state violence, and things that you just think are stupid. Arguing that something is illegitimate because you don't like it or don't see the purpose of it makes you look like a retard.

• Inscriptions are a state attack. Somehow, you see NFTs and shitcoins on other chains, understand that they exist because of enthusiasm, demand, grift, and degeneracy, don't think that these things are a state attack on Ethereum, and somehow turn around and think that they're a state attack on Bitcoin?

Attempting to censor inscriptions is exactly identical to attempting censoring other kinds of transactions. Any machinery you build or public support you muster will immediately lend support to censorship on Bitcoin in general. Fortunately, processing transactions that someone views as illegitimate is exactly the thing Bitcoin was built for, so you will ultimately fail, but we would all be better of if you didn't try to convince people that censoring Bitcoin transactions was something they should bother trying. You've already managed to confuse Ocean Mining into thinking that it's possible and a good idea, and although they'll eventually bend the knee even further than they already have, it would be nice if we just got another mining pool, instead of having it needlessly gimped right out of the gate.

So, what should you do about inscriptions?

Just ignore them. More valuable use-cases will price out the majority of inscriptions. There will always be some high-value inscriptions, but they don't compete seriously with hard money and uncensorable transactions. Bitcoin's destiny is high fees. Embrace it.

We have much bigger fish to fry, and if you're interested in doing more than just pearl clutching and engagement farming, we can all get to frying them.