Ok so when I hear the core people say that the filter doesn't work I think their steelman argument is that because the filters can't provide 100% filtering. Miners will eventually mine some of the spam into a block which will have to be downloaded... Is that right?
Discussion
That is correct, but that doesn't mean filters don't work. So far, 95% or more of the transactions adhere to the filters imposed by the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network, which provably shows that the filters work. Their goal is not to fully sensor transactions, their goal is to rate limit transactions so not to fuck up the experience for everybody else. It's really not hard to understand. Core's arguments are just dishonest and can be falsified by empirical data from everybody's bitcoin blockchain.
Just curious, @germanhodl are you a bitcoin dev or knots dev?
Like I said I'm not smart enough to get all the technical details, but I'm trying to get their steel man case.
Can you explain how they think it helps with miner centralization?
Or how they guy who made damus thinks its removing an unneeded software component is thinking?
They think by removing the filters and relaying all the trash around, smaller miners will have a better chance competing with big miners, who offer out-of-band services like slipstream or decide against network policy to mine trash relayed to them regardless. They hope that by doing it small mines will have access to the same TX and are not disadvantaged by blocks relayed to them where they need to fetch the transactions because they filtered out those transactions in the first place (SPAM).
Unfortunately, this is a problem created by minor centralization in the first place and will only deepen minor centralization. A healthy filtering peer-to-peer Bitcoin network will punish those big miners by slowing their trashy blocks propagation through the network and rewarding honest miners who follow the same mempool policy as most of the nodes.