My blocked response to Galois Field on the Google mailing list

Check out the email from Galois on the Google developers mailing list: https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/Q6ulQb13okg I tried to respond to him several times, but the admins kept blocking my replies, so I figured I’d share it here. Hey Galois, Claire, and everyone on the list. I need a citation. I never said that spam equals "transactions I don't like." Spam on the Bitcoin network refers to any data that has no monetary value and isn’t necessary for Bitcoin to operate as a currency. Things like BRC tokens or jpegs are prime examples of spam. Sure, the spammer paid their miner fee, or else it wouldn’t have made it into a block. And yeah, the transaction was consensus valid, or it wouldn’t have gone through. Plus, a miner had to choose to include it in their block, or else it wouldn’t be there in the first place. But saying that is like claiming that because the Nigerian prince paid for his internet service, followed all the email protocols, and my ISP delivered the email to my inbox, that it’s not spam and shouldn’t be deleted. Anything that isn’t meant for sending or receiving Bitcoin is spam on the Bitcoin blockchain. I’m not the only one who thinks your "use case" is off. Check out what Satoshi had to say about it here: https://this forum.org/index.php?topic=5575199.msg66431361#msg66431361 You’re taking my analogy too far. The point is that yes, the spammer paid their internet bill or the miner fee. If all the spammers stopped paying those, spam wouldn’t be an issue at all. And of course, the spammer followed all the email protocols, or it wouldn’t have gone through.

Interesting, that you cannot understand, how it works. If you put more filters, or other kind of blockers, then guess what: more transactions will be sent outside of the P2P world, straight to the biggest miners. Which will centralize mining, because in the extreme cases, you will have each miner, working on a different 4 MB block. I guess if more and more people will be pushing for more and more filters, then we will no longer have a concept of a "non-standard transaction" anymore. And then, lifting more standardness limits will be needed, just to encourage users to push transactions into the P2P network again, instead of doing it through centralized places. It is a similar case, as it was with transaction fees: they were set to 1 sat/vB for a long time. And then, when lower transaction fees were in use, some nodes started to ignore any fee limits at all, just to improve the block propagation, and started accepting even free transactions, just because it was simpler, than guessing the correct limit. And then, it was changed to 0.1 sat/vB, to put at least some DoS protections back, and not leave the whole system wide open. Also, in normal circumstances, many people wouldn't even think about making spammy transactions. But if you start putting some filters, or other blockers, then you create a challenge to be solved. And then, expect people to solve it. If you say "my filter solves that", then expect people to find counterexamples. I also wonder, what would you do, when spammers would use 100% transaction fees? Because if someone cares only about pushing some data, then concepts like "change address" or "getting any coins left" simply doesn't exist. And in that cases, that kind of spam will always win with regular transactions, just because regular users don't fully turn all of their coins into fees. But data pushers may do, because they care only about that data being published.

I'm getting really annoyed with your stoopit replies on all my threads. I might ignore you or block you completely. Exactly my point. If miners are ignoring the policy of the 90,000 nodes, we have to take the fight at the consensus level to make miners behave. If the filters don't work (as coretards keep parroting) than we have to take it up a notch in the fight against spam and spam miners. A stoopit arguement not even worth responding to.

It's not just about unwanted/disliked transaction or ddosing the network, it's about sticking to agenda participants *agreed* to be part of. The idea is to stick to the main objective (cash transaction) of the Bitcoin Network rather than derailing with something unrelated which could cause serious problem or choas if unchecked. It's like in a meeting with participants who agreed to discuss new furniture acquisition for their organisation, but one or few participants decided to shift the discussion to food. Once in awhile they scream the word food few times, frequently or loudly, and then some consider that as noise and irrelevant, and decided to censor it as it's also distracting and can cause them to derail from the meeting's topic or slow it down. We however should allow emergency related or necessary comments like "I'm having sharp pains in my abdomen, need a doctor", or "please open the window to let in fresh air". This doesn't always happen very often, so it's tolerated By joining the Bitcoin network, you agreed to participate in cash transaction/processing, anything unrelated or outside of this is considered spam especially if it causes the network to have issues, slowdown, bloat the Blockchain or makes others to abandon the cash transaction for the spam probably due to its more attractive monetary rewards.   So you could consider spam as noise since it's unwanted, unrelated, distracting.

