bitcoin is the perfect technical solution for preventing spam in anonymous systems like bitchat (or tor etc). ironically, many bitcoiners these days don't seem to understand that satoshi's big achievement was to tokenize proof of work and literally put it in a coin.

bitcoin can't protect itself with firewalls, IP filters, sign up pages, captchas, or even arbitrary transaction filters. the only thing that keeps bitcoin alive is the fact that it is costly to make a transaction and that cost has previously been tokenized into a sat using energy and proof of work.

tokenizing proof of work as transaction fees is the innovation that protects bitcoin. that's why we can harness bitcoin to protect other systems in the first place. if you ever were confused about why I hate spam but still don't think that filters are a solution, I hope this clarifies it. my thinking has always been consistent on this.

our enemies are much stronger than degens and we need to think much bigger than jpgs.

I don’t know if memory serves me right, but I think the world started to derail after 9/11. I was in my teens when it happened and I wasn’t paying much attention to world events back then, but I have a feeling things were better and generally more sane in the 90s.

There are conflicts of interest here. What is Bitcoin? Is it just money? Is it hope? Is it freedom? Some say all of these things. My biggest concern is that by filtering you are excluding. Exclusion makes you eletist. I believe you should be allowed to do whatever youwantt as long as you don't harm others. My other concern is placing trust in one man. One ring to rule them...

Then there is the workarounds. No one foresaw the ordinals (well not that I know of). They came in by finding a path. We always find a path if we want to get somewhere bad enough.

It's actually simple but it's framed as complicated by the people pushing this.

"Trust the experts"

Is Bitcoin's only use case as money?

Should node runners have the option to configure their me pool?

Should code changes to the default client require discussion and consensus?

Should we be concerned about conflicts of interest of devs pushing changes?

I'd say common sense would be to answer "yes" to all the above. Who we have now as "Bitcoin Core" largely and surprisingly don't agree.

I don't mind admitting this is above my knowledge, so I'm interested in other's opinions. For me I am not keen on changes but neither am I a fan of filtering (censorship). The consensus was to bring in taproot, before, for L2 etc... From that we opened the door for ordinals.

I like privacy and freedom. My biggest concern is, if we go down a filtering root, you open the door to greater censorship and elitistm. Isn't #Bitcoin for anyone?