Nostr Web Client

"Monetary activity will out compete spam for block space."

This is a baseless assertion made by the moderates. (They are moderates because they are at least prepared to admit spam exists and that it is bad).

You can get 85 thousand computers to store your data for free. Forever! Or at least until they get sick of doing it.

Unless Bitcoiners work *extremely hard* to make leeching off the network as cumbersome and expensive as possible, spammers *will* turn Bitcoin's blockchain into a mechanism for storing unwanted data on the computers of unpaid volunteers.

The fact that we can't even update spam filters without a fight tells anyone paying attention that Bitcoin is being stewarded by people who don't understand how it can be attacked, let alone how they might go about defending it.

Cardinal 7mo ago

Right now, spammers are getting what they want by inserting garbage into the blockchain, miners are getting what they want---which is compensation for putting garbage into the chain, but node runners are not getting anything for their work.

Utilizing storage, memory, and electricity is work. There are opportunity costs---node runners could have been using that storage, memory, and electricity for other tasks. But they choose to do the work, paying for it out of their own pockets, to uphold the decentralization and integrity of the Bitcoin Network.

The system has been abusing their volunteer work for about three years now. The costs have risen rapidly. You cannot just easily use an old machine you would have discarded or a cheap, low powered device like Raspberry Pi. Pruning has become a necessity for most people.

There is no way to transfer a part of the economic benefits from the spammers and miners to the node runners. It's callousness to assume node runners will continue to put up with this indefinitely.

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