Narrative evolution in the political battle to undermine Bitcoin as a monetary network:

1. There's no such thing as "spam" in Bitcoin. Transactions are either valid or invalid.

2. OK spam exists and it's a problem but it'll get priced out by genuine monetary activity.

3. OK the trend in the opposite direction is clear, but the proposed solution of filtering spam at the mempool level does nothing at all as miners can still include this stuff in blocks regardless. (And despite the fact that spam filtration is something we've always done, it's somehow now "censorship" as of spring 2023).

4. OK filtering actually works extremely well and is basically forcing some BitVM schemes to use fake pubkeys instead of OP_RETURN which - for the sake of *maybe* preventing a few KBs of UTXO bloat a year - we need to aggressively resolve *now* by forcing nodes to relay giant OP_RETURNs by breaking the datacarriersize filter in the hopes that BitVMers use OP_RETURN instead.

5. OK yes, this is total and utter submission to the attempts to optimize Bitcoin for data storage as opposed to monetary activity as per every other meaningless crypto but hey, we are just Bitcoin Core and you can run something else if you don't like it - isn't open source wonderful?!

6. OK if large numbers of Bitcoiners actually start running something other than Core we'll simply ignore the message being sent loudly and clearly - that a growing % of people running nodes have no interest in becoming free relays for spammers and miners and that in a sane world, the default implementation puts the priorities of monetary users above scammers and even miners.

7. OK we will invoke disaster scenarios that must come from spam filtration - centralized mining, bad fee estimation, poor block propagation - combine with other fear tactics about "Knots being maintained by one guy".

8. Respond to all debunking of the above disaster scenarios with simple assertions that those who disagree "occupy something other than reality". Rest on laurels of deeply established trust of Core that it is extremely painful for people to question.

Contrast all this with the "filter-boi" side which have not needed to twist themselves into Knots trying to justify the unjustifiable -

1. Spam filters work, they optimize Bitcoin as a payment network rather than a generic database.

2. If you let filters fall into disrepair or maliciously break them then Bitcoin fails the same way cryptos always do - nodes become an abused and disregarded commons while we pretend we're decentralized.