Nostr Web Client

What I don't get is why those anti spam people don't like the big OP Return so that spammers are incentivized to use it so anti spam people can prune it on their nodes.

Can sb explain this to me?

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 4mo ago

because pruned nodes don't propagate blocks that they are missing pieces of the transaction payload

it's like saying to someone who wants to help keep bitcoin decentralized "you can only participate in block propagation if you obey our spam-permitting rules"

no spam. git r done and run more lightning nodes. speculative fiat money asset use of bitcoin is a poison pill to pollute bitcoin with fiat incentives. we want to kill the dollar and visa and mastercard, not become part of the shitcoin casino and stock market casino fraud.

Akashi Hyogo 4mo ago

This makes sense actually.

Let's have a scenario, is it not possible or just not implemented (sorry my ignorance):

I run knots and apply the same mempool filters to mined blocks OP_RETURNs (and drop just specific OP_RETURNs). Other knots users accept my pruned blocks because they personally don't need the data in those OP_RETURNS and assume it is spam (the same assumption they make when querying my mempool)

rafftyl 4mo ago

I'm more on Core's side in this whole debate, but Bitcoin's neutrality also means that node runners can censor whatever they wish, as long as they don't break consensus.

GLACA 4mo ago

Yes..they can If they wish but the thing is they delay those tx's and don't censor them today. I don't trust people who push the child porn arguments when it comes to open protocols and networks. This alone puts a red flag on Knots for me.

Maciek 4mo ago

The incentives to turn bitcoin into yet another gambling platform are of fiat origin. They are very strong, but they are screwed. The potential fiat profits are great, hence the spam apologists use a lot of money and effort to achieve their goals. Being useful and unstoppable as money is the sole purpose of bitcoin. The social layer is here to protect it. Spam makes bitcoin less useful as money and less resistant to attacks. We are here to defend our life's savings, the future of our families is at stake here.

GLACA 4mo ago

I have a different point of view and I see Bitcoin network in a different way.

Ome thing is clear: Knots people pushing their version by using the Child Porn argument and making sure it spreads and gets viral are bad actors hurting bitcoin. It is a state level/central banking fear campaign that will backfire. This is a red flag to me. One dev maintaining the software vs 80 bitcoin core devs is another red flag. That is two above average.

Lies about effective filters when they are not working is plain stupid since everyone can check and verify that.

Gracjan Pietras 4mo ago

I get you and partly share your views. But could you explain why you think that CP-on-blockchain argument doesn’t hold water? Isn’t it a real threat and potentially an excuse for state-level attack?

GLACA 4mo ago

The CP-on-the-blockchain argument is just recycled FUD. It’s the same scare tactic that was used against Tor, end-to-end encryption, Telegram, and even Bitcoin itself back in 2013. They said the same thing every time:

“Terrorists will use it.” “Criminals will abuse it.” “It must be filtered or shut down.”

But here’s the truth:

🟧 Criminals already have better tools—encrypted drives, dark web forums, and private servers—none of which require a public, traceable, expensive blockchain.

🟧 Bitcoin is terrible for hiding anything. Every sat, every transaction is recorded forever. That’s the opposite of safe harbor for crime.

Yes, open systems are messy. But the answer isn’t to filter at the protocol level. That’s not protection—it’s a backdoor for centralized control.

The moment we let fear dictate what’s allowed on Bitcoin, we’ve handed the narrative to the same forces Bitcoin was built to resist.

Freedom tech is resilient because it doesn’t rely on permission. It runs on incentives, not fear.

Gracjan Pietras 4mo ago

As I see it, no one in this discussion is actually for censorship. The debate is whether to keep or ditch the filters. Keeping the 40/80kb OP-RETURN filters as they are won’t lead to more censorship. Removing them will open the door to new risks. I just don’t see why we should take that risk.

I understand you believe the CP won’t come to the blockchain because (1) criminals have better tools and (2) Bitcoin isn’t great for hiding stuff. I’m not really convinced by those particular arguments. They don’t address the threat of deliberate state-level attack. Plus, I really wouldn’t want to relay or store CP with my node.

Gracjan Pietras 4mo ago

*42/83 bytes

rafftyl 4mo ago

I think that the main problem is that the filters don't really shield you from CP on blockchain. If a block is mined, your node will still store it, so the best you can do with OP_RETURN filter is to delay the CP by 10 minutes. At least this is my current understanding of the issue.

Gracjan Pietras 4mo ago

Sure, the filters aren’t 100% effective. But can we agree that they might make it more difficult or costly to get that kind of content onto the blockchain? Plus, my own node isn’t relaying that content, so I’m not contributing to spreading it.

I’m not sure how the limited effectiveness of the filters supports the idea of removing them. It feels like a non-sequitur to me.

