At an old job, my team was tasked with building a spam filter. We had a dataset of emails tagged as spam by our users.
The assumption was that the spam was viagra selling and prince of Nigeria emails. We had none of those. Lots of “spam” were legit notification emails people didn’t want to see - but some really needed to see. Some were perfectly honest business offers - they were just not relevant for who was receiving them.
Spam is highly subjective. The day bitcoin has “no spam”, is the day it has no censorship resistance, cause obviously the spammer cared about that transaction, followed the consensus rules, and paid an higher fee to get their transaction in a block, instead of a transaction someone else cared more about.
If there are transactions that are valid but destructive to a part of the system (utxo set), maybe we should be redesigning the system to be less fragile and scale better, instead of trying to control its usage - cause if bitcoin works that won’t work.
If we want to make a certain kind of transaction invalid, because it doesn’t fit the goals of the bitcoin project, then we should be discussing a concrete change to the consensus rules. Discussing “spam” leads nowhere.
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