Facing this reality, which has been the case since the start, increases the reach of blockchain proof. It ends offchain/onchain as an ontological split, and destroys onchainness as a fetish. Treating the blockchain as the root of assertion and commitment, neccessarily incomplete in itself but still unfalsifiable and stretching out rhizomatically in all directions, anchors reality against the political order that would destroy it.

Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space.

Well, you can take some text, encode it as Bitcoin addresses and send Bitcoin to these addresses. Since the node software cannot tell whether these address can be spent or not they cannot be discarded.

The Blockchain is not Permanent Free Storage

Nobody said that the storage should be permanent and free. You have to pay for the transactions to be included.

Transactions designed to store data that are not transfers of Bitcoin were historically regarded as spam.

Dubious claim. We even argued before the block size wars that these transactions aren't spam. "historical." History according to whom? Not according to my history.

Spam defects from this, bloating the blockchain (and in Bitcoin’s case, the live transaction set) with data that may never be useful to anyone other than the person who created it.

Aha, interesting line of arguing. So storing art on the blockchain for anyone to own is "Spam" but storing the transactions between you and your friend buying pizza suddenly isn't.

This imposes a cost on other users without a proportionate benefit to them.

No it doesn't. If it does then the Bitcoin fee algorithm is broken, then you need to fix it and stop complaining.

Each spam transaction may be only a few bytes, but they add up over time and some are much larger.

Thankfully Moore's law for storage exists. A 4 TB hard drive is 280 USD. Cry me a river.

I'm not going to go further in reading this. The basic premise is already completely off IMO

Ha ha, luckily I didn’t write this, so I’m not going to die that on that hill defending it. Also my knowledge on the subject is probably not sufficient.

I guess your criticisms highlight the ongoing debate on blockchain purpose and best practice. However, I think they might not fundamentally refute the article's central thesis that blockchain storage comes with economic and technical trade-offs that must be considered when designing systems and applications.

For example while storage is relatively inexpensive today, the blockchain's unlimited growth presents long-term scaling challenges. Moore's Law doesn't guarantee storage will always outpace blockchain growth, especially as adoption increases. More importantly, the cost isn't just about storage space but also about validation time, bandwidth, and synchronization - all factors that affect decentralization.

I think Bitcoin maximalists like the author of this post always make it sound like Bitcoin has one determined use case and that this would be transacting scalar. They also have a wrong moral model of burdening node operators with storing data permanently.

To even argue that decentralization comes before permanent storage is just your personal preference, as much as it is my personal preference that the data is preserved.

Memecoin trading is adding scalar value storage, which can be pruned according to Satoshi Nakamoto. Is memecoin trading data worth preserving longer than art on the Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchain?

There can be a storage function where fees are determined such that storage size grows slower than Moore's law.

Personally would not describe artist Rhea Meyers as a Bitcoin maxi. She already made work on Ethereum as early as 2014, and most of her work is on Ethereum. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/of-crypto-and-anarchism-in-conversation-with-rhea-myers/

I interpret the article in the context of artists pushing for onchainness as a fetish, the idea of “onchain art” as the leading paradigm for creating art on a blockchain in the sense that their art then will be stored forever and cannot be lost (also in terms of value for the collector) - thought this is not explicit in the article. I think she is trying to argue against this, and that using blockchains for storing art is beyond their purpose.

Yeah, this is a Bitcoin maxi opinion

Misha why do you print artworks and hang them on walls? Walls were not meant to hang artworks and the holes from the nails are ugly and make the wall less stable. Paper and color was never mean to produce art. We manufactured it to write texts, it‘s fetishized to think you can forever embody yourself in paper and on walls. I think you should stop doing it, it makes no sense.

How is this not the same nonsense?

Personally would not describe artist Rhea Meyers as a Bitcoin maxi. She already made work on Ethereum as early as 2014, and most of her work is on Ethereum.

Ethereum’s mainnet was launched on July 30, 2015.

where is the proof that she did this?

Anyways, I‘m also working on using blockchains for storage since 2014 and I disagree with her. And I was also working on storing art. And besides, just because she has a bigger profile and Google decides to show her face when you Google her, it literally means nothing in relation to her vision and argument being bad!

Talking about onchain and offchain storage, recently discovered a project called Beast DAO and they are building an alternative to ENS names called 0xNAME which is fully onchain contrary to, they claim, ENS names that partly rely on offchain data.

Anyway identity probably a good use for onchain storage!