Fair. The threat of this issue can be perceived at different degrees of intensity per individual but the response to it is still a binary. You are either acting against it - meaning you are actively protecting it - or you are facilitating it - even by inaction.

There are two major problems here. Even though UTXO bloat is not a direct consequence of the usage of OP_RETURN, it is an indirect one and it’s not the only issue stemming from it.

First, the UTXO bloat is only an issue because of other spam waves - yes, waves that have been priced out but spam waves nonetheless that bitcoin is becoming more accommodating of - which only increases there reoccurrence in whatever form they may come. The social layer of bitcoin should be the first defense for these attacks. Why let adversarial agents close to your best weapon in this war? Why let them fiddle and test a few bolts? Yes, we might have a tank with a thousand tight bolts - so who cares if only one gets damaged by these non-monetary mercenaries - we still have 999 bolts that are still strong and ready when they are needed, right? Yes, but we are also one bolt weaker because of poor stewardship and lack of vigilance and vision. It’s one thing to get damaged during a legit attack, another is to get weaker by inaction.

These waves have also been funded by short term projects and interest trying to test out the waters of bitcoin. But this vector of attack can be exploited by bigger agents with more sinister motives and larger chests of wars. Why leave an opening that is fairly easy to defend? Why give intel to potential weak points to enemies? Why not actively fix the weak link in the chain?

The second point - even if this is considered just inconsequential graffiti, it is raising the threshold to be able to run a node with accesible hardware - which is an attack vector to decentralization, one of the most important aspect of bitcoin. Spam cannot fill a block more than its intended MB size, but it artificially adds data to the blockchain that now needs to be stored in nodes - forever. Nodes are volunteer - they incur in running nodes without monetary payback or incentives - why make it harder for them?

Bitcoin is man-made, it is a system that needs to be protected - it is not a greater-than-humans, force-of-nature like gravity. We need to give it maintenance and protect its design for it to work as the system was designed to work to be able to achieve its monetary end.

Even though I disagree with you here - I don’t want to appear adversarial towards you. Thanks for all your hard work on the financial side you do for bitcoin. Really appreciate it. Thank you.