"The filter meant to eject spam from your mempool does not eject spam from the blockchain. Therefore, remove it!"
"The policy meant to eject students from the staff lounge does not eject them from the school. Therefore, remove it!"
Same energy
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"The law meant to prevent drinking in the parks does not prevent drinking in the bars. Therefore, remove it!"
"The ordinance meant to prevent loud music in the library does not prevent loud music in the nightclub. Therefore, remove it!"
"The house rule meant to forbid shoes in your living room does not forbid shoes in your foyer. Therefore, remove it!"
There are reasons to tolerate spam in the blockchain: ejecting it requires a large amount of hashrate, and the cost is too high
But the same reason does not apply to the mempool: ejecting most of it is easy, and the cost is low
There are reasons to not allow spam in the blockchain. Bitcoin is valuable because its Money. Shitcoins are not valuable because they are memecoins, fartcoins, turdcoins and so on. So if miners want value for their block rewards its in their interest to not devalue Bitcoin with spam.
I agree completely
did it ever occur to you guys that miners might only care about price appreciation 🤯
I am a Bitcoin solo miner. I know very well why I do it. I also understand economics well.
then you understand that the VAST majority of the hashrate will happily mine transactions that you and I may consider spam
Nope. Spam fees are negligible in comparison to block rewards. They also devalue Bitcoin. Only very low time preference miners would do it but in Bitcoin you need to invest in ASICs so most miners are not in for just a month or two.
Not sure how it devalues Bitcoin. It might, but it's not immediately clear how.
What it does is drive up the costs of running a node. Which is why those running nodes are incentivized to mitigate this attack in any way they can.
That said, it's also valid that having to re-download transactions that were already filtered out is an impact. And these get in thanks to nodes which act against their own self interest.
Sort of like cancer cells.
The only way I suppose I could see a case for Bitcoin's market value being impacted though is that being costlier to use is a deterrent at the margins. But I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who's actually buying any less due to the prospect of higher fees in the future.
Perhaps there's an angle I'm not seeing though.
Spam devalaues Bitcoin.
Spam is waste.
Waste of processing power, waste of hash power, waste of bandwith and waste of storage space.
Shitcoins are not valuable becuase they are different kinds of spam.
Bitcoin is Money and that is where its value is.
> it's also valid that having to re-download transactions that were already filtered out is an impact
> it's also valid that having to re-download transactions that were already filtered out is an impact
Nodes don't just "download" transactions, they also "upload" them to their peers, again and again as long as they are in the mempool and they have peers to upload them to. Core folks love to focus on the fact that if you eject spam from your mempool and it gets into a block, you will redownload it. But they neglect that if you *keep* spam in your mempool, you will repeatedly upload it to your peers. So removing it actually saves you on bandwidth. You may have to download it twice, but you have to upload it 0 times instead of 7 or so.
It is. Which is why having it user configurable was the sensible way to handle it.
Core is like iBitcoin.
If the purpose of the mempool is to store transactions pending inclusion into the blockchain, then doesn’t it follow that the purpose of mempool filters is to keep transactions out of the mempool so that they aren’t included in the chain?
The mempool doesn't only have one purpose. It also exists to keep unconfirmed transactions in ram so that they can be more quickly relayed to your peers. If you want to free up ram that would otherwise be spam-occupied, and prevent consumption of bandwidth that would otherwise be consumed relaying ram, then your mempool filters have another purpose besides preventing transactions from getting into the chain: they solve the technical problem of spam being in the mempool itself, where it would otherwise consume your ram, eat part of your bandwidth, and pointlessly add wear to your system.
"relaying ram" -- oops, I meant "relaying spam"