Lots of Nostr-ers in the replies don't understand how bitcoin works fundamentally, and it is very telling.
I don't know what's more impressive. The urge of those people to censor transactions that are completely valid, or the fact that they think they can have any effect whatsoever?
I assume you use email with spam filters turned off? I mean those spam emails are valid messages according to the protocol right? Why should they be censored? Some spam will alway get through anyway.
Here is the thing - even if you do turn the filters off, the amount of spam you will get is far less due to the fact that would be spammers know that most others do have the filters on. Email would be completely unusable if spammers knew their activitoes were blessed, even encouraged by the main email providers.
The email analogy is completely idiotic. The chain is not your email account, and you do not get to decide what goes into it. Block size is the only factor that can reliably prevent what you think your mempool policy prevents.
Spammers can configure their nodes to directly talk with mining pools, or even just directly send the tx to some web page, if that's even too much hassle for them. You think you'll have prevented spam, but in reality, you'll just accept it normally once it gets confirmed in the next block.
And technicalities aside, you're simply pushing us further toward censorship. There's no universal definition of what constitutes "spam". You just don't like JPEGs, and instead of accepting the network's inefficiencies as a tradeoff for zero trust, like an adult bitcoiner, you've taken it upon yourself to act as the sole arbiter of what qualifies as spam.
I do (or should) get to decide what my node relays. The email analogy is not perfect but pretty good, Google, Microsoft, ISPs and anyone that runs an SMTP replay are the 'node operators' of email. They all filter spam, if they didn't no one would use email.
The argument that filters do nothing because determined spammers can just go direct to miners (and pay much more) is nonsense. If that is the case why do they want to remove the filters? Clearly they do do something, they make it harder and more expensive to spam.
'No universal definition of spam' is also complete by gaslighting nonsense. Email marketers (like Lopp in his early career) say the same thing, but everyone knows spam when they see it. Just because we can't agree on a perfect definition doesn't mean allowing all spam is good idea. Hint: JPGs are spam.
> The argument that filters do nothing because determined spammers can just go direct to miners (and pay much more) is nonsense.
No, it's not. You can just download a libre relay and send anything to a mining pool like MARA pool. "Spammers" pay a premium to MARA, for as long as other mining pools choose to censor their transactions. If enough revenue is generated by those "spammers", I'd expect more pools to start relaxing their mempool policies. Absolutely no transaction has ever been censored because of the way this network works.
In short, it's not your mempool policy that makes the difference, it's Foundry's, Antpool's, ViaBTC, F2Pool etc.
> If that is the case why do they want to remove the filters?
Because 1) it does make it more comfortable for people with these transactions to be part of the network and 2) it makes your transaction fee calculation more accurate.
You miss the point. Yes spammers can go direct to miners. But it costs them more and requires more effort, as you then admit 'it males it more comfortable for people with these transactions to be part of the network'. I do not want to make it more comfortable for spammers I want the network to be as hostile to them as possible.
The fee estimate point is FUD, even if it were an issue it would be a price well worth paying, but it is simply not an issue. See Mechanics explanation for details, but my understanding is it only affects those using an outdated method of estimating fees anyway.
I do miss the point, indeed. The point I miss is that the problem is people who don't want to accept the inefficiencies of a decentralized network and its inevitable role as a data later, but want to meddle with it, causing unintended consequences, because they place themselves as arbiters of truth.
The mempool issue isn't FUD. If you have a different mempool than the mining pool's, then your fee estimation is less accurate. That should be fairly straightforward to grasp.
The more you try to censor dataonly transactions, the more you push them to transform into forms that are indistinguishable from regular transactions, and then it'll be even worse for all of us, because they'll bloat the UTXO set with millions of unspendable UTXO.
