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You hate Bitcoin Core because they don't engage in transaction censorship to validate your purity tests.

I hate Bitcoin Core because they don't seem to care about making Bitcoin private and BTC fungible.

We are not the same.

I'll refer to "you" but this is not aimed at someone specifically:

filtering what your node will relay to others is not censorship. You're enforcing your right to run free software that does not diverge on the consensus level. And since Censorship happens only when someone succeeds in imposing their view on others, I don't think I would consider a client-level policy as a censorship activity. You'll get spam relayed to you through someone else or, eventually, through a mined block.

Also, if 99.999% nodes would run aggressive filters, then a spam non standard transaction could still go through via an off-band communication with a miner.

If you care so much about using the timechain for non monetary purposes, then at least take the burden of paying a lot more for the spammy transaction by contacting a miner. That's how filters work by the way, they increase the cost of spamming...and since the increase is only by a few Xes (3x, 4x or so) then I'd say that's even cheap spam.

And yes, not making bitcoin more private and fungible is an issue.

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Discussion

Vlad, Bitcoin Takeover Podcast 7mo ago 💬 1

How about you pay for the block space you’re trying to gatekeep, so it’s provably yours and you make Bitcoin more expensive for others to use too?

tolot 7mo ago

See, there are several ways to implement outpricing. Outpricing spammers is fine as a strategy, I agree. You can let the market decide, fair enough, we're big fans of the free market. We're so in deep the economic theory we sometimes forget that the market can stay irrational longer than you being solvent. Or you can decide to actively pushback and increase the cost of spamming by filtering more aggressively. In fact an active filtering policy does not exclude the "free market outpricing theory" at all.

Do not forget that WITHIN the bitcoin ecosystem the free market and incentives work, but Bitcoin is not in a vacuum. Out there we see actors that have the power to literally create trillions out of thin air to carry on their dirty tricks. And people with money and time to waste can choose to break the toy just because they can.

Yes, the incentives are out there, but time is a finite resource, money is a finite resource, blockspace is a finite resource.

So I don't buy the naive proposal of "let them play with it, as long as they pay we're fine". In your shows you sometimes (correctly) remind us that bitcoin has not won, there's much else to do. I agree.

I'm okay with paying fees, so much fees these idiots are outpriced. But at what end? This is a game that ruins the experience for everyone, makes everyone not able to use the monetary tool and removes focus from the real challenges we have in bitcoin, such as the privacy battle we're losing.

Or you may be right, by not bothering with them spammers eventually stop. But will that market get rational before we going insolvent?