Thread

Hello Super Testnet, hypothetical question and train of thought. I would love to hear your opinion: The max blocksize is 4 Mb, right? The spammers are spamming and loading up jpegs, right? They are stored forever and this kinda sucks. But it is within the 4Mb limit. So technical consensus and developers and node runners should have been expecting to receive and store 4 MB blocks. Are these always monetary transactions if somebody uploads a picture of a dickbutt? I don’t know, probably not. But it’s not really ‘bloating’ the blockchain, since we all were expecting ( or preparing to be ready) for 4MB blocks anyway. Will it make run bitcoin harder and more expensive ‘faster’? Probably yes, I need to upgrade from 1TB to a 2TB disk sooner than previously expected. What are your arguments for or against this view?

> Hello Super Testnet, hypothetical question and train of thought Thanks! Happy to reply > The max blocksize is 4 Mb, right? Yes > The spammers are spamming and loading up jpegs, right? Correct > They are stored forever and this kinda sucks I agree > But it is within the 4Mb limit Yup > So technical consensus and developers and node runners should have been expecting to receive and store 4 MB blocks Naturally > Are these always monetary transactions if somebody uploads a picture of a dickbutt? I don’t know, probably not Sounds about right. Some of the data contained in some transactions is probably do not monetary data. Sometimes it is a picture. > But it’s not really ‘bloating’ the blockchain, since we all were expecting ( or preparing to be ready) for 4MB blocks anyway I disagree. I often use the analogy of a Justin Bieber fansite to discuss this. If I ran a Justin Bieber fansite, I would want certain content on my server, namely, content about Justin Bieber. If it had a forum, I would want my users to create threads and posts about Justin Bieber. Suppose one day I log into my admin dashboard and see that a bunch of posts contain little to nothing about Justin Bieber, and are basically just a transport for embedded NFT image data -- "Bored Apes," for example. Upon investigation, suppose I find that a bunch of NFT sellers decided to host their image data on my Justin Bieber server because it offers free storage. Maybe they even only host it there temporarily -- e.g. maybe they delete it once someone purchases it. Even so, I would naturally oppose this: it's not what my server is *for.* And it would be silly for them to argue, "We're staying within your image upload limits, so it's not *really* bloating your server. Suck it up! You can't stop us anyway." They would be wrong in several ways: the images *do* bloat my server by being content I don't want to store even for a second, and I *can* fight back by applying content filters to my server. I am also perfectly within my rights to do so, as the admin of that server. The same applies to bitcoin's mempool. You are the admin of your mempool. You get to decide what it's for. If you do not intend it for relaying jpegs, then every jpeg in your mempool is a technical problem. And you have options to fight back, including by applying filters to your mempool, which objectively reduces the amount of spam you relay. You do not have to follow along with the false doomerism of the "it's inevitable, there's nothing you can do about it" crowd. They are wrong, and every available piece of objective data proves them wrong. Mempool filters work at their primary job, which is to filter your mempool, thereby improving the performance of your node, and making it match more closely with the desires of those who use the filters.

Thanks for replying. But there is a monetary transaction attached to the jpegs. Well, since Calle built in the filers for the cashu mints, we know for sure that filters work. 😂 And I am not debating that at all. I just see, that the network of nodes prepared for 4 MB blocks. And since the limit is not breached, everything works as intended. At the same time of course I don’t like the super retarded ‘art collections’ of dickbutts on chain. But I think the usecase of leaving some personal data on chain (something like ‘XYX was here building on bitcoin in 2025’ and my for my future grandchildren will look it up is pretty cool. Immutable, forever. I just like it (but didn’t do it yet).

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This comment will be most likely ignored (as I’ve noticed non-technical comments get little consideration). IMO this whole story raises much worry because it has revealed that core: 1) has very little consideration for non-economic node runners 2) their reaction was authoritarian, incredibly arrogant and immature 3) the reasons provided were not sufficiently strong and had way too many assumptions (pretty clear it was done for gains) 4) suddenly bitcoin is not a database for money but rather a database for whatever 5) increasing the limit by 1000% instead of in smaller incremental steps is not a cautious way to proceed (what happened to move slowly and not brake things?) The change itself could be ok, but it’s the whole other aspects cited above that are worry af. This could be the first of many worse steps, gotta keep the vigilant paranoia up man

i totally agree. they pushed it through for the Peter Thiel Antichrist money for sure. and it’s the Miners who are super powerful. they have access to the infinite money printer via the US stock market.

One thing: it is ‘your’ node, ‘your’ server. But it is not ‘your’ blockchain.

Mempool filters are primarily for filtering "your" mempool, not the blockchain But they sometimes start affecting the blockchain too, if widely used