Bitcoin is permissionless monetary network.
Not permissionless jpeg, audio or video network.
I agree that we should do something about this spam. I will filter out these transactions and I hope the rest of the network does too. Even if everyone filters spam, there are still ways for spammers to get into blocks. They can send their transactions directly to miners. Granted, this is another layer of friction, but it’s not much. Spammers will likely send their transaction to the larger pools for faster confirmation. This hurts small miners as they wouldn’t get the transaction fee and it increases mining centralization.
I’m all for strongly standing up for the original intent of Bitcoin, but this is a permissionless network. I think we will eventually have to rely on the incentives of the fee market to fix this issue.
https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqspu7vanzp4a622qcdlp3cf78yv52yvtjzej50guw8j8v8g3v4v0vchacuu9
Discussion
Then how are people posting jpegs without permission? It might be more difficult with nodes filtering their mempools, but they can still pay miners to put their spam into blocks.
Bitcoin full nodes like Bitcoin Knots are securing the Bitcoin network and miners must comply with the Nodes and provide consensus-compatible blocks. So if majority of Nodes filter out spam, it will be very hard for spammers to turn Bitcoin decentralized freedom Monetary network into a meme shitcoin. "Nodes define what "miner" is." This is explain here:
https://medium.com/bitcoinerrorlog/who-secures-bitcoin-95b19bbcda3c
A balanced explanation about OP_RETURN is here:
And some of the risk of leaving spam unfiltered and unlimited are in the following screenshot:
I hope that would be helpful.
Nodes don’t reject blocks with transactions that have a massive amount of arbitrary data. They are still technically valid. Nodes simply filter these transactions out of their mempools and prevent them from being relayed to other nodes and miners. Spammers can circumvent these filters by submitting their spam directly to miners and paying them a high enough fee. Check Marathon’s Slipstream product.
If nodes really wanted to assert their authority, they would have to start rejecting blocks with too much arbitrary data. This would be extremely difficult as there would be disagreements about what counts as arbitrary data.