Bitcoin's design inherently discourages SPAM, as demonstrated by fees stabilizing at 1-5 sat/vB after the alleged "attack" on the network.
Andrew Poelstra, a renowned cryptographer and Bitcoin developer, eloquently addresses whether arbitrary data storage on Bitcoin can be prevented:
This dev got the point I think. We already know that Bitcoin cannot scale onchain, we even know that not everyone can self-custody and open channels just for themselft on Lightning. We need these options open to scale Bitcoin off chain while keeping freedom. It doesn't matter if not everyone can do their daily transactions on-chain, it doesn't matter that not everyone will manage lightning channels but it matter to have the freedom to do so and use any node we want to interact with Bitcoin, own node if you can afford, oncle Jim node if you are lucky to have one around, a community node where we share costs with trusted individual or even corporate managed nodes, offering acces to Bitcoin as a service for profit.
Today, with fiat, only the latter is possible, with banks or service on top of banks (Paypal and co). Bitcoin offers a better future for everyone, not because it can serves everyone directly but because it's giving freedom.
And yes, such freedommhas a cost, that it will be possible to use the network for non-financial, non-bitcoin, use cases. Maybe in 2023 it was worth doing it for some but it slowly fadr out as RoI was getting negative. Today it's a non-issue again, like for the majority of the Bitcoin block so far, it might chance again tomorrow but we cannot do much about it without hurting the ecosystem even more.
