I've developed several theories about the anti-spam / BIP-110 movement:
1) The entire thing was cooked up by Luke + Mechanic as a marketing mechanism to get free press for OCEAN and thus gain more market share of hashrate. It succeeded brilliantly on the first goal but failed hard on the second because miners tend to be mercenaries rather than driven by morality.
2) OCEAN is getting desperate and its investors are pretty pissed. They peaked at 2% network hashrate in Jan and have dropped back to 1% recently. Perhaps all the posturing and threatening to reject blocks from "impure miners" isn't a great marketing tactic after all? I wouldn't be surprised if Luke is expecting to get demoted / kicked out due to poor performance. This could also explain his extremism about "Bitcoin dying this year" / him departing from Bitcoin work - he sees the writing on the wall.
3) If this is all OCEAN, you may ask, why such a grassroots movement?
3A) A lot of the movement is manufactured. I've confronted and unmasked many AI bots on both X and nostr that were spewing Knotzi propaganda.
3B) Some of it is real people, tapping into the small sect of puritanical Bitcoiners who are completed fixated on this issue. Some seem to be trying to make themselves influencers while others are just sucked into the cult-like emotion-driven narrative.
4) One common theme across all of the above is that they have no financial conviction in the success of the movement. They handwave away any offer of financial wager as "gambling" while simultaneously thinking they can economically coerce miners into doing their bidding. This is completely illogical.
5) The one logical explanation I can come up with for folks continuing to posture with narratives but without economics is that they have deceived themselves into thinking that merely acting like aggressive assholes will "scare off the spammers" and thus they don't ACTUALLY have to succeed in enforcing their desires at the protocol level, but can be happy that they "defended Bitcoin" at the "social" level instead.
