Care to engage with a confused pleb?

What I don’t understand is why core seems to have given up on working on filters. They initially created op_return with a limit to minimize spam damage, so they did wanted to limit spam. But spammers found workarounds like using witness and fake output (on top of going directly to big miners to get their over the limit transaction in).

I don’t understand why the solution now is to remove the filters completely, instead of working on improving filters (2 years ago a PR related to that was refused as “controversial” if not mistaken) or to change code at consensus level to make these kind of transactions invalid…?

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The PR was to just tighten the filters I believe. It was controversial then for the same reasons this PR is controversial but the opposite way. No matter what you try to filter, if it is a concensous transaction, it will get in. And there is no magic bullet to stop spam. Until someone can explain to me a solution, removing data carrier only serves to squash this drama once and for all and we can talk about things that might actually work.

thanks for replying man, much appreciated

1) Ok, so if I understand correctly, one way to get rid of spam would be to change what is a valid transaction at the consensus level. But this has already been tried few years ago and consensus was not achieved.

But if this is true, then the PR pushed just now also clearly was very controversial but was pushed anyway in a hurry....why?

2) When OP_RETURN was initially created in 2014, did spammers already used then witness and fake output for their spam transactions?

3) I get that big miners directly accept spam transactions thus creating several problems (mining centralization etc). But why are we not developing a way to prevent miners from doing this (at the consensus level?). And why are we so worried about miners' fee? I mean, the block reward is more than enough for few years. And even then, isn't the difficulty adjustment there exactly to self-manage miners ecosystem? Why are we intervening at policy level to facilitate them?

4) I guess what most ppl are worried about is that spam transactions will drive fee high and fill blocks thus making it harder and more expensive for money transactions to get in. Let's say that hypothetically by removing the limit (like now) it happens what I described above, will then core do a step back and re-instate the limit? because judjing from what core said and wrote, if this happens, then btc is a database for whatever the market wants it to be and they will not change anything (and I think this is what most ppl are worried about)

Cheers

1 there is no way to get rid of spam as spam is subjective.

2 Yes they were, that's why OP_RETUEN was introduced. It was to fix this problem of small unspendable UTXOs

3 There is no way to prevent miners from directing mining whatever transaction they want if its in concensous. To make spam non concensous see point 1.

4 the jpegs people are worried about are massive in size compared to a legitimate transaction to move coins or make anchors in OP_RETURN. They will be the first thing priced out in a high fee environment. I'm not worried about not being able to move coins because fee is too high. What's the highest been? $50 or so? That's a lot but it's nothing when mainnwt should be the use case of base layer money. No, you can't buy your coffee in that fee environment. But I would argue we should be using L2s as a way to scale throughput and privacy alike. There is plenty of opportunity to move a portion of your stack to Liquid or lightning right now if this concerns you. We can also work on funding more L2s and scaling solutions like eCash and Ark. You need to be prepared for the Layer 1 of money to cost a lot. In the end, unless something big changes (a scary thought, another fork war) that's how it's going to be. And I appreciate that it will be very hard to make that change. That's why I use Bitcoin. Changing concensous is not like changing policy. It's nearly impossible unless you prove beyond shadow of a doubt, that change won't break the worlds money. It's been working since 2009 with exception to the one inflatition bug in 2010, the 6 hours or so it split between .6 and .7 upgrade

First of all, of course I'm not gonna call you a NFT scammer man! I'm here to exchange ideas not to waste time calling ppl name 😄

1) I guess for us "monetary maxis" there are tx which are clearly spam (like jpeg, NTF ect). But if you are not in the camp of "btc should be used only as money" then I get your claim that spam is subjective

2) ok so this whole thing of ppl bypassing op_return with witness/fake output has been going on since 2014. We already threw the bait with op_return but has been ignored, and now we are throwing it again but larger by eliminating the limits and hoping "spammers" will actually use it this time and hoping the economic incentives are good enough that the network doesn't get bloated with "spams" tx.

3) mmm then I guess the only way to resolve this as consensus level is a hardfork of ppl who are "monetary maxis" and who have a clear definition of what a spam tx is

4) I get your point man, and I totally agree that L2 and L3 is where 99% of money transactions will be at. I guess at the end of the day I'm really protective of bitcoin as money and it bothers me seeing the greatest thing on earth being used in such (for me) stupid way.

On one side I'm thinking "ok there's an attack on btc to use it only as store of value and not medium of exchange, because MoE is what would really fuck up governements"

On the other I'm like "ok until the day enough ppl transact in btc miners are greedy as fuck and in the meantime want as much fees as they possibily can and in doing so are creating problems to the networks. Let's give it to them in the mean time, no big deal, they just greedy nothing out of oridnary here" (but in doing so I'm worried that making the big guys happy once, they'll get used to it, and our priority will shift to make them happy again in the future. Kind of the feeling of "before we had big banks making the rules, now we have big miners making the rules"

I'm not worried about the miners either. I think Bitcoins Game theory all but makes it inevitable. I'm protective of it too. The most damage is caused (with people) by drama like this. Bitcoin will be fine. But out of this drama people are going to dump their coins or make irrational decisions when they don't need to. I mean it's their loss and I don't care about dollar price but I don't want people to make irrational decisions with their Bitcoin because of Internet drama.

Your "monetary maxis" have no way to solve this problem. People have put arbitrary data into Bitcoin since genesis. The fee mechanism is how we prevent spam. To change that would be to change and hardfork Bitcoin in a way that I would be very hesitant to hold for any amount of time. It makes someone the arbiter of truth. The opposite of a censorship resistant monetary network. In order to have censorship resistance this is the tradeoff to make. Fees.

Thanks for the engagement dude, much appreciated and you gave me material on which to reflect on!

I feel like we bitcoiners are getting very polarized on this issue, it’s important to keep the convo going instead of closing us in tribalism

Thank you for asking questions and not just calling me an NFT scammer.

Also makes the code base more maintainable.