I do see the duality by the way, and something I am conflicted with. However I stand by my statement that bitcoin is money for enemies. I don’t care if my enemy uses bitcoin for money. I do care if anyone uses bitcoin to put a picture of a pizza on the blockchain and take up space on my node forever. I guess that is where we’re different.

I fear this is the beginning of the end. I hope one day we’re not arguing over if bitcoin should move to proof of stake, and larger blocks again so we can cram more pointless scam tokens into bitcoin. “It’s pointless to do proof of work, we can mint tokens so much faster through PoS, what’s it matter they’ll be minted anyway since we removed the guardrails. And let’s just up the block size too. What’s it matter? It’s pointless the blockchain will be huge eventually, let’s just bump up the size now and cut to the chase, we can sell me ordinal tokens!”

I find it extremely funny that a protocol was made for monetary transactions and you think it’s alright to spam and bloat the process, even welcome it. What’s the end goal here? Mint as much garbage tokens and ordinals to sell overpriced UTXOs to weak minded individuals with deep pockets, and VCs and crypto firms get rich? And you cheer that on? They make money and tell you it’s pointless to filter their spam and you lap that up?

I’m all for individuals being individuals and self sovereignty. That’s why I became a part of this community. But I’ll stand up for the integrity of this project when developers and VCs start making actual software changes for me “in my best interest.” Think who benefits the most from these changes. What is the point of putting non transactional data on the block chain? Just because you can, you should be able to permanently alter software code that’s run by the majority of the nodes? That’s shady at best, I’m picking sides.

Yeah I think we’re just going in circles at this point. If every node ran knots with spam filters, and only broadcasted monetary transactions to the mempool, spam would never be included in the block. Those spam transaction wouldn’t exist for a miner to mine. That scenario would never happen unfortunately. Especially when it’s pretty clear that the core developers and large mining companies are only interested in profit and shareholder value. At the end of the day it was incredibly simple to switch my node from core to knots. I just won’t support software that thinks removing features is better for the network at the cost of my storage and node power. I heard an interesting contrast the other day, just because burglars are armed with a hammer to smash the glass out of your windows, doesn’t mean you don’t lock your doors anyways. Don’t ever say it’s pointless to try and filter spam, it’s not. My instance of Bitcoin will never recognize jpegs on the blockchain, and I’m happy with that.

Are you referring to MARA’s slip stream? You pay them thousands of dollars for them to use their hash rate to only include your large data set/ transaction, enough to fill an entire block if you want. It’s using their nodes block template to be selective of certain “transactions” and then using the full force of their hash rate to mine that block with their set filters. There’s actually no guarantee that the block will be mined believe it or not. It’s also the exact equivalent to what I’m trying to explain. I have a a spam filter, they take money to filter everything but spam. The same but very different. I also only have 5 TH backing my template haha. But if I were to mine a block, there wouldn’t be any more than 83kb of data per transaction for my block.

So all in all, my argument is that Core decided to remove my ability to filter what transactions my node sees. That’s why I switched to Knots.

Incorrect. Nodes broadcast the transactions to the mempool/ miners. That’s the whole point for a node network all running the software in consensus. Think of it this way, when Bitcoin is double spent, or the data of a transaction is too high, it won’t be picked up by then nodes, and broadcasted to the mempool. And it will not be included in the block once it’s mined.

Same goes for spam filters. My private instance of the mempool could be vastly different from the public one at .space, because of the filters I’ve set. Some transactions simply don’t exist on my instance because of my parameters. If I was able to mine that block myself, those transactions that I have filtered out will not exist in that block.

That still doesn’t mean that a set of developers can remove my ability to filter out the transactions I don’t want to process on MY node. Telling me that they know better because they can code and I should just accept the changes I don’t understand, I’m good. That’s why I left the fiat banking system.

Bitcoin is MONEY for enemies. “A peer to peer electronic CASH system.” And I’ll die on this hill my friend.

People perverting its use case through exploits is not decentralized use cases. I suggest you check out SOL or ETH. It may be more what you’re looking for.

Rare sats and frog jpegs are not why I started a node. I’m not a free cloud data storage provider. Simple as that.

You too? Ah man I thought I was the only one. It’s all gone, and I’ll think I’ll just DCA into gov’t bonds like a good little citizen.

The state just can’t help themselves from stealing, pathetic.

And that’s just to keep the savings separate from bill pay account, any surplus in the bill pay will end up in cold storage too. River also has 1 free transfer off exchange a month, which will waive any mining fees, not that fees have been very high lately. It’s also a form of UTXO management too.

Oh oh I see, good question as I didn’t make that part clear. I have my paycheck direct deposit to a traditional bank account and then I have a large reoccurring buy at strike for bill pay, and a smaller one over to river for savings. So both buys take advantage of each exchanges’ free buys on a schedule.

Just a personal choice. I’ve always been better with savings if I don’t see the balance that often.

It converts your sats to usd before paying your bill. Incurring a fee and possible taxable event. Strike should help you eoy with tax docs, fees I cover with cash back from credit card spending. I left a comment on the main thread explaining my process if you’re curious

I just made a comment on the original post on how I mitigate fees, and use River as a savings account

Congrats! Strike is great. Hey just a heads up, I figured a way to cut down on fees a bit, while still maintaining somewhat of a bitcoin standard.

On strike, I setup a weekly buy every payday about10 mins after my direct deposit usually hits. This recurring buy waives the purchase fee, and calculated each week to eventually cover my expenses by the end of the month. I then use credit cards all month for purchases, and strike routing and account number for bills that offer a discount for ACH setup with auto pay.

Then once a month, I pay off my credit cards with the strike bill pay feature, which does generate some fees. The fees are more than covered with credit cards cash back rewards that I also use to buy more BTC.

Rent is the only bill not paid with cc or strike since my landlord is old school prefers a handwritten check.

Hopefully that makes sense, it does to me at least. It’s a fun process and only have to do it once a month but I’ve been keeping a ledger and moving surplus BTC “savings” over to River before eventual cold storage. Happy stacking!

The consensus change is coming from Bitcoin core devs. Forcing through an update for Core node runners to limit the control they have over their own node software. Sound familiar yet? Sounds like something from the fiat system doesn’t it?

No no no I was just going to comment, “Don’t you dare share this blank template.” 😂 I’d be fine never seeing this again

“THIS is MARA, and now you too can pay us to create more blockchain bloat, you know, for progress.”

Woooo you cooked on this one for sureee 🔥🔥🔥