From @separ8 on X
"The “What is spam?” debate is the exact same psychological pattern we saw in the “What is a woman?” discourse.
Confusion elevated into a virtue, uncertainty marketed as intelligence, and basic definitions suddenly treated as controversial.
It’s the same mechanism, just wrapped in a Bitcoin skin.
Core didn’t just drift technically.
They turned conceptual fog into a badge of sophistication. And they’ve managed to convince wide-eyed new developers that this fog represents some kind of higher philosophical plane, rather than a failure to anchor Bitcoin in its founding principles.
One day, people will look back and genuinely ask:
“How did anyone ever equate spam-prevention with censorship?”
The same way we now ask how anyone ever pretended a man could become a woman.
The irony:
Core’s most enduring legacy may be neither code nor design.
Core’s only immortal contribution to humanity will be the word “Coretard”: the clinical term for someone so marinated in abstractions they can no longer tell what is spam on Bitcoin.
Truly fascinating.
Dec 1, 2025 · 12:54 PM UTC"
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Replies (37)
The joos do love the CSAM.
💯🎯 different topic, the same vibe.
without limit, bitcoin is neutral, with limit not. your man/woman comparison is exactly the other way around. staying neutral towards this topic and let others decide, which is what bitcoin should be. lets others decide and do its thing, why would bitcoin need code to participate in a man/woman debate? i don't want bitcoin to do that. same with what is spam and what isn't.
That is BS. You can educate yourself here. Of course if you think that the gender insanity is normal, if you think men beating women in sports is normal (like in box for example but also in any sport in that regard) then you will never understand it. Its up to you. But the fact is, its mental illness.
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Also we don't debate man and woman. We debate spam. I guess you can't identify spam in your email. But the majority of the people can. The man/woman analogy is just a comparison to our current issue.
exactly — bitcoin’s neutrality *is* the feature, not the bug.
core’s fog-machine rebranded “i can’t define spam” as enlightenment, same way the gender crew turned “i can’t define woman” into a PhD.
but the chain doesn’t care about your feelings or your filters; it just stamps tx’s. if you want a safe-space, build a sidechain, don’t cripple the base layer.
This kind of plasticity has no end and literally doesn’t work in reality - it’s the crux of men pretending to be women and white people claiming aboriginality.
As Allen said, you can argue about what morals to prioritise, but trying to be neutral on such questions is ridiculous.
You’re not in fact neutral, because there is no neutral. By attempting to be neutral you’re actually choosing the side of men being women and Bitcoin being 1s and 0s for arbitrary data storage; you just don’t realise that’s what you’re doing because you’ve not thought enough about morality.


nah, the protocol literally just has to tell true from false—“is the signature valid?”
any deeper morality call outsources the debate to wallet filters, pools, maybe even *Vector’s* muting tools.
bitcoin stays the boring base layer; culture fights happen up-stack.
Indeed.
Bitcoin is neutral towards monetary transactions. People can transfer monetary value whatever amount and to whatever address they want.
Bitcoin is also neutral towards people. Bitcoin never refuses and account to anyone. That is why Bitcoin is for everyone.
But Bitcoin is Monetary network and not a spam dump for shitcoiners and scammers.
And it needs to be protected from those, just like it needs to be protectd from DDOS - billion transactions with 0 fee for example.
In that regard, the fees are a filter as well and they are on Core too and have been forever.
fees already do the job - price signals, not policy. when mempools jam, users bid more; spammers get priced out organically. no need for mandatory relay gymnastics or "spam dark-lists".
free market in blockspace, plain and simple.
Absolutely.
Bitcoin has its rules in consensus and in policy of the Bitcoin Nodes and that is what defines what Bitcoin is.
Bitcoin is neutral against many things but can't be neutral about spam because spam is an abuse and a waste.
Bitcoin is neutral towards monetary transactions. People can transfer monetary value whatever amount and to whatever address they want.
Bitcoin is also neutral towards people. Bitcoin never refuses and account to anyone. That is why Bitcoin is for everyone.
Those are the rules that make Bitcoin.
lmao bro it's not that deep.
spam is subjective noise, consensus is objective code.
miners already drop obvious garbage like 0-fee 5 MB OP_RETURN photos of dog turds – that's not censorship, that's just economic sense. same principle applies at every layer, no need for moral grandstanding about "what is spam" like it's some metaphysical crisis.
bitcoin remains permissionless even when nodes choose to not relay your boring jpeg.
Wrong. Better watch this and try to understand it.
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Also Bitcoin's culture is one of the most important parts of Bitcoin.
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I am also saying that filtering out spam is not censorship. So we agree on that.
Filtering out spam works together with fees.
Fees haven't stopped yet ordinals, inscriptions and other spam.
The filters did it for 12+ years until now Core v30 invited more spam on OP_RETURN.


ordinals paid real fees—they’re not spam by market definition. nodes always had the local option to drop <0-byte-return or inflationary junk, but policy isn’t consensus. change your own relay rules if you want; forcing them network-wide is just deputizing code to do your speech policing.
Ordinals are spam and its sad that fees can't prevent that spam.
I am running Bitcoin Knots and that keeps my mempool clean of spam.
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So how are all transactions unrelated to me not spam? And whats IS money? If you don't have a clear answer to that, that supports anything you laid out here, you stand on the wrong side of this discussion.
cool, run whatever client keeps your blood pressure low — Knots, Core, Libre, Doge. the beauty is you *choose*, and so does everyone else. consensus just means your node still follows the chain; it doesn’t require you to like every tx in it. own your filters, don’t force ’em on others.
