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@ jimmysong
2025-05-19 03:10:28
If Bitcoin is a monetary network and that's your priority, then NFTs and Memecoins are definitely worth thinking about, given that those things are now a significant chunk of the UTXO set. Somewhere in the 40% range are under 1000 sats and using Taproot, from what I've read so they have real effect on users' ability to run nodes. Shouldn't decreasing them or economically discouraging them be a priority? The attitude I've seen from many core devs is that of "we can't stop them entirely, so what's the point of trying?"
> If bitcoin's going to go anywhere, it can't be something where some select individuals can exercise outsize control over the network as a whole based on their personal dislikes. If you're in a position to stop people from spamming, governments are in a position to stop people funding opposition parties.
You're right that the analogy I gave is off, but I disagree with this.
Certainly if it was a small number of people that could veto transactions, yes, that would be terrible (though with enough KYC mining pools, this will be the case). But what we're talking about are relay standardness rules that virtually every node on the network already runs *being removed*. That's not a small number of people, that's almost everyone! And as others have pointed out, they can *still* get their transactions in if they're willing to use other means to get to miners who will mine these non-standard transactions. We're not talking about a small number of people censoring transactions they don't like, we're talking about most of the network *not relaying* transactions they don't like. They're not the same thing.
Nobody should be forced to relay transactions that they think are spam. It is not your bandwidth. Nor should anyone be forced to not relay transactions that they think are legitimate. The choice should be up to the node runner. The PR that got closed, and the current PR that's open both aim to remove this choice now, the next release or eventually.
> The issue with a global public ledger is that **every** entry in it other than those relating to your personal coins is fundamentally spam as far as you're concerned.
I get your broader point that we have blocksize limits that prevent data that people don't care about from getting out of hand. But what you have here is a very strange definition of spam.
I care about the part of the ledger that I have, yes. But I also care about the total number of Bitcoin as its absolute scarcity is a hugely important part of the value proposition. So yes, even transactions that I'm not directly party to actually do concern me because I want to be assured that the number of all Bitcoins is what I expect it to be. In other words, a continuous audit of the entire ledger has value to the individual holder.
Spam wastes the resources of my node and block space on non-monetary transactions making this continuous audit more expensive. So spam is not just "transactions that I'm not directly party to," but non-monetary transactions that bloat the resources required to audit the ledger. As I said, I understand the spam is limited by the blocksize limit, which is great. But it's still spam and making the distinction between monetary transactions and spam would mean monetary transactions cost less while spam costs more, which means we get more of the former and less of the latter. And conversely, removing the distinction, which is what removing the relay filter would do, would mean monetary transactions cost more while spam costs less. That would be prioritizing spam.
In other words, a monetary network should prioritize monetary transactions.