There are two ways to fight unwanted data. Pay-to-play, or an arms race of filtering.
Adam Back figured this out decades ago. HashCash was invented as a solution to email spam to replace brittle filtering. Satoshi Nakamoto took this to the next level as the basis for a monetary system.
Re-introducing a filter arms race is a step backwards.
It is not always about money.
There are people who want to kill bitcoin.
Instead of hardening it, they make it easier.
Thatβs fucking stupid.
You supporting it is even stupider.
Yep. You can do both filtering and pay to play. Nostr works this way. Email works this way. Both are decentralized just fine. Why not bitcoin?
so, where is hashcash for email today?
has PoW really stopped spam on nostr also? (hint, no, but auth whitelisting has had a dramatic effect)
so the thesis is back to front. filtering is the first line of defense. for a public good like the "global feed" of bitcoin's chain, you have to at least *start* by removing the bias that favors spammy data in witness sections of transactions. the first thing that core should be talking about doing is removing the witness discount. they would easily be able to persuade the whole flock of bitcoin nodes to agree with this change. but no, instead they are disabling filters instead.
the actions are contrary to the intent. end the witness discount. put a cap on taproot push. and if the consensus is being held back from adopting these changes, people are going to reach for whatever tools that can do something to at least slow down this trash getting on chain.
i don't mind if people really want to pay through the nose to put JPG files on chain. they just should pay the same as everyone else.
adam back deserves kudos for inventing PoW but PoW never became useful until it was applied to bitcoin, and the history of shitcoins using PoW is pretty clear that it doesn't work well for anything other than bitcoin.
i keep saying this to PoW enjoyoors but they just aren't listening.
firstly, a desktop computer is way faster at doing EC pubkey derivations than a mobile
secondly, they don't exist yet, exactly, but it's conceivable that AVX/AVX2/AVX512 and other SIMD implementations probably could be created that would put the desktop computer far ahead of mobile devices
third, if there's money in spamming a network protected by PoW, they will do the investing to build pubkey derivation ASICs and then even desktops are game over. the spammers will win because their profit margin is sufficient that they can afford to bypass PoW by using accelerators.
the only reason why it works for bitcoin is because bitcoin is worth more than the cost of PoW accelerators. they have been on the network since 2014 and every year leap ahead by several zeros most of the time.
the only reason why it works for bitcoin is because bitcoin is more expensive than the asics. and this is a fact because otherwise it would not pay to mine.
