🔔 🔔 NEW OP_RETURN 🔔 🔔

All of the OP_RETURN drama just reinforces for me how few people actually understand how Bitcoin works at a fundamental level. Anyone telling you that you can filter out arbitrary data at the mempool policy level are either malicious or misinformed, it simply is not feasible. Soooo many people have just blindly believed their favorite influencer or podcaster and haven't taken the time to understand that Bitcoin is a simple decentralized database literally designed for data storage. Should we optimize for financial transactions however possible? Sure! Can we prevent arbitrary data storage? Absolutely not! Are there good reasons to use Bitcoin for arbitrary data storage? Absolutely! Many new L2s and scaling solutions would require storing proofs on-chain, something that is simple data storage. They can do this no matter what you run on your node as the only entity who matters for block inclusion are miners, and miners have a clear incentive to make more money. That incentive is at the core of Bitcoin's game theory, and cannot change or everything falls apart. If you go nuts with mempool filters and everyone runs sketchy software to white knight as "Defenders of BitcoinTM", guess what happens -- everyone just sends transactions straight to miners for an additional fee, small miners can no longer be competitive, and miner centralization gets drastically worse. Or they find unstoppable ways to simply make their transactions look standard using steganography (hiding data in tweaked pubkeys, unspendable outputs, etc.) so that they don't have to bother with direct miner submission. Not only would that be literally impossible to filter, it would also be drastically worse for scaling than the current state of things. Now the last major effect of this insanity is that it will absolutely lead to faster burnout of the few devs willing to work full time on Bitcoin, and disincentivize future devs from working on Bitcoin as they'll know they have to wade through the morass of public opinion just to get simple changes in a PR. Guess what happens when less devs want to work on Bitcoin? It stagnates, becomes more and more vulnerable to attacks at a software level, and becomes less useful as money because not enough people are maintaining or building the software. So what can you do about "spam"? Bitcoin has a novel spam prevention mechanism -- fees. Don't want people spamming the chain with "useless" jpegs and zk proofs? Simply spend more sats on using Bitcoin day-to-day, take self-custody, participate in the circular economy. The current state of almost no Bitcoiners using Bitcoin regularly is a core reason why on-chain "spam" is happening more than ever the past couple of years, as more and more usage of Bitcoin has shifted to custodians like Strike, Wallet of Satoshi, Liquid, etc. The more of us that actually use Bitcoin the more we disincentivize using Bitcoin for data storage as the fees necessary will prevent it. Simple and effective. https://x.com/sethforprivacy/status/1919003009880616976

https://mempool.space/tx/64a4b1efaeedfe88596c118f7ba5b48cac498cbdb51bc3e8366edd0d20da2662