GLACA 4mo ago

Well..they don't work that's why. CP is simply put over fuckin blown and the way Knotis communicate it is through fear and that has been done by state actors, banks and EU's before..scare you and censor you. Whole thing is a nothing burger. Bitcoin is protected by fees

rafftyl 4mo ago

Yes, if the whole network has the filters on, then the uploader has to go directly to the miners, probably paying a higher fee. However, this only incentivises them to put the content in the witness data, which is worse than using OP_RETURN that can be pruned. And as soon as the transaction gets into a block, your node starts spreading the content.

GLACA 4mo ago

Filters are a form of censorship, because they introduce subjective judgment into an otherwise neutral protocol. The moment a group decides what qualifies as “spam,” they’re no longer just validating transactions — they’re enforcing ideology.

Bitcoin was designed to be neutral. If a transaction pays the required fee and follows consensus rules, it is valid. Period. Adding filters changes that — it creates a class of “unwanted” transactions even if they are technically valid.

Miners play a crucial role here — and inscriptions and ordinals have contributed a significant share of miner revenue, especially during periods of low monetary transaction volume. That’s a market signal. It proves demand, and it helps secure the network by increasing fees and hash incentive.

To censor that flow — through filters or relaying policies — is not only ideological, it’s economically reckless.

Maciek 4mo ago

Bitcoin was designed to be money. Neutrality is a mean, not an end.

Does bitcoin need the massive, bloated, fiat-funded mining corporations to survive and be resilient?

1. You are free to think of it as of anyone's litter tray. But if so, what is the real purpose of bitcoin in your opinion?

2. Do you run a bitcoin node? If so, why? Or why not?

3. You say the filters do not work yet you say let's remove them and let's take away the possibility to use them from the node runners. Why?

For me the censorship resistance applies solely to monetary use and we need to optimise for that to keep bitcoin working. Bitcoin is a life threat for the various fiat rent seekers and they will try to destroy it.

The spam filters were introduced in 2014. It's not about introducing them now, it's about core planning to remove them completely, taking away the user's freedom to use them. OP_RETURN is not for monetary data, so no financial transaction is being filtered by it.

The whole CP argument is indeed FUD but clinging on it and refusing to listen to the arguments behind it is also missing the point.

GLACA 4mo ago

In studio. Will give my perspective when done with audio since I seem to have a slightly different understanding and vision of what I think bitcoin is.

GLACA 4mo ago

What Bitcoin Is — And Why I Run a Node

I run a Bitcoin Core node because I want to be directly connected to the Bitcoin network — not through an interface, not through a third party, but as a sovereign participant. Running a full node allows me to verify every transaction myself, both incoming and outgoing, and to know with certainty that the rules I agreed to are the ones my node is enforcing.

But it’s more than that.

Running a node is how I study Bitcoin. It’s how I learn — from the inside. I don’t believe there’s a better entry point to understanding this protocol than being part of it. And once you understand what it means to run a node, you realize something deeper: non-mining nodes don’t just observe consensus — they uphold it. That is both incredibly powerful and incredibly rare.

This is why I believe everyone should run a node. Even if you don’t hold any bitcoin, you’re still part of shaping and securing the most censorship-resistant network in human history. Running a node is an act of digital sovereignty — it gives you a voice in Bitcoin’s consensus. That matters more than most people realize.

At the same time, I don’t believe in freezing Bitcoin in time. Bitcoin is an ongoing experiment. It’s alive. To claim that Bitcoin was created solely for one rigid purpose feels not only limiting, but also historically short-sighted. Even Satoshi couldn’t predict the full trajectory of Bitcoin — how it would evolve, how it would collide with banks, hedge funds, governments, and global culture. The system he launched has already grown far beyond its original moment.

Bitcoin is now the foundation for something much bigger than money alone.

In my view, Bitcoin is the future substrate of cyberspace. And humanity needs more than money to thrive in that space. We need history. We need communication. We need permanent memory — the kind that can’t be altered, deleted, or censored. We need art, culture, and truths that survive regimes.

There is no better place for that than Bitcoin.

Some people say Bitcoin should only be for money. But we forget: the very first block — the Genesis block — contained a message. Not a transaction. Not coins. A message. Satoshi embedded a statement of intent, a piece of human context. A signal to the future.

That wasn’t an accident. It was the first inscription.

And it proves the point: Bitcoin was born with meaning, not just monetary value.

Today, that legacy continues through things like Ordinals, inscriptions, and projects like Bitmap. These aren’t just digital gimmicks. They are early signs of a broader Bitcoin-native culture forming — one that includes not just value transfer, but expression, permanence, and space.

We can’t build lasting civilizations on centralized sand.

If we want cyber-land, cyber-archives, and cyber-art, they must live on Bitcoin.

Ethereum and Solana are not built to last.

Bitcoin is.

