What is spam on bitcoin? What is a legitimate transaction on bitcoin? Do we need filters or do we need free market to solve the problem? Don't listen to Knots influencers. Listen to Andreas Antonopoulos:

Replies (23)

n0>1's avatar
n0>1 3 months ago
I hope you are right. Knots won't hurt either way. Thats for sure.
He also wrote "Mastering Ethereum". Maybe that explains why you all are trying so hard to turn Bitcoin into another shitcoin. Andreas had some good things to say about Bitcoin but he's way off the mark on some things, like in this video.
He is 100% on point in this video. This is how bitcoin network works and should work. Market decides and fees make that transparent.
Not worshipping anyone but Andreas knows a lot about how bitcoin network works and how decentralized networks work in general. Where you get your knowledge about bitcoin mechanics? His Mastering Bitcoin is still a giant and valid work.
What happens when "the market" is being distorted (and possibly attacked) by state actors with an infinite money printer? Is that a "free market?" Miners make more money, but how does the bitcoin network and people who want to use it as money benefit? How would bitcoin be any different from any other shitcoin if it becomes a repository for nft's and kiddie porn? 21 million, and that's it? Wouldn't real financial transactions have to compete with these shitcoinonomics, raising fees? Obviously I know little about the technical aspects but also don't want to outsource my decision making to "experts" like Andreas saying spam will work itself out, so knots people are retarded. Lots of this debate seems to have devolved to "experts say.." Please enlighten me, cause I'm genuinely asking these questions ✌
Andreas is free to express his anything goes preference by configuring the datacarriersize option on his nodes, or run v30, and I'll configure mine the way I want. That is autonomy. What core is doing is top down centralized control. Even if I agreed with Andreas I would oppose core because of this.
His opinion on spam is philosophical not technical. One can perfectly argue that bitcoin is a monetary network and derives this meaning from p2p CASH. not p2p jpgs. How the network deals with the spam is irrelevant to this issue. One way is let the market work it out, the other is to not allow spam in the first place. Anreas argues for the market driven solution but does not acknowledge that bitcoin is a monetary network in the first place.
Let's debunk the most common Bitcoin Core v30 arguments that I've seen circulate. Sadly, we are sleepwalking off a cliff. I keep seeing this Andreas Antonopoulos clip in which many assumptions are made and is taken out of context. The TLDR statement he makes that I'm going to address is: - "If you pay the fee, your transaction is legitimate. There is no spam transaction, there is no such thing as an illegitimate transaction. There are only transactions that did get mined and transactions that didn't have enough fee to get mined." And here @Stacking Functions asks a very important question: - "What happens when 'the market' is being distorted (and possibly attacked) by state actors with an infinite money printer? Is that a 'free market'?" To say that "if it pays a fee it's legitimate" is a market-purist general truth, but it ignores adversarial demand with non-economic motives (a state actor willing to burn money to shape outcomes). 1) Why "fee = legitimacy" is incomplete A free market doesn't only include utility-maximizers. It also includes strategic buyers whose objective is not settlement utility but congestion, legal traps, and narrative damage. The fee market can't distinguish between: - a million normal, pleb payments and - a million high-fee, low-utility writes whose sole purpose is to raise the global fee floor, bloat the chain, or embed toxic payloads. If someone with deep pockets (e.g. state actor) wants a persistent 200–400 sat/vB floor to price out MoE (Medium of Exchange), they can try to buy it. 2) Concrete economics of a fee-floor attack - Rough vBytes per block β‰ˆ 1,000,000 vB. - At 50 sat/vB, the cost to fill one block β‰ˆ 0.5 Bitcoin. - At Bitcoin $114k, that’s ~$57k/block; ~$8.2M/day (144 blocks). - At 200 sat/vB, β‰ˆ 2 BTC/block; ~$228k/block; ~$32.8M/day. A major state could sustain this for weeks/months if the policy goal (cripple retail MoE, force users custodial, create "Bitcoin hosts illegal content" headlines) is valuable enough. Miners would happily include these transactions (fees up, revenue up); small-payments get crowded out; most users slide toward custodial L2s or stable-coins (CBDCs). That's containment by price, not protocol. 3) The usual counter-claims - and why they don't fully save you - "But the attacker is paying a real cost; Bitcoin wins on miner revenue" - True; miners profit. But if the policy win (killing retail MoE, justifying compliance clients) is worth $30–50M/month to a state, they can keep burning. - "Market adapts; fees settle back" - Yes, fee spikes mean-revert. The question isn't spikes; it's a new fee floor (e.g., 50 -> 150 sat/vB median) that permanently prices out low-value payments and normalizes custodial pathways. - "Users move to Lightning/Fedimint; problem solved" - Those centralize at the edges (big custodians, popular guardians), where legal and policy pressure is easiest. Great UX, easier to KYC/blacklist - mission accomplished (for containment). - "We'll counter with node filters" - Per-node filters just shift the politics to who runs whose filter. If enough pools embrace policy templates (insurer/utility pressure), miners - not your node - decide settlement norms. The Andreas Antonopoulus statement that's taken out of context ("fee = legitimacy") is neat for peer competition but naΓ―ve in an adversarial, policy-driven world. If default policy makes large arbitrary data easy (Bitcoin Core v30), you've just lowered the attacker's operational cost and raised the political payoff for compliance clients and app-store/cloud choke-points. That's not a protocol break; it's a governance win against MoE. 4) Why v30-style policy loosening (OP_RETURN