If you can get away with giving your wife antibiotics without her knowledge for a disease you gave her without her knowledge then the next logical step is wondering if you can do that to the whole world.

Still bullish? Me

The "fees are the filter" argument for regulating spam only works when the fee is charged by the party providing the service to the party receiving the service. That's how consensual transactions work. It would be the spammer paying the node runner to store his arbitrary data. What we have is a third party paying a fee to a miner at the expense of the node runner who is on the hook to store the data, for free, FOREVER. That's parasitism. Rent-seeking. This is an example of Bastiat's That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen. In the broken window fallacy a broken window is viewed as good because it stimulates economy by providing work for the window maker. The more windows you break the greater the benefit in stimulus. But what is unseen is the damage done to the property owner's disposable income, such as a new pair of shoes that he can no longer afford. He has been deprived of the benefit of his wages, and furthermore, so has the shoemaker been deprived of employment. Spam is a broken window. The spammer enriches himself, and shares a portion with the miner. The sender of the financial transaction gets stuck with higher fees, and the node runner gets stuck storing the images at his risk and own expense for the benefit of the son of a bitch that broke his window.

We live in a dissimulation

X (formerly Twitter)

Nithu Sezni (@nithusezni) on X

We live in a dissimulation

An empire in late stage collapse attacks not only their enemies but antagonizes its allies. RIP Bitcoin Core

X (formerly Twitter)

Ben Sigman (@bensig) on X

Core devs now blocking me on X. Hilarious. I’ve been completely on the side of core this entire time… AND I am still in support of core devel...

"Core devs now blocking me on X. Hilarious. I’ve been completely on the side of core this entire time… AND I am still in support of core development AND I’d like to see the greater community align again - after more carefully understanding the process of reviewing and merging PRs this week it became clear that a mistake was made in changing the default size of the OP_RETURN - which was obviously not a consensus decision. Even if the opinions of the NACKs were philosophical rather than technical for the most part… one argument that is very valid is that the cost of OP_RETURN storage is 4x the fee of where what some people call “garbage” has landed in witness_data - so there is literally no incentive to use a more expensive trash bin when it is less costly to litter. The absolutely most ridiculous part of it is that they could just add back the default and it would make no difference to them really but mean the world to hundreds or maybe even thousands of other people. I opened a PR to suggest it and it got shut down so quickly! Now they are also blocking me on X." @bensig

Allegory of the Core Before we had the matrix to unplug from, Plato gave us the Allegory of the Cave. In that story the Priest class enslaved the people in the fiat system by projecting a fake reality onto the cave walls. A guy escapes, discovers the real world, and then goes back to try to save the others, and they don't believe that sunshine and blue skies is real, and they threaten to kill him. Ever try to orange pill a normie, and get this response? The story transcends time, and in our age bitcoin is reality that let's you escape the financial chains. But just like Cypher betrayed his shipmates on behalf of the matrix, Core V30 tries to convince you that NFTs are money. Plug back into the system. The fees are the filter. The Taproot Wizards are the new Priest class shouting down common sense by telling us that your opinion doesn't matter because you're not technical. I've seen the light, and I'm not going back inside the cave to stare at graffiti spammed onto the walls.

Can Bitcoin Treasury Companies be the heroes of the Spam Wars? Bitcoiners can stack sats without running a node. BTCTCs do not have that luxury. Their custodians must run a node, and therefore a decision must be made. What protocol to run? Michael Saylor said that, "the war for the future of money will be won with money," and now that BTCTCs have taken their places on the battlefield, I believe that they can be the critical force as economic nodes that holds the line against spam. According to the doctrine of 5th Generation Warfare, we as individuals, and bitcoin itself, are under constant attack. Spam is one attack vector that distorts free market signals. How can 1 satoshi = 1 satoshi if some satoshis have "valuable" arbitrary data glued to them? That would be like a fiat decree that paintings are legal tender and valued at a penny, and now you need 100 Mona Lisas to buy a candy bar. It's why we stopped making pennies because the copper in the coin is worth more than the fraction of one dollar a penny represents. Spam on money makes perfect money less perfect, and any effort to degrade bitcoin's ability to be money is clearly an attack. Whether Core is complicit in the attack or simply too incompetent is irrelevant. It reminds me of the Lysander Spooner quote: "But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." So Core has either authorized spam as we have had, or it has been powerless to prevent spam. In either case, it is unfit to exist (on my node). How are BTCTCs uniquely positioned to help? They have fiduciary obligations to preserve shareholder value, meaning they have an obligation to preserve bitcoin's value. They can commission studies to analyze the threat of spam (and CSAM) to bitcoin's value, and direct custodians to run Knots or fund developers to find alternative solutions to spam. The war for the future of money will be won with money. This will require courage, however as all heroic efforts do. Luckily, it's been said that bitcoin is a courage test, not an IQ test. If it were an IQ test then all the "but you're not technical" arguments would be correct. The plebs who understand money is supposed to be money (and nothing but money) recognize the appeal to dev authority as tech slop. But what if BTCTCs aren't motivated by the carrot of being the heroes we need? There's always the stick, and shareholders hold that stick. If a spam event like CSAM is connected to the next black swan event, shareholders will be wondering why BTCTCs didn't protect shareholder value by running nodes that filter spam and why they didn't advocate for BIP-110 to move this protection to the base layer. So while individual node runners are likely insulated from legal repercussions of a CSAM event, BTCTCs will have made themselves juicy targets of litigation for failing to protect bitcoin's value. Anna Lappe is attributed to the quote, "Every dollar you spend is a vote for the kind of world you want." This is easily converted to philosophy of stacking sats, and also by investing in companies that are aligned with bitcoin ethos. That could be finding a cure for cancer or it could be converting the fiat financial system to a bitcoin standard. Will BTCTCs be the heroes or the villains of the Great Spam Wars? Only time will tell. And I will be voting with both my time and money.