Is there an argument to be made about allowing spam on the chain because there's limited demand for monastery settlement?
Discussion
It doesn’t matter too much because existing consensus rules already allow spam.
It would take a consensus change (rather than just node-relay behavior) to truly limit spam that people are willing to pay for, which is unlikely to get broad enough support.
I would not support consensus changes to allow or incentivize more spam. Such a stance can only be supported if one is long-term bearish on monetary/settlement demand.
So, spam filters work, but not completely. And the op_return debate is still reasonable to have? I'm still puzzled about what would happen in the case of continuously orphaned blocks.
Spam filters 'work'... but they don't work well.
Yes they 'work' but not equally... and in their current state, especially with mempool 'filters' they only work on smaller miners. Large miners just create custom APIs and the interface to accept spam out-of-band to receive the high fees associated with arbitrary data.
Therefore the current 'filters' are broken... and in their current state tend to centralize hash-power rather than decentralize it.
In my opinion people saying that miners will 'decide' out of 'goodness' not to mine the spam is a pipe dream - they will mine whatever pays the most provided it is not a DoS attack (like unverifiable transactions).
Plus... decentralizing 'block construction' does NOT guarantee that miners "won't mine spam" if the spam pays higher fees. How does that make any sense? For Bitcoiners to *really* decrease the on-chain spam they need to make it more expensive to spam... and the only technically, ethically, and economically sound way to do that is *use* Bitcoin the money as money.
The more people use Bitcoin 'the money' the healthier it is overall.
There's an argument but it's probably not a good one. If demand for blockspace doesn't pick up before we've had a few more halving and/or the price appreciation slows down significantly, we could have a situation where miners can't afford to sustain the high levels of hash power they have invested so much into producing. They might look for ways to increase fees by facilitating more data storage applications, but it really doesn't seem like there's much demand so it probably wouldn't do much.
Thankfully the difficulty adjustment will keep the mining industry from collapsing completely, but we could see a washing out of less efficient operations and some consolidation and centralization as a result. Not sure if any of that is likely to happen or not. I think fees will pick up the slack for lower coinbase rewards by then.
Isn't that part of the risk of being a miner? It's not reasonable to require every node to store arbitrary data forever, simply because they overinvested in a malleable network.
Will there not be an incentive to use DATUM if inefficient operations become unprofitable?
I was just playing devil's advocate in trying to answer your question. Honestly you should probably just disregard what I said, I'm not really that knowledgeable on mining.