Reflections on On-Chain Censorship and Fork Debates in Bitcoin
Some comments on the censorship and the potential fork.
The Question of On-Chain Censorship
A recurring question often comes up: since Bitcoin’s blockchain, with its limited but real data capacity, already contains some illegal content, isn’t it reasonable to demand censorship or even removal of such data?
At its core, this is a question of responsibility. Should Satoshi Nakamoto—and later Bitcoin Core developers and maintainers—be expected to ensure that all user-uploaded data on the blockchain complies with the legal standards of every jurisdiction around the world?
Where Responsibility Belongs
In my view, the responsibility of Bitcoin Core developers lies in continuously optimizing the system so that the blockchain serves its primary purpose—facilitating transactions—while making it less convenient and less suitable as a storage medium for illegal content.
This is already happening, and it appears to be working well. By contrast, preventing the display and distribution of illegal data across different jurisdictions is the job of blockchain data service providers. This is the missing piece today, and it needs to be strengthened.
Why Immutability Matters
From a technical standpoint, efforts to preserve Bitcoin’s immutability are both reasonable and essential. Blockchain is understood as a trust carrier built on cryptography. That trust is rooted in mathematics itself, not in people, and it is precisely what allows the system to accrue long-term value.
If the system were ever subjected to human censorship and manipulation, that foundational trust would suffer structural damage.
The Role of Service Providers
Blockchain data service providers cannot ignore the realities of legal and compliance pressures. They are the ones with the power—and the responsibility—to decide which on-chain data their customers may access through their platforms.
It is unconvincing to shift the burden of compliance onto the blockchain itself, which is merely a neutral data carrier that cannot bear legal liability.
Take the example of the internet: countless torrent files containing illegal content exist. If a service provider indiscriminately enables its users to access such data without filtering, it is effectively facilitating the widespread distribution of illegal material. In such cases, the responsible party for compliance is clear and concrete.
What This Means for Ordinals
Censorship on Bitcoin has always been a clear and specific threat to Ordinals. If one day Bitcoin’s maintainers were to adopt the position that “Ordinals are spam and should be blocked in future versions”, Fractal Bitcoin would be able to perfectly mirror all inscriptions from the Bitcoin mainnet—with only about a 1/38 increase in data size.
Importantly, offering this potential capability does not conflict with the responsibility of preventing illegal content from being displayed or distributed in specific jurisdictions.
Lorenzo
2025-09-30
E-2509B (Lorenzo’s Library)
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0