> Hello Super Testnet, hypothetical question and train of thought

Thanks! Happy to reply

> The max blocksize is 4 Mb, right?

Yes

> The spammers are spamming and loading up jpegs, right?

Correct

> They are stored forever and this kinda sucks

I agree

> But it is within the 4Mb limit

Yup

> So technical consensus and developers and node runners should have been expecting to receive and store 4 MB blocks

Naturally

> Are these always monetary transactions if somebody uploads a picture of a dickbutt? I don’t know, probably not

Sounds about right. Some of the data contained in some transactions is probably do not monetary data. Sometimes it is a picture.

> But it’s not really ‘bloating’ the blockchain, since we all were expecting ( or preparing to be ready) for 4MB blocks anyway

I disagree. I often use the analogy of a Justin Bieber fansite to discuss this. If I ran a Justin Bieber fansite, I would want certain content on my server, namely, content about Justin Bieber. If it had a forum, I would want my users to create threads and posts about Justin Bieber. Suppose one day I log into my admin dashboard and see that a bunch of posts contain little to nothing about Justin Bieber, and are basically just a transport for embedded NFT image data -- "Bored Apes," for example.

Upon investigation, suppose I find that a bunch of NFT sellers decided to host their image data on my Justin Bieber server because it offers free storage. Maybe they even only host it there temporarily -- e.g. maybe they delete it once someone purchases it. Even so, I would naturally oppose this: it's not what my server is *for.* And it would be silly for them to argue, "We're staying within your image upload limits, so it's not *really* bloating your server. Suck it up! You can't stop us anyway." They would be wrong in several ways: the images *do* bloat my server by being content I don't want to store even for a second, and I *can* fight back by applying content filters to my server. I am also perfectly within my rights to do so, as the admin of that server.

The same applies to bitcoin's mempool. You are the admin of your mempool. You get to decide what it's for. If you do not intend it for relaying jpegs, then every jpeg in your mempool is a technical problem. And you have options to fight back, including by applying filters to your mempool, which objectively reduces the amount of spam you relay. You do not have to follow along with the false doomerism of the "it's inevitable, there's nothing you can do about it" crowd. They are wrong, and every available piece of objective data proves them wrong. Mempool filters work at their primary job, which is to filter your mempool, thereby improving the performance of your node, and making it match more closely with the desires of those who use the filters.