There are plenty of people much more knowledge and articulate than I am who have done an excellent job explaining why ignoring spam, and in this case enabling it, is a massive problem. I think it's imperitive that someone in your position takes the time to hear the opposing case (if you haven't already) considering 10% of node runners have already switched to Knots in the wake of this.
@npub19z2u...fkd4 and
@Bitcoin Mechanic in particular are worth taking the time to listen to.
Even if these spam attacks only come in waves and then disappear they are still massively harmful. I don't need to tell you fiat money is infinite and this means that funding these scams will go on as long as the money printer exists. If a new wave of jpeg tokens push up fee prices then vendors in poor countries have to compete with that rubbish to manage lightning channels and any other number of issues. That doesn't mean we don't think it's valuable, it means we think it's too valuable to be abused like this.
What can be mined is currently decided by less than 10 entities which in itself is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Spam can only be mined as easily as it is because pools have so much control they can make guarantees to include it in blocks they know they will find and control the template for. Mining needs to be much more decentralised and in that scenario 99% of what can be mined will be the default mempool policy of Core, which should be aggressively filtering spam not bending the knee to it.
Filtering has always been a part of bitcoin and is clearly effective as 99% of what is in blocks falls into the default mempool policy of Core. Spam is a continuous arms race but it is one where every time they find a new attack we can easily create a new filter and crush that particular scam and they have to explain to their investors why they need to build monkey jpeg viewer v15. It is a battle that is always worth fighting.
Also I apologise if I came across as disrespectful in my first response. I have massive respect for your work but I just think you are wrong on this and we cannot afford for someone as influential as you are to be complacent about what is happening here.
