If this Ordinals stupidity keeps going on, for years to come, become more popular and a lot of idiots creating shitcoins and images that children do on Paintbrush and saving them in the Blockchain with these unspendable UTXOs, couldn't this harm bitcoin at some point?
For a non block miner, sadly it will harm the network and probably its adoption a bit if it’s prolonged for a longer time, because just like now we will be face with high number of unconfirmed transactions and the use of bitcoin network to propagate small transactions will be a thing of the past. If it continues then will be face with another block size war as proposal for a bigger block size will emerge to enhance its scalability and we know how a bigger block size poses the risk to decentralization of the network.
But will the ordinals and inscriptions continue for a longer time? I will say NO because as time passes on those naive people buying this jepegs will find out that it wouldn’t be profitable as they see it and will stop and probably the inventors will have to find another initiative to scam users again. For now it’s just hype because people believe it is the next big thing like that thought when NFT started.