Adam Back, an early Bitcoin developer and the co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, has weighed in on the debate about what he calls “JPEG spam” on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Back argues that it undermines the cryptocurrency’s core purpose as money in a thread on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday.

Bitcoin should be considered "owned by humanity" with developers acting as "stewards" who require user consensus to change the network materially, Back said. That principle, he added, was reinforced during the block-size wars of 2015–2017, when user-led economic pressure stopped miners from pushing through protocol changes.

Back took aim at the surge of JPEG inscriptions—images stored directly on Bitcoin through the Taproot upgrade and the Ordinals protocol that it helped spawn.

The number of JPEGs em

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