Just because one cannot predict every form of spam does not mean one should surrender to all of it. Spam filters, like all boundaries, are not invalidated by their limitations. They’re justified by their effectiveness and even imperfect walls still hold back the flood.

Mechanic never claimed omniscience. He acknowledges the inevitability of bypasses. But to use that fact as an argument for abandoning filters entirely is intellectually lazy and, frankly, manipulative. It’s like saying locks are pointless because thieves exist.

This isn't about censorship or validation rules. It's about sovereignty. About whether a node runner retains the right to curate their own mempool, to reject what they believe pollutes the system before it becomes consensus reality. Removing that power isn't neutral, it’s malicious. It’s an attack on the autonomy of the individual in the name of vague, speculative future possibilities.

To liken this debate to a "left vs right" psyop is a false equivalence. Validation rules and mempool policy are not theatrics. They are philosophical ground lines... who decides what Bitcoin propagates? The miner? The core dev? Or the person running the node?

If the answer isn’t the node runner, then Bitcoin stops being decentralised and starts becoming curated. And a curated Bitcoin is no different from the systems it was designed to escape.