Man, I am back and forth like whip lash on where I stand on this. Spam sucks, Core should be more thoughtful with communication, but I can’t decide if the filters make a lick of difference when they can go direct to miners to get in a block. Maybe there is a way to incentivize people to spam less? Like a social engineering angle?
Just did a little sleuthing on the OP_RETURN > 83 bytes from @oomahq
's post (https://x.com/oomahq/status/1916793928025596338).
There were 30 such transactions in the ~4 month period:
8 had reasonable fees (< 2x the median for the block)
11 had around double fees
7 had around triple fees
4 had 5x-8x fees
9 were mined by F2Pool (10-11%)
21 were mined by Mara (6-7%)
So in general, the OP_RETURN filter means the non-standard transactions were on average paying a good deal more than normal transactions to get into a block. And since only about 18% of the hashing power seems to mine them, they had to wait 5-6x longer to confirm.
If the point of filters is to make spamming cumbersome and costly, I'd say that they're doing their job. TX IDs in the first comment so you can look for yourself.
Discussion
The crux of this is that Etherium gas-fees became too exorbitant to justify the overwhelming and various “wild west” of spamming, and therefore as Eth fell out of favor, the grifters moved to Bitcoin - spurred by an unrecognized opportunity in the Taproot upgrade.
And now, because they drove fees high on the Bitcoin mainchain, they’ve recognized a change to leverage the core Bitcoin node software itself.
It’s not about anything but letting Bitcoin be Bitccoin.
It’s not about Bitcoin supporters doing anything.
But it IS about not allowing the easy grifters to go unchallenged.