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With every argument you keep proving to me that you fundamentally misunderstand what money is, despite having written an entire book on the subject. Bitcoin is not “just a ledger,” as you’ve claimed in the past. Bitcoin is a monetary good, a decentralized payment network, and a censorship-resistant currency all in one. It’s a full-stack monetary system, not a spreadsheet.

From economics perspective, money emerges from the market as the most saleable good. Bitcoin fits this because it optimizes for scarcity, verifiability, and portability. Turning the blockchain into a dumpster for arbitrary data directly contradicts these foundational principles. It bloats the system, undermines its monetary utility, and creates financial friction for actual users.

Bitcoin *is* the most spam-prone system in the world. That’s the price of having no centralized party to manage or steer usage. And that’s exactly why its culture has always been hostile toward non-monetary use of the blockchain. Every byte of nonsense stuffed into blocks competes with real monetary transactions, increasing fees *unnecessarily*, straining bandwidth, and degrading node accessibility. That is not neutrality, it is misallocation and *abuse*.

This isn’t a technical debate, it’s an economic one. Austrian economics warns about malinvestment (capital being misallocated due to distorted incentives). JPEGs, tokens and other data on Bitcoin are a textbook examples of that. They waste block space, misalign incentives, and sabotage the very foundation that gives Bitcoin value: its usability as money and its decentralization.

If you make it expensive or difficult to run a node, you centralize validation. Most miners don’t run full nodes or create their own block templates. They outsource that to a handful of mining pools, most of whom are already flirting with KYC and OFAC. You let guys like that dictate consensus and the 21M becomes meaningless. That’s how Bitcoin dies. Not with a bang, but with friction, complexity, creeping node centralization and ruined culture.

Your current stance is pure cope. It betrays a deep ignorance of the very economic principles you claim to understand. Bitcoin is money. Everything that weakens its monetary properties weakens the entire value proposition. As a prominent influencer loved by many Bitcoiners you should do better.

Crizzo 7mo ago 💬 3

I agree with you about some of this, but I just want to point out that the filters are what's causing bandwidth strain because nodes and other miners that aren't aware of certain transactions and have to download them to validate a recently mined block. Bandwidth usage is already limited by block size and blocks are almost always full anyway, so it's not like spam would actually increase the amount of data that needs to be shared every time a block is mined. Having everyone aware of all the transactions available to be mined would reduce latency and keep the network running smoother.

As for the rest, I agree that spam is marginally detrimental to the monetary use case, but I also think it will be priced out pretty easily at higher fee rates. My current opinion is that I would like to see fees reach a higher baseline to preemptively price out spam before the filters are dropped, but I do think they should be dropped eventually.

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Discussion

Tauri 7mo ago

Wrong. Suggest reading the whole post, but I pulled out the relevant part to your opinion.

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Crizzo 7mo ago 💬 2

I've read that post and I know about the block reconstruction, but that doesn't address my argument about bandwidth. If everyone is running filters then nodes and miners will never see certain transactions to cache them.

Tauri 7mo ago

Good. Then they don’t need to be seen and can just be dropped.

Crizzo 7mo ago 💬 2

Until a big miner mines them...

Tauri 7mo ago

Fair game. The problem is that the big miner would probably be a big pool that unilaterally decides what goes into blocks without respecting what the hash rate providers or node runers might want. And that’s a whole other can of worms. Hopefully FPPS will be getting less and less relevant in the future and the mining centralisation will be fixed to a good extent.

ESE 7mo ago

That's okay. Some wounds leave scars that we carry forever; they're part of our lives, and we must embrace them and carry on.

Guy Swann 7mo ago 💬 1

There is no strain on bandwidth from missed transactions (even though that also isn’t happening anyway). The transaction is downloaded either way, either when broadcast, or when added to a block. But default compact block filtering actually keeps all transactions that are valid, even those being filtered, in expectation of them being in a block.

Essentially this argument being paraded around has no example of it in reality. It’s just some theory being tossed around that kinda sounds good, imo. Transactions are downloaded by every node no matter what the relay policy is. The only question is when.

Des Imoto マキシ 7mo ago

If nothing is happening and if it were happening it doesn’t matter, why change it? (OP_Return) The argument is, don’t change it.