The battle between inscriptions and the mempool: blocking inscriptions could trigger a Bitcoin "civil war"

Author: BEN CARMAN

Translation: Luccy, BlockBeats

Editor's Note: Since the launch of the Ordinals protocol, Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr has been openly opposed, even tweeting that he would "fix" the inscription "vulnerability." This statement sparked heated discussion within the community, with various Bitcoin OGs sharing their views.

BEN CARMAN is a developer at Suredbits and works on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. He also believes inscriptions are "garbage" for Bitcoin, but he does not support aggressive opposition or intervention to stop them. He argues that inscriptions will ultimately prove to be a bubble, just like other shitcoins. BlockBeats translates the original article as follows:

Ever since the infamous 4MB Taproot Wizard block, Bitcoin enthusiasts have been fighting hard to stop inscriptions. Inscriptions are certainly harmful to Bitcoin, but the ways in which Bitcoin holders are trying to stop them would cause far more damage than any harm inscriptions could ever create.

Inscriptions embed images or other data into the Bitcoin blockchain by exploiting a trick in Bitcoin scripting. They essentially place data into an unreachable code block followed by actual spending conditions, allowing users to reclaim the original NFT. It’s a clever trick, but it breaks many prior assumptions held by Bitcoin users.

Previously, the main way to embed data into Bitcoin was using OP_RETURN—an opcode specifically designed for data embedding. However, this posed two problems for NFT creators: it rendered coins unspendable, and was limited by mempool policy to just 80 bytes. The advantage of inscriptions lies in their size limit being only constrained by block size. Because inscription data resides in the witness field rather than outputs, they benefit from witness discounting, enabling up to four times more data to be embedded. This shattered the assumption among many Bitcoin users that a theoretical 4MB block would never happen—since having blocks filled solely with witness data seemed absurd. Yet, NFT proponents found a way to monetize it. Now that this has become commonplace, we’re seeing massive volumes of inscriptions driving up fees and block sizes.

However, now that it has happened and become normalized, we can no longer stop it.

In retaliation, some Bitcoin users have proposed various methods to “block” inscriptions—methods that would bring far greater harm than the inscriptions themselves. Nearly every proposal to block inscriptions boils down to preventing such transactions from entering the mempool. The mempool is the battlefield for Bitcoin transactions, and we must protect it. The mempool only functions effectively when it remains the preferred method for sending highest-fee transactions to miners. If we lose that guarantee, people will turn to centralized systems, and we may never recover the mempool. Filtering spam transactions from the mempool won’t stop inscriptions—it will at most delay them by a week. Inscribers already have backchannel communications with mining pools; if we cut them off from the mempool, only those mining pools aligned with shitcoins will be able to collect these fees.

This has already occurred across many shitcoin networks, where mempools were shut down for various reasons, and the primary way to broadcast transactions is now through centralized APIs. This effectively creates a permissioned network—even though anyone can run a node, you cannot access Bitcoin without access to the transaction broadcasting API. We are already seeing increasing efforts in Congress to regulate nodes, miners, and wallets as money transmitters. Losing the mempool would make this problem 1000 times worse. Without a functioning mempool, trustless fee estimation becomes impossible, creating serious security issues—though that’s beyond the scope of this post.

Moreover, filtering transactions based on "spam" metrics might lead us down a dark path. The most economically efficient way to conduct transactions on Bitcoin isn't necessarily the most private. Today, the most popular method for achieving on-chain privacy is Coinjoin. Coinjoin isn’t inherently economical—you're essentially paying yourself along with others. If we set a precedent that transactions must prove their utility to avoid being labeled spam, it won’t be long before someone exploits this to exclude Coinjoin and other privacy-enhancing techniques from the mempool by labeling them as spam.

Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed numerous shitcoin bubbles—and this time is no different. Shitcoin supporters will eventually dupe all the fools, and things will return to normal. But we shouldn’t interfere in ways that risk undermining Bitcoin’s core principles in an attempt to prematurely stop something. We should simply wait and let it resolve itself.