The Bitcoin Mempool Drama Was All Too Predictable

So mempool.space recently added features to spot Runes and Ordinals transactions, and Bitcoin monetary maximalists totally lost it. As a Bitcoiner and observer of Bitcoin culture, this whole drama felt completely normal and predictable.

Over time, an ideological split has emerged between Bitcoin monetary maximalists who see Bitcoin as only money and those open to building things on Bitcoin such as innovative, crypto-esq tech like Ordinals, Runes and tokens.

With this split mindset now entrenched, the mempool.space backlash was inevitable.

To clarify some FUD going around:

The Mempool Open Source Project does not support “ord” daemon integration - https://t.co/VXxVsvUuQN only displays data contained in Bitcoin’s mempool and blockchain and from the Lightning network.

This means that if you lookup a transaction…— mempool (@mempool) October 12, 2024

From the purist viewpoint, anything beyond the Bitcoin protocol is heresy.

So, even just the neutral action of mempool.space displaying Runes and Ordinals data for their users to see provoked outrage. Never mind if it made one of the best open-source Bitcoin explorers more useful and data rich — it touched the "forbidden" topic, and all rationality went out the window.

This reaction perfectly followed the playbook. The monetary maximalists responded to perceived apostasy with fury, as they always do on X. 

These clowns have managed to bribe one of the longest-standing and highest-quality open-source projects in the space into labeling transactions that "contain ordinals, inscriptions, and runes" as such. It is a shame, to say the least.

None of these scams are #Bitcoin. They all… https://t.co/ietxCH3T1f— Knut Svanholm ₿ = ∞/21M = 1/