Well.  You named it correctly.  It is UNWANTED and DISLIKED.  And no matter how you want to call it, if you push this away from the Network then it only sounds like Censorship. If this is the current Spam of the Network and it gets pushed away, years from now we will run in to other kinds of 'Spam'.  If the majority of users start considering Privacy and do Coin Joins, will a significant increase of Coin Join Transactions be considered Spam too?  It is unwanted in the Blockchain if you think about it.  I like Coin Joins but I do not want them there.  I would in fact like it better if Coin Joins were impossible to see by the Blockchain users as it would drastically improve Privacy and significantly reduce the possibility of linking UTXOs together post Coin Join. You could argue Transactions as little as 1000 Satoshis are also Spam.  They are distracting too, so are Coin Joins.  Coin Joins you could argue defeat the purpose of a Public Ledger and Transactions that small are almost nothing compared to the average Bitcoin spent in a Transaction.  If you add these and Coin Joins together and find a few more Transactions to consider 'Spam' too, the numbers actually add up to a decent number that could be eliminated from the Network.  Then you would have a much more clean Ledger to work with. Right now we have this Spam.  If it goes away, the next largest Transactions right after it become the newest Spam.  So tell me.  Where does it really stop?

Bitcoin is censorship resistant money. Bitcoin IS NOT censorship resistant everything else. You are free to buy your precious jpeg or your pancake with bitcoin. But neither your jpeg or your pancake belong on the bitcoin chain. This is the slippery slope arguement at it's worst. You are telling us we have to tolerate 40% of spam in the blocks, and it gets worst every year, or else it will devolve into monetary censorship? Can we give the nodes some credit and pretend for a minute that we know the difference between a dickbutt.jpeg and Iranian UTXOs? If anything the slippery slope is the other way around as core is getting more and more tolerant to spam, until they actually blew up a spam filter.

The Network will tolerate until it will not any more.  A change will naturally happen.  If the Bitcoin Blockchain becomes mainly Spam, I am guessing that some of the large Miners will decide to not include any of this Spam in the Blocks.  It is after all in their interest, they would earn nothing if Bitcoin dies away due to the Blockchain being too filled with Spam.  If the Spam is more difficult to include, some of it will naturally move away to another Blockchain. Even if they do not, the more Spam this Blockchain has the more Fees they will have to pay.  Which naturally keeps Spam away.  How many increasing Fees will they pay until they finally stop, probably not too many. Now back to your question.  Speaking against Kim Jong Un is not tolerated in North Korea either.  But we can start using 'toleration' instead of 'Censorship' if it makes you feel better about it.

Waiting and praying that the problem will naturally go away on it's own or that others will fix the problem, is a very lazy and passive way to handle the problem. You can keep praying, I choose to be reactive and aggressive towards a solution. Miners, by design, are high time preference actors. And large miners are actively promoting and facilitating spam with spamware like LibreRelay and SlipStream specially created to push for more spam. Hoping big miners, who are part of the problem, to find the solution without the nodes input, that is a very bad approach and will only result in more spam. Knots filters, BIP110, and The Cat are all counter measures which are going to make it more difficult for spam. If you disagree with what those measures do, feel free to come up with better ways to handle spam. And no, rejecting filters, and blowing up existing filters, as core has been doing, is not an acceptable way to handle spam. The argument that the fees are the only filter required to fight against spam has been turned on it's head with the Taproot and Segwit exploits, which core refused to even acknowledge, much less attempt to rectify. Monetary users get a 50% Segwit discount at best while spammers routinely get a 75% Segwit discount. If the spammers get a bigger miner fee discount than monetary users, who are the fees really filtering? And by what mechanism do higher fees only chase away spammers, not monetary users? Is there a magic smoke in the fees that affect only spammers? Pretending that the fees will only filter out spammers with no serious effect to monetary users is just absurd. Especially when you factor in that spammers get a larger Segwit discount than monetary users. Bitcoiners are waking up. We will treat spammers with extreme prejudice. Join the fight and run a UASF BIP110 node.