Peter “Economically Illiterate” Wuille claims node runners don’t get to decide what the chain is used for. That’s gaslighting. Your node is your private property. Some devs try to paint it as public property just because it might relay transactions to others. That’s a fallacy. Public property is owned and run by a central authority that pays for its upkeep and dictates its use. Your node is none of that. You paid for it, you maintain it, you can shut it down anytime. Running it altruistically doesn’t make it public, it just means you’re choosing to take a net economic loss for reasons that matter to you - exactly like a charity. And just like a charity wouldn’t accept vandals and squatters storming in and wrecking the place, node operators aren’t obliged to host whatever spam others want to push. That’s the key distinction. Private property lets you deny use or walk away. Public property doesn’t. Which is why the public sector endlessly expands costs while services degrade (zombie post offices in empty villages, for instance). Now about miners. Miners construct blocks, but they lean on nodes to tell them what’s standard. “Standard” signals preference. If the fee is high enough, miners might shove in non-standard garbage anyway, even if it’s harmful. That’s the “Moloch problem”: rational actors wrecking long-term value for short-term gain, same as banks demanding inflation or regulators trapping people in dependency. Nodes aren’t powerless here. They can punish pools that stuff blocks with junk by slowing block propagation, increasing the risk of orphaned blocks. But with today’s centralised mining, the incentives flip: smaller pools get punished for filtering trash, while big pools keep feeding the addiction. The analogy is obvious - core suggests giving the addict (miners and VCs) more drugs (spam) to ease the symptoms, instead of cutting him off to save him long term. The path forward is the opposite. Tighten relay policies to signal that nodes reject arbitrary spam. Push for mining decentralisation with tools like Datum so miners can build their own templates instead of outsourcing to a bunch of shitcoin cartels. And stop bending to the garbage ideas of VCs. Your mempool is yours, not theirs. The economics are dictated by management (nodes), not by employees (miners).