> In bitcoin terms it’s gotten cheaper.
I hope you’re not serious here. 🫠
Anyway, the evidence is the size growth of the UTXO set. Check the link below. There’s also the testimonial evidence from node runners that made a fresh IBD in the past year, all of them reporting slower node sync, especially when downloading the past 2 years worth of blocks. Of course you can always claim that they are dishonest, which is why you should try an IBD yourself, ideally on a machine with 4-8GB of RAM.
Am I wrong about it being cheaper in bitcoin terms?
“Although non-payment related transactions occupy about 50% of each block, the majority of the fees paid in each block are still coming from payments. This data shows how non-payment transactions (spam) are displacing payment transactions, this is forcing payment transactions to pay a much higher fee to be included in blocks.”
Isn’t this good for miner decentralization? The mempools are empty and miners are getting most of their revenue from the subsidy reward. That’s not good.
The subsidy from spam is less than 1% of the total block reward, fees included. It’s a marginal difference for miners mining spam vs miners than don’t. The adverse effect on nodes is much more substantial and node runners don’t get compensated for the additional burden on their machines.
1% revenue from spam is what it is now but that could change. Ordinals were very profitable for miners. The fact of the matter is that the spam does incentivize miners because it is more profitable for them. And although you may see it as a small profit, miners still think it’s worth it to mine those transactions. And it’s a free market, so miners should decide for themselves if they want to include it in blocks or not. The fact that they just go directly to large miners for it hurts miner decentralization because the small miners don’t even have a chance to profit from spam. I don’t like spam but it seems like the main argument to filter out spam is a moral one. And I’m more interested in longevity of the Bitcoin network. Why wouldn’t a small miner just join a large mining pool when a flood of spammers decide they want to put their spam on the network?
