A comforting idea has taken hold among Bitcoiners: that Bitcoin can be a store of value you keep and never spend. It is the most expensive misunderstanding in Bitcoin, because storing value has always depended on other people being willing to take it in exchange.
Nothing holds its worth on its own. A thing carries value forward only because others will still take it off your hands tomorrow, the way a word keeps its meaning only while people go on using it. Menger called this salability; Mises showed that a money's value today rests on people having accepted it yesterday, and so on back. Cut it off from that use, and you are left holding a bet that people will want it again later.
So Bitcoin has to stay money people can actually spend, and can verify for themselves, by running the software and reading the rules off their own copy of the chain. That works only while a full node stays cheap to run. Let the chain bloat, and verifying it drifts to whoever can afford the hardware, and most people fall back on trusting a few big intermediaries, which Bitcoin was built to avoid.
This is what the BIP-110 fight comes down to, and why I stand with
@Matthew Kratter and
@Bitcoin Mechanic. It keeps arbitrary data from crowding out payments and raising the cost of running a node. Opponents call that censorship, but Bitcoin has always had consensus rules about which transactions are valid, and I would rather they protect the people using and verifying the money than those storing images on-chain.
We may not get another chance like this to take money out of the state's hands. Losing it to on-chain spam, and ending up with a store of value too bloated for ordinary people to use or check, would be a grim waste. The fight of our lifetimes is on!
