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@ Itamar Peretz
2025-05-24 17:28:38
I agree with a lot of what you're saying — Bitcoin can and should be able to handle some noise. Graffiti on the monument is fine, and yeah, it’s a pretty honest reflection of humanity.
The concern isn’t about the JPEGs themselves — it’s about the direction of the response. What worries many of us is that instead of letting node runners decide how to handle this kind of activity on their own, the current maintainers of Bitcoin Core are removing those choices. Filters that let you ignore spam? Deprecated. Settings that help lower-resourced nodes protect themselves? Quietly being raised 1000×. People who have tried to raise concerns about this issue have been banned from GitHub, including me. Not for abuse — just for disagreement.
So it’s not about “Bitcoin can’t handle scribbles.” It’s about whether people running sovereign nodes are still allowed to say, “Not on my relay.” That’s not central planning — that’s local control. And the fear is that we’re watching that get eroded.
Suppose Bitcoin can survive trolls, great. However, it should also withstand people saying 'no thanks' to troll payloads. That’s what decentralization means — not just a protocol, but permission to dissent. If we lose that, even quietly, it changes the culture of Bitcoin more than JPEGs ever could.