it's the only one that can be considered a currency since it's fungible
same way as cash is, a $20 bill is worth $20 no matter what
1 xmr is worth 1 xmr no matter what
that's not the case for any of those others, including bitcoin
bitcoin already wasnt fungible due to transaction history being public, tainted coins, are a thing, some bitcoins are worth more and some are worth less because of the transaction history they carry
and now, with the bitcoin ordinals, every "sats" (last decimals of bitcoins, like, bitcoin cents basically) are being inscribed with NFTs pics or whatever:
https://ordinals.com/making every cents on bitcoin having their own value, that's not a currency, that's an NFT, bitcoin was the original NFT and now even more, which... fuck that
Monero is different due to being the only crypto
currency being used as a currency and having the fungibility of a currency which none of those other billions are
Bitcoin now has over a million NFTs inscribed on it's blockchain (https://ordinals.com)
Meanwhile, Monero devs and community being all like "nop, fuck that NFT shit, it's supposed to be an actual currency, not something to store and spam arbitrary data on"
https://libreddit.de/r/Monero/comments/12jsaft/monero_cli_01822_fluorine_fermi_released/
One-sentence summary of the following quite long post: If you think the Monero blockchain is not the right place for NFTs install this release soon.
Some background info about the most important change in this release, the first highlight in the release description:
Code
Daemon: add a size limit for tx_extra in tx pool (#8784)
tx_extra is the technical name for a part of Monero transactions where you can attach any additional arbitrary data, e.g. a picture or a text document. Monero until now was very liberal regarding the size of the data; you could add 100 KB if you liked, and thanks to Monero's quite low fees that wasn't even expensive. However, until quite recently there was no software available that made it easy for Monero "end users" to really use that tx_extra feature.
That changed about 1 month ago when a dev or a group of devs released a modified version of the Monero CLI wallet app that made it very easy to attach pictures to transactions, see their announcement tweet thread. They called the mechanism mordinals, with m from Monero and ordinal, the name of the corresponding feature on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Now where is the problem? If many people publish such mordinals, the blockchain will grow faster than today, and you as a Monero user may be less than thrilled to store gigabytes of material as part of the blockchain that has nothing to do at all with using Monero as a currency and may not interest you in the slightest.
You may also object to controversial pictures that people upload, with porn of course the prime example.
Finally transactions with a much bigger-than-usual tx_extra will stand out on the blockchain, and quite in general everything that stands out has the potential to develop into something that weakens privacy.
A clear majority of Monero devs are of the opinion that something like "minting" mordinals is unwanted on the Monero blockchain, and this led to this change. It limits the size of tx_data to a bit more than 1 KB.
In the future this limit will probably either become even smaller (256 bytes are proposed), or tx_extra will be removed altogether, introduced with a hardfork then.
So is this the end of mordinals already? This is an open question.
If you run release 0.18.2.2, your daemon will refuse to accept a transaction if its tx_extra is over the size limit, and won't distribute it further to other daemons it is connected to. But if such a transaction arrives as part of a valid block, it won't object. In fact it can't, because this release does not implement a hardfork, and thus there is no way to enforce the use of it. As long as some miners and pools run previous versions sooner or later a transaction with a mordinal attached will find its way into a block.
How fast this happens depend on how many people run this new release, and how many mining pools we can convince to switch to it as well.
Thus, if after reading this you also think that you don't wan't NFTs on the Monero blockchain, and you run your own daemon, it's a good idea to install 0.18.2.2 soon.