Yes because they are financial transactions on a monetary network. Arbitrary data or as we use to call it spam, is not.

So labeling transactions as financial magically makes them moral and legal? Never mind you would never know unless you used special tools to tell the difference

The whole point of bitcoin is that it is a monetary network outside the control of central banks and governments. If you believe that's a good thing then you have to accept that it will be used by people you don't like.

I accept that decentralization is the MOST important attribute of the monetary network. I also accept that because it is a network that uses large amounts binary data, it is impossible to control how people interact with it within the rules of consensus especially since there are countless ways to encode non-monetary meaning into large amounts of binary data. Policing that meaning will require centralized authority which runs counter to ideals of this entire endeavor, as well as to your legitimate suggestion that I accept it will be used by people I don’t like.

There is a difference between policing the data and welcoming spammers by: - providing official' support for large quantities of spam. - refusing to fix the bug which enabled inscriptions No one is claiming all spam can be stopped but deliberately removing friction for spammers is not a good idea for the long term health of the network. If spammers know that the network is hostile to them and there is a chance they will get rugged at some point in the future then that's a huge deterrent to VCs funding large scale spammers.