Cat and mouse games sound futile, until you realize that you catch a lot of the mice.

Spam is not some esoteric difficult-to-define thing. It's about as dumb as the "what is a woman" argument and has the same energy.

If you're worried about the OP_RETURN controversy, don't stress. BItcoin will not just be fine, but controversies like this resolve with a huge price bump.

GM, economic incentives are a first order approximation which don't take moral values into account.

GM, you make better decisions if you're married and have kids.

What made me suspicious before about the OP_RETURN debate was how the proposal removed the datacarriersize option. What makes me suspicious now is the dismissive, arrogant framing.

GM, I am praying for the people of India and Pakistan.

A lot of idealistic coders think that by explaining the technical reasoning, they can get people on their side of the argument. I get why. In technical circles, there really is often one best practice and you can arrive at consensus through explaining the nuances of the issue, though that happens far less often than is believed. But this current argument really isn't a technical one. It's a social, monetary and economic one and no amount of technical nuance-splaining is going to get consensus. I applaud the effort, but the higher level question that we're all really fighting about is this: What is Bitcoin? Is it money? Or is it money and ...?

You know what I'm not hearing about this debate? How price is going to crash because of it.

For me, the bigger question around this OP_RETURN debate is getting rid of the datacarriersize option (one proposal gets rid of it now, another deprecates it for getting rid of it in the future). The Core devs are underestimating just how many people construct their own block templates given the popularity of devices like the BitAxe. Given many such miners are principled and won't mine spam transactions, that option is a very important one to have for their own mempool.