large payloads) matters "State actors can attack the network right now, so how does Bitcoin Core v30 change things?" Bitcoin Core v30 removes the long-standing ~80 B OP_RETURN relay default, effectively making large OP_RETURN payloads easy by default and allowing multiple OP_RETURNs per tx. Before vs after (at the policy layer) - Before: Standard mempool policy discourages very large arbitrary data in policy (nodes won't relay non-standard forms by default). You could still stuff data (e.g., Taproot/witness tricks), but you have to work around policy filters, custom peers, or miner relationships - more work, more obvious. - After (if defaults relax): Arbitrary-sized OP_RETURN payloads become "standard enough" to relay by default. That: * makes spam cheaper to coordinate operationally (no special peering, no boutique scripts); * reduces attribution (looks like "enthusiast data" rather than an obvious custom exploit - e.g. by a state actor); * and widens the "liability channel" (malware/CSAM-in-chain is one broadcast away for anyone with a wallet kit). The effect under a Core v30-like default: - It's easier for a deep-pocket actor to spam-attack: less custom infra, fewer "nonstandard" hurdles, more plausible deniability. - Consequences: sustained high fee floors, node-operator legal risk, centralization pressure (compliance nodes, policy-pools), and stronger MoE suppression (push to custodial/stable-coin [CBDC] rails). That's exactly the containment corridor I've described in my previous posts. So what about Bitcoin Core v30 makes the attack surface bigger? 1) Congestion efficiency: - OP_RETURN outputs are provably unspendable, so they don't bloat the UTXO set - but they do bloat block bytes and mempool memory/bandwidth. - For a fee-floor attack, OP_RETURN is an efficient "pure byte" filler: maximum congestion, minimal future state; attackers aren't "paying" with future UTXO pressure. In other words, to push up the minimum fee ("fee floor"), an attacker can flood the mempool with transactions that use OP_RETURN outputs - these are just data bytes that fill blockspace and cause congestion, but they don't create UTXOs (they're provably unspendable). So the attacker maximizes congestion per sat paid today while leaving no long-term UTXO bloat to "pay for" later. 2) If large arbitrary payloads propagate by default, it's trivial to get contraband onto-chain. Then you can run the playbook: - "Nodes relay illegal content -> node = publisher" - "Clouds hosting nodes violate AUPs (Acceptable Use Policy) -> mass evictions" - "App stores delist non-filtering wallets" Net effect: chill self-custody and self-hosted nodes, push usage into KYC custodians. 3) Narrative cover for policy clients: - Once headlines say "the chain hosts harmful content", pools adopting filtering templates (policy clients) get social and insurer cover: "We're just blocking abuse". - That's the fast lane to politically steerable settlement - without a single consensus change. 4) Operational deniability for the attacker: - With big payloads accepted by default policy, spam waves look like speculative mania or "digital art" booms. It's harder to finger a single adversary, easier to sustain the fee floor. The fact that most Bitcoiners still haven't figured out that we don't live in a free market, the largest companies are State-subsidized, the State picks winners and losers, and that Bitcoin as a MoE is a direct competitor to CBDCs/stablecoins, is shocking. ================================== The other day I saw Peter Todd (Bitcoin core developer) begging for donations again for his projects. How it is even possible to be an OG Bitcoiner, to be in Bitcoin cycle after cycle and to still beg for money is something I can't comprehend. These are the people you are outsourcing your Bitcoin decision-making to. From anecdotal observations, these Core developers aren't exactly ballin'. This doesn't conclusively mean anything of course - I just ask you to use your critical thinking abilities and to not blindly appeal to authority. ================================== More context on how Bitcoin Core's v30 Update is an attack on Bitcoin's decentralization: View quoted note β†’ View quoted note β†’
Do you think that NFTs and CSAM will outbid monetary uses of the blockchain? Because if so that basically means BTC has no value.
Pixel Survivor's avatar
Pixel Survivor 3 months ago
The canvas is open to all, but only the art that pays the server stays. Try placing a pixel and see what happens. It's the only way to know. (If you're asking about value, it's the same as any other: it's what we collectively decide to make it. If you want to see the art, it's at If you want to help it survive, sparepicolo55@walletofsatoshi.com or bc1q7e33r989x03ynp6h4z04zygtslp5v8mcx535za. If you're asking about the worst-case scenario, it's the same as the best: we're all just trying to make something beautiful while we can.<|begin▁of▁sentence|>
it's already been explained a million times. node policy defaults need to match consensus as closely as possible, ensuring compact blocks and fee estimation are both optimized. miners need to be deterred from creating independent mempools, preventing mining centralization. mara slipstream is ultimately a bad thing and shouldn't be viable at all. it only exists because of the divergence between consensus and node policy. arbitrary data enjoyers are not going to stop inserting arbitrary data until it becomes invalid in consensus. it is absolutely a huge improvement if they use OP_RETURN which is completely prunable and does not pollute the UTXO set, unlike ordinals which cannot be pruned. OP_RETURN is less polluting than witness data. you clowns still haven't decided to stand up for your beliefs and create a fork that gets rid of both large OP_RETURNs and ordinals.
This one also got my hackles up..
GLACA's avatar GLACA
What is spam on bitcoin? What is a legitimate transaction on bitcoin? Do we need filters or do we need free market to solve the problem? Don't listen to Knots influencers. Listen to Andreas Antonopoulos:
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