If you think "Bitcoin DeFi" includes everything involving the currency "Bitcoin", then I can agree. So if you include tools like RGB/Taproot Assets, where some of the operations are taken off-chain, then I see a bright future for "Bitcoin DeFi".

But on-chain Bitcoin DeFi should be quite difficult, because Bitcoin's blocks are much more limited than Ethereum's, and thus the high fee problem will make many typical DeFi operations unfeasible. Some years ago, the Counterparty project intended to bring a extensive DeFi suite to Bitcoin but even the fees in 2016 (much lower than those today) were too high for an ecosystem to evolve. They had even planned Turing complete smart contracts (see here) but development stalled for a long time; more recently it seems to have made progress in this field again.

A "good" outcome could be that Runes people could develop a technology similar to OmniBolt using LN for Runes Transactions. But being aware that the Runes community is very much a spinoff of the Ordinals community and they were quite eager to put everything onchain, I doubt that.

There are builders that are bringing smart contract programmability on-chain, https://www.arch.network/

From the standpoint of an user spending fees to "etch" or "mint" a rune which will never see a buyer, the money is wasted.

I still am unsure if it's positive or negative that Runes fees are delaying the effects of halving to miners. I tend towards the latter: the miner income drop will come eventually, so it's currently only delaying it, with the cost of people leaving Bitcoin (delaying adoption "as a currency") because the network is more expensive to use.

@satscraper: Seems to be an obvious move to delay the death of Ordinals with some circlejerk token distribution, like the "Runestone" Ordinal tokens (not to be confused with the Runestone Rune platform ...)

@franky1: A full node is every node hosting all the data necessary to validate Bitcoin transactions. It should not be necessary to host the "original" data.