Can Bitcoin Treasury Companies be the heroes of the Spam Wars?

Bitcoiners can stack sats without running a node. BTCTCs do not have that luxury. Their custodians must run a node, and therefore a decision must be made. What protocol to run?

Michael Saylor said that, "the war for the future of money will be won with money," and now that BTCTCs have taken their places on the battlefield, I believe that they can be the critical force as economic nodes that holds the line against spam.

According to the doctrine of 5th Generation Warfare, we as individuals, and bitcoin itself, are under constant attack.

Spam is one attack vector that distorts free market signals. How can 1 satoshi = 1 satoshi if some satoshis have "valuable" arbitrary data glued to them? That would be like a fiat decree that paintings are legal tender and valued at a penny, and now you need 100 Mona Lisas to buy a candy bar. It's why we stopped making pennies because the copper in the coin is worth more than the fraction of one dollar a penny represents.

Spam on money makes perfect money less perfect, and any effort to degrade bitcoin's ability to be money is clearly an attack.

Whether Core is complicit in the attack or simply too incompetent is irrelevant. It reminds me of the Lysander Spooner quote:

"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist."

So Core has either authorized spam as we have had, or it has been powerless to prevent spam. In either case, it is unfit to exist (on my node).

How are BTCTCs uniquely positioned to help?

They have fiduciary obligations to preserve shareholder value, meaning they have an obligation to preserve bitcoin's value.

They can commission studies to analyze the threat of spam (and CSAM) to bitcoin's value, and direct custodians to run Knots or fund developers to find alternative solutions to spam. The war for the future of money will be won with money.

This will require courage, however as all heroic efforts do. Luckily, it's been said that bitcoin is a courage test, not an IQ test. If it were an IQ test then all the "but you're not technical" arguments would be correct. The plebs who understand money is supposed to be money (and nothing but money) recognize the appeal to dev authority as tech slop.

But what if BTCTCs aren't motivated by the carrot of being the heroes we need? There's always the stick, and shareholders hold that stick. If a spam event like CSAM is connected to the next black swan event, shareholders will be wondering why BTCTCs didn't protect shareholder value by running nodes that filter spam and why they didn't advocate for BIP-110 to move this protection to the base layer.

So while individual node runners are likely insulated from legal repercussions of a CSAM event, BTCTCs will have made themselves juicy targets of litigation for failing to protect bitcoin's value.

Anna Lappe is attributed to the quote, "Every dollar you spend is a vote for the kind of world you want." This is easily converted to philosophy of stacking sats, and also by investing in companies that are aligned with bitcoin ethos. That could be finding a cure for cancer or it could be converting the fiat financial system to a bitcoin standard.

Will BTCTCs be the heroes or the villains of the Great Spam Wars? Only time will tell.

And I will be voting with both my time and money.