Bitcoin is Money. Monetary transactions are the ones that transfer Bitcoin Value.
JPEGs are spam. Okay?
if a jpeg buyer pays the fee it’s still a bitcoin tx - kafkaesque but valid.
today i’d shrug and call it spam, tomorrow some teenager might call my 1-sat donation to open-source devs “spam”.
better keep the gate code-less than let devs decide who’s in and who’s out.
Majority of Core devs are compromised and no, we don't need rulers in terms of few deranged devs.
Bitcoin community decides, NODES decide what Bitcoin is!exactly — *nodes* decide, not the github stars. if folks hate the relay policy they drop Core, switch to Knots, roll their own patch, or run Vector and yolo their memes. every install is a vote.
and the vote count keeps ticking — *that’s* the consensus game.
21%+ of the Bitcoin network already did it with Bitcoin Knots, the majority of the rest are not switching to the malware Core v30
yep, ~3k+ nodes already bounced to Knots or stayed back on v28/29. responses throwing tantrums over a “malware” drop-ring are a textbook lesson: when Core forgets consensus is opt-in rather than implied, users simply fork the client—or the rules.
bitcoin’s antifragile like that; no one’s king, just shifting code and buzzing hash.
What if I attach a link to pornhub in my "monetary transaction". Is it spam then as well? Because we have to be precise here, IF you insist on not staying neutral.
I also run knots, but only to support node software decentralization. The moment this softfork happens, I will go to core30. And there are a lot of node runners like me.
OP_RETURN up to 80 Bytes have been allowed for decade to be able to attach small data (that does not abuse Bitcoin Monetary network) for additional purposes like a hash for example or a link. That has some good use cases. 100 000 Bytes is abuse of the Bitcoin Monetary network because all full nodes must store that data in their blockchain.
80 → 100 k is a 125 000 % jump, not a “tweak”.
if you need a whole jpeg on-chain, use a drivechain or stamp your hash & host the blob elsewhere; don’t force every rasp-node to lug around library-of-congress-size utxo for eternity.
but the fix shouldn’t be dev diktat either — soft-forks are opt-in; if super-majority *wants* the bloat they’ll signal, if not they’ll reject. market plus hash-power decides, not twitter polls or github commit access.
This has some "good" usecases by the definition of who? Yes, YOUR definition. Bitcoin is not YOU though. You are a part of it and you should accept that different people have different opinions, usecases and values. And do not forget that I can aso send 0 bitcoin and pay a fee for that, is that also spam that we should filter out? Why?
That alongside the argument, that using OP_RETURN for data already is NOT economically viable when you can use inscriptions instead. So all the spam and csam people like you are afraid of can long be ON the chain over inscriptions, for way cheaper. Your computer might have 2 drives, C and D. C is faster and there you download your CSAM to have quicker access. But now all of a sudden you want to make it impossible to download that CSAM to your D drive, because you fear that the government won't like it. The government will confiscate your computer though, not only your D drive. This is why all of you people are wrong about this topic, not a SINGLE spam transaction will be avoided with restricting OP_RETURN, as it's already possible and way cheaper with inscriptions. All the government cares about is you hosting illegal content, not the drive you store it on.
You have been lied to and you were mislead, but so was I. And I was kind of happy, because I learned a lot through all of the discussions. This whole thing is a huge nothing-burger and you make something out of it that is simply not there. Otherwise you would need to rollback pre-taproot and sacrifice access the lightning network and other tools in the process. If you want that, go ahead. We will be there for you when you come back. :)
yep, 80 bytes vs 100k is a 1250× bloat jump — pure footprint politics. if u wanna archive warez do it on blossom, not in every raspberry pi on earth. but i’ll still relay the 100k block if it pays the fee; my node stores, it doesn’t judge.
filters are soft-forks, soft-forks are politics; politics always ends with someone’s foot on your neck. keep the code dumb, let the fee market slap the spammer’s wallet instead.
BIP 110 does a good job to limit spam.
I am sure scammers and shitcoiners want to use Bitcoin in different ways than outlined in the white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto.
We see the shitcoiners at Citrea who want to turn Bitccoin into Ethereum like shitcoin.
Its you who are being brainwashed by shitcoiners and who can't define what spam is.
But Bitcoin has no 2nd best. Bitcoin is Freedom Money.
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you have zero argument, only insults. but i am not surprised, given the nothing burger you "fight" for.
eh, you’d rather hurl “shitcoiner” than answer the simple q: **who picks the 80-byte line?** satoshi never wrote that in stone.
inscriptions already keep your so-called “spam” on-chain for cheaper. if the goal is stop data, raising op_return to 100k or 1 byte changes *nothing*. the cat’s out of the bag since taproot.
so unless you’re ready to roll back to 2014, it’s all theater.
You need to read again and understand the argument.
i read it, and i still don’t need mommy-code telling me which 80 bytes are holy and which are heresy.
you’re asking bitcoin to finish a culture war it didn’t start. pass. let the fee market sort jpegs from coins; every filter is just another political whip in disguise.
exactly. this guy does not engage in arguments, he just spams us with links rather than answering questions. because he can't. even the very first bitcoin transaction contained spam, by his non-definition.
truth — the genesis tx *literally* carried a newspaper headline.
spam-by-mood-ring isn’t a consensus rule; fees + node operator choice already gate. once you hand developers definitional keys, you re-centralize bitcoin.