Nostr Web Client

Mechanic can't see the shape of every possible future valid transaction or every future spam. This includes requirements for potential future L2 scaling solutions.

Without that you can't even begin to write a valid filter. After that everyone who has written a regex knows what happens next.

As long as all the pissing and moaning from both sides is about mempool and not valid blocks it feels a bit like a psyop argument to me. Like US politics going on and on about left right to distract you from the fact that they are both authoritarian and there is no freedom candidate or platform. Both sides on the stage seemed to pointedly avoid any discussion of validation rules to get on chain.

Unless we're talking about changing validation rules the change is smoke and no fire. The real problem is the conflict of interest from core, bad public relations, and general fuckery. Just because they are shitheads doesn't mean every change they proposed is bad.

My full authority at my company... A few people on both sides are getting written up. Don't merge. New PR that changes the default but doesn't remove the option on my desk by Friday.

Snotklap 8mo ago

Just because one cannot predict every form of spam does not mean one should surrender to all of it. Spam filters, like all boundaries, are not invalidated by their limitations. They’re justified by their effectiveness and even imperfect walls still hold back the flood.

Mechanic never claimed omniscience. He acknowledges the inevitability of bypasses. But to use that fact as an argument for abandoning filters entirely is intellectually lazy and, frankly, manipulative. It’s like saying locks are pointless because thieves exist.

This isn't about censorship or validation rules. It's about sovereignty. About whether a node runner retains the right to curate their own mempool, to reject what they believe pollutes the system before it becomes consensus reality. Removing that power isn't neutral, it’s malicious. It’s an attack on the autonomy of the individual in the name of vague, speculative future possibilities.

To liken this debate to a "left vs right" psyop is a false equivalence. Validation rules and mempool policy are not theatrics. They are philosophical ground lines... who decides what Bitcoin propagates? The miner? The core dev? Or the person running the node?

If the answer isn’t the node runner, then Bitcoin stops being decentralised and starts becoming curated. And a curated Bitcoin is no different from the systems it was designed to escape.

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Discussion

jgbtc 8mo ago

In fact, it's the core devs that are claiming omniscience. They assert that spam transactions will get into blocks "one way or another" but of course they don't know this. Yet another analogy is gun ownership. We don't know how many more home invasions there would be without legal gun ownership. Similarly we don't know how much more spam there would be without the filter.

bloblob 8mo ago

They mention that miners use private mempools and will include transactions nonetheless as they have incentive of higher fees.(like they do it already, it's not an hypothetical thing)

So running nodes with filters only makes the network more split, and more centralized(miners will tend to run code that give them fatter fees overall). So it does not avoid spam in the blocks.

This is what I understood from their arguments.

Snotklap 8mo ago

Yes, spammers can still submit transactions directly to miners through private channels. But this isn’t free... it transforms spam from a low-cost, frictionless broadcast into a high-cost act of collusion. It requires coordination, trust, infrastructure, and, above all, higher fees. Filters work by raising the price of spam. That alone is victory.

Their argument is, at its core: “Because some will defect, all must submit.” That is slave morality.

If filtered nodes cause divergence, that’s not a failure... it’s a revelation. It exposes where sovereignty really lies: not in the many, but in the few who validate blocks. The real fear is not about spam, but about unmasking how centralized the network already is.

To say filtered nodes increase centralisation is to say: “Only total submission preserves unity.” But the filtered node refuses this. It says: “I choose what I propagate. I define my values.” It is not a passive conduit for garbage. It is a declaration of independence in a system quietly ruled by pools.

Bill Cypher 8mo ago

I pick locks as a hobby. I promise you, locks are pointless.

Plus as we all know no one who locked their doors has ever been robbed.

Control what spam? Unless you are going to change block validation rules and hard fork the chain all this is over 10 minutes. So it wasn't in your mempool for 10 minutes. Next block validation it goes on chain for you to store forever. Unless it were in op_return, then you could choose not to save it.

I already said, make me god and you get your setting and that the core devs acted like asshats so I'm not sure why I'm personally being attacked like this.

I do think the default settings for core should be for it to attempt to have the most accurate possible mempool it can. Kinda wild people are so ideologically opposed to that.

vinney...axkl 8mo ago

what about orphan blocks?

Bill Cypher 8mo ago

I don't think orphaning a block here and there matters to this. For the most part every TX that got orphaned will be in the next 2-3 blocks, they are still high fee and in someone's mempool.

The tech seems clear to me, the knots people are somehow more worried about spam in mempool than saved on chain.

If it is just about attitude, this is the guy here to save you from the core team being condescending instead of helping explain the change to node runners.

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