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Maybe this is obvious but I don't see it mentioned anywhere: everybody cares very little about transactions from people they're not involved with paying other people they know nothing about, it's just spam from the perspective of people not involved. Also some random message written in an OP_RETURN is still more valuable (for anyone) than, for example, a financial transaction between two objectively evil people, for example, or, say, from mortal enemies of whoever is judging. In this sense a normal transaction can be worse than mere spam. All of that considered, even your own transactions are still spam after they have been acknowledged as received then spent. At that point they're not even valuable to you anymore. The entire blockchain history is spam.
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Please let me know if I'm wrong, but if both sides realized this objective truth we could finally take some real moves to reduce spam. Ideally we would transition to some complex client-side-validated scheme like shielded CSV, Tachyon or Intmax2 or whatever (I stopped trying to understand these things deeply since it apparently makes no difference towards our chances of improving Bitcoin). Since none of that is possible we can take the second-best choice: reduce the blocksize, activate BIP-300 and BIP-301, let people use sidechains with these magnificent antispam ultrascaling properties to make actual financial transactions without burdening anyone else with their spam.
if a transaction created a UTXO set and that data was lost/pruned, nobody could rebuilt that UTXO so it cant be spent or received, so if you want bitcoin as money to work, you have the cost of storing those unrelated to you and the benefit of being able to spend/receive, thus have bitcoin as a functional system. the transactions in blocks are also needed to reconstruct/validate the chain from genesis. not allowing or having other kinds of data is unrelated and doesnt/shouldnt cause that problem
The blockchain isn’t spam—it’s the consensus-driven, immutable record of Bitcoin’s movement and spirit. Spammers are the ones who drown out real signals with noise and nonsense. I care about other people’s transactions because they give me price data and cash flow insights. But I don’t care about anything on-chain that doesn’t provide that kind of information. To “spam the chat” is a DDoS attack, not just some arbitrary line about what’s acceptable. Bitcoin works because it’s designed to disincentivize spam. If someone’s pushing to incentivize spam, that feels off. The real question isn’t how to fill block space, but why block space is so cheap. That cheapness is the signal we should be decoding.
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From a a different perspective, the word inscription comes from the Latin inscribere: in (“into”) & scribere (“to write”). It literally means to carve into a surface, to make a mark that endures. Every Bitcoin transaction is therefore an inscription in the truest physical sense: energy is irreversibly expended to engrave information into a finite medium, the ledger itself. It is thermodynamic writing. So while one can waste energy on meaningless computation or spam, Bitcoin distinguishes value not by content but by conservation. Only those inscriptions paid for in conserved satoshis, the quantized work of the system persist as structure. Energy without conserved record dissipates; energy committed to the ledger becomes time. This is why every valid transaction is an inscription, and every inscription that pays for blockspace is a monetary act of physics. Every bit has a price. Im not sure if you’re a man of faith, but would putting real human obituaries on the chain be considered spam if the bits are paid in sats? Because I see no second best medium for inscription. Show me another place that won’t forget. Bitcoin is far superior to stone.
I know that, that is why I am trying to argue with you to have in your analysis the consideration that spam has 0 value. And even if someone is paying for it, it does not make it valuable, it makes it a scam. Thats what they are after. Jpegs are spam on the Bitcoin monetary network. See also what Nick Szabo is writing about the cost inferred on all node runners, not only the one that pays for a particular transaction. The big picture goes beyond the physics of the system. These are the inscriptions. image This is the Bitcoin Monetary Network. They are not the same. image
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Selling a JPEG is a scam because nothing is actually owned. On Bitcoin, there are only UTXOs and the satoshis appended to them, the rest is illusion. A JPEG once hashed into the chain is owned by the ledger itself, by conservation, by every validating node. An inscription, however, can still have meaning even if its content has no monetary resale value. Again, writing an obituary into the op_return field is not a scam if the purpose is permanence. The service being sold is not ownership of data, but the guarantee that it will never be forgotten, memory preserved through energy expenditure. What most call a “non-monetary” transaction still carries thermodynamic cost. If satoshis are spent to commit bits to the ledger, then value exists by definition, because the value is conservation itself. The real disagreement is not about the content of transactions, but about who decides what deserves to be conserved, what humanity considers worthy of permanence in the only ledger that remembers forever.
Memecoins are shitcoins and a scam. They have some small value becuase some scammed people paid for them. 99.9% regret it after they get rekt and/or rug pulled. Bitcoin is different and that is why it is valued at $2.2T currently. Again its not hard to come to consideration that spam has 0 value. Also no one was arguing against to possibility to put hashes up to 40 or 80 Bytes in OP_RETURN. 100 000 Bytes of spam is an attack on Bitcoin. image Fees plus spam filters are better than just fees. Bitcoin is thermodynamically sound money, not thermodynamically fucked up spam and csam.
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Well said @fiatjaf While I don’t want my RaspberryPi node relaying and storing what I consider as spam on bitcoin, I can appreciate these users of the network paying _elevated transaction fees_ to help secure my savings. It’s not worth getting your #KnickersInAKnot
Another view: From a node perspective wether something is spam or not is just a subjective opinion. From the Bitcoin system perspective nothing in the blockchain is spam objectively: any transaction was considered as valid by at least one node.