Thread

• Bitcoin’s design objective is the secure, decentralized transfer of value. • Every transaction represents a financial state transition: ownership of sats moving between keys. • The block size and scripting capabilities are intentionally limited to preserve decentralization. • Storing arbitrary or non-monetary data bloats the blockchain permanently. • Increased chain size leads to higher storage, bandwidth, and validation costs for all nodes. • Excessive non-financial use centralizes the network by pricing out home node operators. • Bitcoin’s immutability demands responsible usage—every byte is an eternal burden. • Embedding unrelated data (NFTs, files, messages) exploits consensus for non-consensus purposes. • Such actions mirror altcoin behavior: complexity, bloat, centralization. • Bitcoin is not a general-purpose data store or computational engine. • The UTXO set must remain manageable to maintain full node accessibility. • Abuse of the base layer invites soft forks and protocol changes—threats to monetary immutability. • Non-financial uses break the economic symmetry between cost of inclusion and utility. • Layered scaling (e.g. Lightning) exists precisely to offload non-core functionality. • Preserving Bitcoin’s integrity requires ideological clarity: it is money, not middleware.

A peer-to-peer electronic cash system can be interpreted as a data storage system in the specific sense that it immutably records transaction data in a distributed ledger. Each transaction is a data entry. The blockchain acts as an append-only database replicated across nodes. However, its function is not general-purpose data storage—only financial state transitions are recorded. Storing arbitrary data is inefficient, and antithetical to its purpose.