Hello everyone,

Before I start this message, I first wanted to wish everyone a happy holiday season and a very prosperous New Year in 2024. Ok now that that's out there, I feel that its important that I post related to the ongoing Inscriptions/Ordinals issue that's bloating L1 and, IMO, attacking the social, technical, and financial game theory layers of Bitcoin.

As I see things it appears as though they, entities funded and/or focused in TRADFI, are currently pitting miners against many members of the community and the generally accepted ethos of the greater good of bitcoin's independence of the traditional fiat system, and are currently complicit in attempting to fold our BTC freedom money into the fiat system.  These inscriptions and ordinals attacks are trying their very best to create things like "rare sats" (which attacks the fungibility of Bitcoin token) while also pushing NFTs onto L1 while simultaneously making every node runner responsible in hosting these potential political attack vectors. 

Also not to mention that with the currently (artificially high due to inscriptions IMO) L1 transaction fees, they're making it impractical for many of the lower earners net worth folks around the world to attain self custody of their sats and thereby making them reliant on third party custody solutions which very much pumps the breaks hard on the self custody revolution that IMO Bitcoin is all about.  I should also mention that with respect to the higher fees over the last few months that I understand that eventually fees will rise on Layer 1 however it's my view that they will only do so in terms of fiat currency, not in sats or Bitcoin as the price of BTC should rise and eventually the large publicly traded miners selling them for fiat will likely be part of team HODL rather than team fiat.

Since currently however TRADFI seems to have their tentacles deep into the fiat price of bitcoin and are taking this opportunity (while their political money still has value relative to bitcoin) to try their best to get control of it by all means necessary (look at the current Elizabeth Warren attack on self custody initiated by the CEO of the largest US bank , Mr. Dimon).  To me it comes down to the grass roots community here to try to stave off these attacks as soon as possible. 

With all of that said, as a long time node runner in different parts of the world I've been noticing a difference between my node's mempool and what mempool dot space as well as blockstream dot info. After digging into it a bit deeper (with the help of the new goggle tool on mempool dot space), I was able to look at literally dozens of transactions in the mempool labeled inscriptions and then try to pull the same transaction on my nodes running version 20.2 and none of them were visible..that is until they're confirmed by the miners. The point I'm trying to get through however is that if you don't support inscriptions like me, then you might want to consider running an older version of bitcoin core as your node like me as it appears to filter them out of the mempool. Case in point as of now I see about a 1 GB difference between mempool dot space and my node (1.48 GB 311,000 TXs on their site vs. 564 MB/81,000 TXs on my node).

As always, any and all feedback is greatly appreciated...especially relating to the apparent filtering of the inscription transactions on bitcoin core v 20.2.  Thanks in advance and again happy holidays everyone!