There is a war of words raging on X right now, and the insult of choice is some version of "retard." I'll admit, I've used it too. It is easy to reach for when the other side seems either unable or unwilling to understand your position.
Ironically, as we walk through the Retard-bomb smoke and the wreckage of countless "Bitcoin influencer" reputations, we find ourselves fighting against the retardation of Bitcoin. And I mean that in the older, cleaner sense of the word. Let's pull up the definition so we're on the same page:
retard (transitive verb): to delay or impede the development or progress of: to slow up especially by preventing or hindering advance or accomplishment. (Merriam-Webster)
That is exactly what is happening to Bitcoin.
The attack on the network
Suppose you wanted to destroy Bitcoin, but you knew you could not kill it directly. The next best move would be to hobble it. To retard it: delay the growth of the network. Raise the cost of using it. Raise the cost of verifying it. Make it harder for ordinary people to run full nodes. Push the network toward professionalized infrastructure that can be regulated, pressured, and eventually captured.
One obvious way to do that is to fill Bitcoin blocks with arbitrary data: images, tokens, inscriptions, Runes, BRC-20s, and other junk that has nothing to do with Bitcoin as money.
That data competes with monetary transactions for block space. It raises fees on people actually trying to use bitcoin. It also bloats the chain and the UTXO set, increasing the cost of running a node. Push that far enough and "plebs" drop off. Node count concentrates into a handful of well-funded operators. A network that runs on a few hundred professional nodes can be regulated, pressured, and eventually captured, i.e. no longer permissionless.
This is not some abstract concern. It is already visible in the data.
The bloat is measurable
Bitcoin Block Space Weekly has been documenting the damage. Start in December 2025, with Issue #3, "Three Years of Spam." There, Renaud Cuny tallied the damage since Ordinals launched: roughly 76 GB of non-financial data permanently written into the chain and copied onto every node on earth, with spam eating 36% of all block space over the prior 90 days. Across three years, that non-financial junk consumed well over a quarter of Bitcoin's block space while contributing about 1% of total miner revenue.
That should have ended the "we need this to pay miners" argument. I used to repeat that argument myself. The data changed my mind.
In Issue #17, "OP_RETURN on Bitcoin: Five Years of Data," the picture gets worse. April 27, 2025, the day Bitcoin Core PR #32359 was opened (proposal to raise the default OP_RETURN data limit by roughly 1,200x), large data payloads that had appeared just 292 times in four and a quarter years showed up 19,088 times in the following eleven months, a 307x jump once you adjust for the length of each period.
Even more telling, most of this activity traced back to just three mining pools: Marathon, F2Pool, and SpiderPool. Dozens of other pools mined none of it. So much for "organic demand." In practice, the push to store large payloads on Bitcoin appears highly concentrated.
By Issue #26 (May 2026), the structural picture was more bleak. 46% of Bitcoin's block space, measured in vbytes on a 90-day average, was carrying non-financial payloads. Nearly half the chain's capacity, on average, spent on something other than money. As Cuny puts it, heavy non-financial use "raises fee pressure on monetary users" and "increases the probability that harmful or outright illegal payloads end up permanently embedded in the chain, inherited by every full node operator by default."
I fell for it too
I know the appeal because I fell for it early.
In 2023, my brother and I were working on an animated cartoon called Bitcoin & Friends. He had been more involved in broader "crypto" culture, while I was moving steadily toward Bitcoin maximalism. He wanted to release an NFT collection on Solana. Then Ordinals arrived, and I bought into the "make Bitcoin fun again" pitch.
At first, it seemed innocent. Cartoons, collectibles, fun little experiments. I was busy with non-Bitcoin software work and was not following the deeper technical arguments closely. The talking points sounded reasonable enough: block space was underused, miners needed fees, and Bitcoin should be open to whatever people wanted to do with it.
I was wrong.
The people who promoted it
Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Ordinals, was welcomed onto major Bitcoin podcasts, including Matt Odell and Stephan Livera. Here's Odell in a "spicy conversation" with Casey Rodarmor , where he says early on: "I do not think Casey is a scammer."
Rodarmor presented inscriptions as a legitimate Bitcoin use case. He even argued they were superior to Ethereum NFTs because the entire artwork could live on-chain rather than pointing to IPFS. In other words, he treated the permanent embedding of images into Bitcoin's blockchain as a virtue.
But every full node operator inherits that data forever. That is not innovation. It is abuse of a monetary network.
Many people, including me at the time, were hoodwinked by the presentation. Bitcoiners who promoted this man should be ashamed.
Then they fight you
Did anyone seriously think Bitcoin would threaten central banking, financial surveillance, Cantillionaires, and political power without being attacked?
Of course not.
The attack does not need to look like a ban. It can look like "innovation." It can look like art, culture, experimentation, "freedom" to use Bitcoin however you want, or fee-market development. But the practical effect is the same: raise the cost of running a node, centralize validation, and from there apply regulatory pressure until Bitcoin is captured and becomes permissioned. I wish everyone screeching online about keeping Bitcoin permissionless could see that this is exactly how you lose it.
This is the fight. Or at least one prong of the attack.
Ordinals and the garbage built downstream of them are not just annoying. They are an attack on the network.
Halt the retardation
Bitcoin is being slowed, burdened, and redirected.
Thankfully, the network attack has a concrete answer: run BIP-110 .
BIP-110 is a user-activated soft fork that temporarily limits arbitrary data in transactions. It caps small outputs, restores an 83-byte OP_RETURN ceiling, and limits data pushes and witness elements. In plain English, it makes Bitcoin a far worse place to dump images and tokens.
It is a node operator's veto.
Use it.