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Bitcoin is an electronic cash system, not an electronic jpeg storage system.

Arbitrarily calling JPEGs spam goes against the Bitcoin ethos. That's partly why we have fees.

This fee-based filtering aligns with Bitcoin's broader ethos of removing trusted third parties and subjective gatekeeping. Rather than having miners or nodes decide what constitutes "legitimate" use, the market mechanism of fees lets users themselves determine what they value enough to pay for.

Bitcoin's design is intentionally neutral about content - it processes transactions based on economic incentives, not subjective judgments about what data is "worthy" of block space. When someone pays market rates to include data, they're participating in the same permissionless system that makes Bitcoin valuable in the first place.

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Discussion

Tauri 3mo ago 💬 1

Nodes have always dictated what is legitimate use. Your argument about the fees being the ultimate metric of what should go into the chain is why Vitalik made Ethereum. He was arguing the same thing and he was shown the door.

EverythingSings 3mo ago 💬 1

Satoshi talked about this btw. When Andresen raised concerns about people potentially flooding the network with “millions of transactions to transfer the latest Lady Gaga video to all their friends,” Satoshi responded: “That’s one of the reasons for transaction fees. There are other things we can do if necessary.”

Tauri 3mo ago 💬 1

The “other things” are filters. Fees have already proven ineffective against gamified spam like ordinals and inscriptions, where speculators cover the higher cost of clogging the timechain with ever-higher bids. Fees only work against the classic kind of spam - a temporary DDoS attack. And Satoshi couldn’t have predicted the SegWit witness discount, because SegWit didn’t even exist when he made that statement.

EverythingSings 3mo ago 💬 1

If you start censoring certain types of data, you open up a Pandora’s Box. Just seems near impossible to start censoring arbitrary data while respecting the freedom and privacy aspects of Bitcoin. But I respect other’s opinions, part of the power of open source is having these discussions so thanks for sharing.

Tauri 3mo ago

Fist, it’s not censorship. Second it’s being done with enormous success over the years between 2009-2023. 99.9% of the data containing txs are within the filter parameters. In 2023 a filter got exploited thanks to the taproot upgrade (unintentional consequence) and that resulted in the huge abuse of arbitrary data (spam) that we’ve seen over the past 2.5 years. If this filter was fixed back then in Core 26 or 27, like it was fixed in Knots, we wouldn’t have been having this conversation.