High fees: Be careful what you wish for

It's no secret that Ordinals and Stamps are making the fees go to the moon, they are so high right now that the median fee to be included in the 6th pending block (1 hour away from now) is 200sats/vByte, around 45200 sats in transaction fees if you're spending a 1 input 1 output segwit UTXO, or roughly 17.5 € at the time of writing (December 117th 2023 - Block height: 821656) . In what started as a means to do something new with Bitcoin, has spiraled into making Bitcoin unusable to the average Joe, a bunch of conspiracy theories on how this is "a Nation estate sponsored attack" and the wackiest wars ever fought: in one side you have a bunch of idiots in Wizard costumes telling everyone that they can do whatever they want with their money and in the other side a religious fruitcake that has been accused of eating cats trying to limit what people can do with their money. And in the middle of all this shitshow, it's us the plebs, the people who now can't spend their own money because it's too expensive to move of that have resort to trusted 3rd parties to do the heavy lifting.

How many times have you checked the mempool just this week? 1 time? 10 times? 100 times? Was that enough, or do you need to check it another 10 times Anon? It's not like you can afford to spend your money right now anyways.

The situation right now is sad, really sad, you see people losing half of their hard earned money on a LN channel closure, trusting a 3rd parties to hold their trustless money, we went from "Not your keys, not your coins", "remove your coins from all custodians immediately" and "never reuse an address" to "Wallet of Satoshi is great", "Pressure your exchange to accept Bitcoin on Liquid" and "Make all your UTXOs bigger than 1M sats, or even better, have all on a single UTXO because you might never be able to spend it" real quick, so now, the same people who were pitching self-custody, multiple keys and never resusing UTXOs, the same people who bashed cryptobros every time the federation who held the keys of their favorite layer 2 rug pulled everyone, and who said that Bitcoin would bank the unbanked, are now pivoting to recommending a trusted federation as the holder of their money until it becomes economically viable to move and are telling everyone that they'll never be able to use the trustless system, only trustees.

Now, let's be real for s second, while I find Ordinals and Stamps to be a waste of resources, pure gambling, speculation and overall an extremely stupid way to burn money, I won't even try to stop them, it would be against myself to do so, I support freedom, even the freedom to make stupid decisions, and although this fad will pass, but the problems will stay and something must be done to tackle them, we need better solutions than what we have right now.

This is the result of keeping Bitcoin unchanged for the sake if keeping it unchanged, ironically but nut surprisingly, the fear of change has led us to needing a change. This is what we all wished for, a fee market and only a few players using the chain.

I know this might sound as a Mike Hearn moment but it isn't, I won't be leaving Bitcoin and selling it all, and even if I did, it wouldn't matter, I'm a nobody. But if there's anything to learn from everything that's happening is that Bitcoin needs a change, and it doesn't matter what do you think, Bitcoin will change, and this new war is evidence that it will happen.

I'm really glad all this debacle is happening because it stress tests the strong beliefs held by many Bitcoiners, it stress test the strength of decentralization and it stress tests market dynamics, this is not a war sponsored by a nation estate, this is the market fighting puritanism and extreme caution, it's a war on the absolutely stupid cult-like behavior of many so called Bitcoin maximalists, which is willing to give away Bitcoin to trustees as long as Bitcoin doesn't change, and it won't be won by them, nor will be won by the people who only want to trade JPEGs. In the end, the only winner in all of this will be Bitcoin.