Stupidity can bring value.
Testing dumb ideas is, in the worst-case scenario, a warning to everyone else.
Ordinals were one of those ideas.
From the start, it was obvious they would not scale well on Bitcoin mainchain. Block space is expensive and scarce. The more people use it, the more expensive it becomes.
But nevertheless, Ordinals brought value to Bitcoin.
People who followed Ordinals early, especially inside the Ordinals community, saw something interesting: many people who had never run a Bitcoin node started running one because of Ordinals.
And they did not only learn how to run a node.
They learned how to use RPC commands to talk to it.
They learned how blocks work, how fees work, how mempools work, and why block space matters.
Then fees exploded.
The temporary spam created by Ordinals proved two important things:
1. Bitcoin mining can be profitable from transaction fees alone.
2. Layer-above technologies like Lightning and Liquid are necessary if Bitcoin is going to scale.
But only real-world usage can push these technologies forward and shape their path.
In the end, the market always wins.
Ordinals had a lot of supply, but not enough lasting demand.
Still, the lesson was valuable.
We only know that hot water burns because someone got burned by it.