i don't think that's the case. i used to. but i underestimated the abilitiy of the average person to realize that they're being scammed.

With smtp hashcash the sender paid for EACH recipien (or receiving server, its been about 15 years since i played with it so memory fades), the message is also extremely ephemeral. In btc the spammer fee is paid once but permanently occupies the blockchain and every node, forever. So the spam narrative seems wrong to me, costs are inverted. Thats a tax on all participants who wish to support decentalization which is clearly in conflict with Satoshi's comments. Without being melodramatic ive been musing we end up with Solana size nodes. Even if that was only 20% true it has a cooing effect on decentralization.

"cooling" (doh)

How on earth would we end up with nodes that large with a 4 megabyte block limit

Read what you wrote. "eventually they will run out of money" ... that is not serious What if eventually we run out of time while waiting for them to "eventually they will run out of money"? What if eventually Bitcoin network becomes unusable? What you wrote is not an argument. Filters are addition to economic incentives. Bitcoin is MONETARY network, not jpeg decentralized storage. Jpegs are spam. Run your Bitcoin Knots friends.

Knots has no bearing on how usable Bitcoin becomes over time... This is the part you seem to not be able to grasp...