Loyal readers of The Protocol will recall our riff in final week’s problem, headlined “Bitcoin Censorship, or Just ‘Spam Filtering?‘” The gist of the story is that some Bitcoin purists try to maintain the oldest and largest blockchain free from non-financial transactions – such because the textual content snippets and pictures that some individuals are “inscribing” onto the blockchain by way of the Ordinals protocol, launched late final 12 months. The drama ratched up lately when Ocean, a new bitcoin mining pool backed by Jack Dorsey and co-led by a longtime Bitcoin developer, the pseudonymous (and feisty) Luke Dashjr, arrange software program that may “filter” out the Ordinals inscriptions. Lots of customers of the blockchain, nevertheless, say a number of folks should not be deciding how the Bitcoin blockchain will get used; let the market determine, the pondering goes. That actually quantities to a guess that Bitcoin miners, who finally determine which transactions to incorporate in new information blocks and which of them to depart out, will select to maximise self-interest, er, earnings. And that makes them extra more likely to preserve together with these Bitcoin “inscriptions” as a result of, you realize, why go away cash on the desk? The chart under, courtesy of Dune Analytics, exhibits simply how a lot in charges have been generated thus far by inscriptions-related transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain – $147.7 million.