Lyn’s a macroeconomic wiz but not necessarily in a position to understand the ripple effects of these seemingly small protocol changes. Nor does he claim to be. Nor do I, for that matter.

I’m a pretty simple minded guy with only a surface level understanding of how these BTC transactions are crafted. From my perspective, I’m just asking myself, “Does this make things easier for spammers , or harder? Does it further Bitcoin’s primary purpose as money, or just it make it easier to crowd out monetary transactions with garbage? Do the people pushing the proposal receive outsized financial benefits from the change due to their own business interests?”

The only response I’ve seen so far is, “No worries. Spammers probably won’t make use of this exploit we’re introducing because, guess what, we’ve already introduced a *prior* attack vector that’s even *more* effective for supporting spam transactions.” Meh, ok. Maybe that’s true, but not exactly a compelling narrative. Why take the risk when no one is really certain what the side effects will be?

Even if turns out the change is a non-issue from a technical standpoint, if there’s enough acrimony over it to cause a split or hard fork, either on the chain itself or in terms developer mindshare, that truly is a problem. No way institutions or government agencies will want to stay onboard if there’s a debate over which branch is the real Bitcoin. I don’t think it’ll come to that, but I already see rumblings of people digging in, running alternate Bitcoin implementations, trying to poach devs from the core group, etc.

It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.