So yes, I reject the idea that art, literature, or memorials on Bitcoin are “spam.”

What some call spam, I see as signal — evidence of life.

Of course, Bitcoin needs to remain functional, and the network has natural incentives to filter out low-value noise. That’s what fees are for. That’s the brilliance of the system: it filters by cost, not by committee. That’s how Bitcoin defends itself — not through censorship, but through economics.

To be clear, I am not pro-spam.

I’m pro-freedom, pro-permanence, and pro-experimentation.

I’m a student of Bitcoin — not a maximalist of the past.

I run Bitcoin Core, not Knots.

Not because I hate Knots, but because I believe in diverse, decentralized stewardship — 80+ independent developers working across the globe is more secure than relying on a single gatekeeper. That’s the Bitcoin way.

Bitcoin is not finished.

It’s not perfect.

But it is the most important protocol of our time.

And if the future will be built on anything — it will be built on this.

Maciek 4mo ago

You derive a theory that is against any other evidence, from just one ominous message, that seems to be a timestamp with (maybe) some added indication what Bitcoin is aimed to change.

But we've got quite a lot of Satoshi writings – do you find anything in his quotes that can back your statement, that he meant Bitcoin to be something else than money?

GLACA 4mo ago

Please take a moment to actually read what I wrote — especially the full concept of what Bitcoin represents to me.

This isn’t about one Satoshi note in the Genesis Block being interpreted as an early inscription. That’s just one detail.

I’m looking at the bigger picture — Bitcoin as a network, not just a currency. The only truly decentralized, censorship-resistant system we have that can anchor all forms of human data: value, history, art, identity, memory.

I’m not saying Bitcoin must become more than money. I’m saying it already is — and the protocol’s neutrality allows it.

You may disagree. That’s fine. But please don’t reduce my perspective to one sentence.

It’s a vision built on the logic of how both Bitcoin and the world are evolving — and what humanity will need to survive what’s coming.

Maciek 4mo ago

It is indeed a fundamental difference between us. What you're saying is: use bitcoin as a glorified database to fix the world. Do I get it right? What I'm saying is: fixing the money will fix the world (using bitcoin for that). We are not the same ;)

Cykros 4mo ago

My computer is not neutral. It is mine. You're free to relay what you like.

The idea that Bitcoin should somehow be neutral in all ways is an odd one. Bitcoin is money -- something that by its nature is designed to keep score. To let us see the winners and the losers.

That it is even possible to upload jpeg's to the blockchain is simply a failure for developers to solve a technical problem: how to prevent it without impeding the ability to manage the monetary use of the network.

As such, we can't (yet) stop the spam from getting through. But nothing says any of us needs to take part in actively assisting it in doing so.

Cykros 4mo ago

And yes, if there does come a day where we have a proposed change to Bitcoin that prevents non-monetary transactions, I'll be in favor of it. Including a hard fork. The sooner the vandalism stops, the better.

GLACA 4mo ago

You are free to have your opinion but I personally keep myself in check and try to add in my opinion it is this and that as It's an ongoing project and I don't think anyone can say it is 100% only money. It's a weird concept and in 100 years it might be a huge data base basic layer of the whole humanity reaching far beyond monetary use.

It's odd that so many people claim to know exactly what bitcoin is and what it isn't.

Cykros 4mo ago

It's a human creation. It is what we decide it is.

It's sort of like being a man.You can choose to live with principles, and establish yourself with a backbone, or you can "see what happens."

Those who "see what happens" tend not to be the ones that achieve greatness, however.

Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will. Not the observance and pondering about what might happen if we avoid making any decisions.

I for one choose Magick Internet Money.

Cykros 4mo ago

I'm not censoring anyone by running knots.

I'm simply choosing to forward monetary transactions and suggesting that other transactions find someone else to relay their weird proposed transactions.

This idea that anyone has a right to my mempool is downright socialist.

GLACA 4mo ago

These filters don’t prevent anything. They just refuse to relay or delay propagation. But they don’t stop inclusion. So your node still becomes “polluted” by the very data you claim to oppose — just a few seconds later.

So what’s the actual goal?

Ideology?

Cykros 4mo ago

They sure seemed to get Vitalik to make Ethereum as a separate project back when core devs had some sense.

And there sure is a lot of hand wringing over something so ineffectual.

I'm always going to opt for more, not fewer, config options.

GLACA 4mo ago

Wish top knots influencers did not resort to CP fud and fear tactics and labeling everyone who opposes filters a potential CP trafficker. That tells me all I need to know about the project.

Skyler Byrden ⚡️BIP 110 ⚡️UASF 4mo ago

Being checkmated is always frustrating.

GLACA 4mo ago

🤣 Mate..Chill Out. Knots is a scam.

