Spam on the timechain is mostly a symptom of there still being limited monetary/settlement demand.
Discussion
The fact that fees are this low still makes me think spam isn't really a threat and the filter controversy is overblown.
Is there an argument to be made about allowing spam on the chain because there's limited demand for monastery settlement?
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.
IMHO, Fees are not low or high; they always represent the fair value of using the network at a particular time. The filter issue is not related.
Fees are the filter.
Prices coordinate behavior.
For the moment yes. #bitcoin is still under used. and this will change with mass usage.
So yes, now, today, it is not a problem, but tomorrow can you certify it will not ?
Any vision about that, about the future ?
What do you think the fees will be on Bitcoin in the future? High? or Low?
If and when Bitcoin becomes the neutral 'fed-wire' for the world???
a lot higher for sure, because the reward will be low.
But hope this will not avoid most legit transactions (too higher fees for low transactions amount).
That's why "spam" should be a concern for everyone.
So when a base-chain transaction is 10$... (with 99% monetary usage) will it be 'too high' or 'too low' at that point?
And *no* the fees will not be high because the 'reward is low'. The fees will be high due to block space demand because the entire world wants to transact on chain.
THAT is the future of Bitcoin and any other explanation/rationale imo about the future misses the entire point.
So for you block space could be fulfill with anything ?
i said reward will be low and it is a fact, and miner will try any options to keep the most profitable mining block.
Having higher fees because everyone want to "transact on chain" is ok.
Having a lot more higher fees because everyone want to "put extra datas on chain" is not.
As i said, this is not a problem when a block is not fulfill, you can fill it with these extra datas, they don't take the place of any other legit trasactions.
But thinking these extra datas will only be written when there is no transaction on chain is a lack of vision. If you create the opportunity of space for anything, it will be fulfill most of time and will raise fees a lot when legit transactions will be needed to be written in a block.
This was my point.
"we must stop the spam" bro there is almost NO onchain activity rn
Nice to meet you 😉🤝
Yeah, when it just came out and it was a fad. Now it’s a long residual echo.
What do you think the fess are going to be in a hyper-bitcoinized world? With Bitcoin as *a* global settlement layer for 200 million companies, 8 billion people, on 7 continents?
What are all the big companies and institutions going to 'pay' (much less countries) to get their transactions 'on-chain'?
what will you?
Nice to meet you 🤝😉
And that we are lazy defending our network from spam.
cherry picked data
You'll be surprised how much success is the LN for txs sub 0.1, it's almost all of them.
I have a routing node that every day is getting more tx than a single block on chain, and multiply that by thousands of more LN nodes.
This picture from your own mempool instance? Or is this somebody else's node?
Block after block, tick tock…!
Regardless, spam should not be accepted on Bitcoin mainnet.
I’m not an extreme Bitcoin bull, but I think that’s just because we’re still early.
I agree.
That's why I don't consider there to be a serious problem.
So lightning bad?
Spam won't help facilitate more economic use in the future, it's just parasitic. It hurts bitcoins focus as monetary network, makes running nodes harder which are the central pillar of the network. Even in times of low demand for block space we need to be stewards of the chain and keep it focused.
The spam on bitcoin will solfy itself. Bitcoin is a self-regulating system
empty blocks being mined.
fishy as hell.