But from the viewpoint of the Ordinals/soon Runes users, if they have paid the fees and they're transactions are following the consensus rules, are they truly "exploiting" the system? It's not their fault it's there. They're merely using it because the system allows them to. Plus if it wasn't Casey Rodarmor, it would be another developer that would use this "hack/bug" and make something from it.
I'm not sure if I get it right, so excuse if I confuse consensus rules with something else. My standpoint is: it's a flaw in consensus rules to allow arbitrary sized witness data for an input in a transaction. There's likely no real need for this. It's an oversight which is now exploited. Can it be fixed easily without having weird or problematic side-effects. I don't know, that's a bit over my technical Bitcoin expertise.
I don't care who exploits it for whatever reason. The inscription shitheads and shit-token on Bitcoin blockchain morons exploit it and abuse the blockchain for storage of bullshit data. They don'c care about Bitcoin, period!
Sure, I'm exaggerating that it's bullshit of whatever flavor in my personal opinion. I don't expect anybody to agree on this with me. I'm free to have my own opinion and defend it.
I believe that they should be careful. It might start a hash war again.
Did you rather meant a blocksize war? I believe, yes, because I can't make up anything related to hash power with this topic.
I don't like it too, it's making on-transactions a little more expensive to use for plebs like us. But what can we do? Literally ANYONE can use Bitcoin the way it allows us to if we pay the fees and follow the consensus rules.
We can debate the magnitude of "more expensive" fees, but that's not what I dislike in particular. More adoption and more transactions would also fill up the mempool and make it more expensive for you and me. That's the fee market and I have no valid point to complain about it if more adoption and "normal" transaction volume were the reason for mempool clogs.
OP_RETURN data costs 4WU per byte. I wouldn't be happy if people start to use it excessivly but at least they'd have to pay a fair fee for it. And it's limited in size for a reason. Someone who wants to pay for it could use as many OP_RETURN outputs in his transaction(s) as this someone feels (s)he needs to. Would I like it? Certainly no. But I'm pretty much sure, it wouldn't be exploited in the extend we see with the inscription shit.
This superfluous data burdens every archival node and because of arbitrary size within the limits of max. blocksize any exploiter can cram in data that could become a problem with law. OP_RETURN is somewhat similar but you have the 80 bytes limit, even if used in multiples, you have a segmentation of problematic data like pictures or movies that collide with law.
Another issue is the bloating of the UTXO set by idiots who like to send dust or more to the genesis block's coinbase or rather the derived P2PKH address of the P2PK coinbase public key or other "Patoshi" blocks. But that's another, entirely different topic, though it shows to some extend that many people simply don't care to look at the whole picture and consequences for all of us.
Sorry for the rant but such sort of asocial ego-centric <choose your own fitting curse word> narrow-bubbled beings piss me off from time to time.