JesterHodl 4mo ago

I understand where you are coming from. Censorship-resistance is paramount. In Bitcoin, it is expressed by the fact that no one can stop a node from broadcasting a consensus-valid block. Absolutely no one.

Purpose of Bitcoin is very simple, to create and destroy UTXOs which represent financial transactions. That simplicity is part of the breakthrough.

Now, apart from the consensus rules for transactions, policy rules exist. Ponder the name for a moment. Policy is a weaker brother of consensus which functions as a malleable way for nodes to effect the rules, without (or before getting to ) changing the consensus. That's why nodes always mattered.

For example, previously it has been possible to create transactions paying to public key. (P2PK). Because that opens a risk of factoring the private key in the future, this scheme has been rejected in favor of paying to public key _hash_ (P2PKH).

Not that it is censorship, it's because there is technical reason for applying cryptography in a sounder way. Similarly for bare multisig.

Bitcoin is not losing its censorship-resistant properties just because people defend their mempools with the tool they've been given and that's been in Bitcoin since earliest of days.

Now, Bitcoin doesn't care about transactions because it's not alive. It is a network of nodes policing each other, and we are the people running the nodes and bitcoin is the expression of the purpose of why it was created and the culture of bitcoiners.

Failing to see that is bound to get a person to think 'everything goes' in Bitcoin, and if you're not for it, then you are 'censoring', but that's just not true.

When Vitalik wanted to do EVM and his funny smart contracts, he was met with disapproval and left to found Ethereum. Similar to colored coins and counterparty.

Was this "Bitcoin not caring"? No, in fact it was bitcoiners caring.

Now, since Feb 2023, bitcoiners had gotten relaxed and distracted as new avenues for spamming had been discovered, bugs not fixed timely and inscriptions exploded, blowing up the chainstate to 12GB, most of which are currently toxic dust UTXOs which, if you run a node, are have done IBD multiple times, you should know affects IBD performance. Don't dismiss it. It's very important.

Why? Key health metric of Bitcoin is decentralization. Key decentralization metric is number of individuals running nodes for themselves. Key metric for running nodes is how easy it is in the decades to come. Each day, each Terabyte of disk, each GB of RAM, each CPU core that is incrementally added year by year by non-monetary uses acts to dishearten potential node runners, and opt for custodial solutions which lead to centralization. And with centralization of nodes, every other centralization metric follows.

I absolutely love that you are for fuck-you money, fuck censors, fuck busybodies, for freedom, for sovereignty. But Bitcoin is not a Swiss army knife and it shouldn't be because the more we give way to optimize any non-primary objective (eg. BitVM, Citrea L2 DeFi, etc), the worse the primary function (Uncorruptible Sound Money) becomes.

We've seen that when SPAM waves displaced monetary transactions. A blatant "advice" was given: "fees are the SPAM filter, outbid the graffiti or you're too poor to use bitcoin".

We need this sound money to establish itself in the hands of many people, probably for a few decades more, and not fiat and klepto bros sucking hope out of gullible souls around us.

That's not the humanity angle I came to Bitcoin for. That's horrible. Spammers were using an op code envelope which enabled to stuff data as code. Bitcoin was tricked into treating obfuscated data as transaction code. That is a subversion of the original intent, yet Bitcoin Core has been adamant not to entertain the idea that we could address it.

Many narratives emerged which only fed helplessness:

- defeatism (you can't fix it)

- strategic fatalism (if it fails, it never was good)

- descriptivism (oh, it's broken? let's fix the documentation to match the error; it is what it is, bitcoin don't care, transaction is transaction)

- censorship-resistant skewed to mean "eat my JPEG or you're a tyrant"

- incentive-compatible skewed to mean "we do everything to secure miner revenue"

And on the basis of those we got this faux hype word salad that Bitcoin is to be fun, and become the underpinning of a new digital era and that's why it must become a google drive to host all the vaporware use-cases.

Having said all that let's resume fucking up the central banks, shall we? With money, not JPEGs.

With plentiful bitcoiners, not DeFi peddlers pushing loans.

With purpose, not use-cases.

Bitcoin Monk 4mo ago

You're right, it's about incentives.

What incentive do I have to store your data on my node?

GLACA 4mo ago

If it is for example the history of mankind and humanity that we inscribe so it can't be manipulated and erased then it is our common incentive. I think this side of our lives and future of humanity is as important as money.

Bitcoin Monk 4mo ago

No, childish scribbles are not worth storing forever.

If your ideas are worth remembering they will be remembered

Do you even run a node?

GLACA 4mo ago

Yes. I run a node. I started that before getting my first sat.

Stupid stuff and inscriptions is super shortsighted because you can inscribe whole human history before it gets re-written by Zionists for example. That is one example of course.

BitcoinIsFuture 3mo ago

What if they write/inscribe their version too?

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