Let's debunk the most common Bitcoin Core v30 arguments that I've seen circulate.
Sadly, we are sleepwalking off a cliff.
I keep seeing this Andreas Antonopoulos clip in which many assumptions are made and is taken out of context.
The TLDR statement he makes that I'm going to address is:
- "If you pay the fee, your transaction is legitimate. There is no spam transaction, there is no such thing as an illegitimate transaction. There are only transactions that did get mined and transactions that didn't have enough fee to get mined."
And here @Stacking Functions asks a very important question:
- "What happens when 'the market' is being distorted (and possibly attacked) by state actors with an infinite money printer? Is that a 'free market'?"
To say that "if it pays a fee it's legitimate" is a market-purist general truth, but it ignores adversarial demand with non-economic motives (a state actor willing to burn money to shape outcomes).
1) Why "fee = legitimacy" is incomplete
A free market doesn't only include utility-maximizers.
It also includes strategic buyers whose objective is not settlement utility but congestion, legal traps, and narrative damage.
The fee market can't distinguish between:
- a million normal, pleb payments and
- a million high-fee, low-utility writes whose sole purpose is to raise the global fee floor, bloat the chain, or embed toxic payloads.
If someone with deep pockets (e.g. state actor) wants a persistent 200–400 sat/vB floor to price out MoE (Medium of Exchange), they can try to buy it.
2) Concrete economics of a fee-floor attack
- Rough vBytes per block ≈ 1,000,000 vB.
- At 50 sat/vB, the cost to fill one block ≈ 0.5 Bitcoin.
- At Bitcoin $114k, that’s ~$57k/block; ~$8.2M/day (144 blocks).
- At 200 sat/vB, ≈ 2 BTC/block; ~$228k/block; ~$32.8M/day.
A major state could sustain this for weeks/months if the policy goal (cripple retail MoE, force users custodial, create "Bitcoin hosts illegal content" headlines) is valuable enough.
Miners would happily include these transactions (fees up, revenue up); small-payments get crowded out; most users slide toward custodial L2s or stable-coins (CBDCs). That's containment by price, not protocol.
3) The usual counter-claims - and why they don't fully save you
- "But the attacker is paying a real cost; Bitcoin wins on miner revenue" -
True; miners profit. But if the policy win (killing retail MoE, justifying compliance clients) is worth $30–50M/month to a state, they can keep burning.
- "Market adapts; fees settle back" - Yes, fee spikes mean-revert. The question isn't spikes; it's a new fee floor (e.g., 50 -> 150 sat/vB median) that permanently prices out low-value payments and normalizes custodial pathways.
- "Users move to Lightning/Fedimint; problem solved" - Those centralize at the edges (big custodians, popular guardians), where legal and policy pressure is easiest. Great UX, easier to KYC/blacklist - mission accomplished (for containment).
- "We'll counter with node filters" - Per-node filters just shift the politics to who runs whose filter. If enough pools embrace policy templates (insurer/utility pressure), miners - not your node - decide settlement norms.
The Andreas Antonopoulus statement that's taken out of context ("fee = legitimacy") is neat for peer competition but naïve in an adversarial, policy-driven world.
If default policy makes large arbitrary data easy (Bitcoin Core v30), you've just lowered the attacker's operational cost and raised the political payoff for compliance clients and app-store/cloud choke-points. That's not a protocol break; it's a governance win against MoE.
4) Why v30-style policy loosening (OP_RETURN large payloads) matters
"State actors can attack the network right now, so how does Bitcoin Core v30 change things?"
Bitcoin Core v30 removes the long-standing ~80 B OP_RETURN relay default, effectively making large OP_RETURN payloads easy by default and allowing multiple OP_RETURNs per tx.
Before vs after (at the policy layer)
- Before: Standard mempool policy discourages very large arbitrary data in policy (nodes won't relay non-standard forms by default). You could still stuff data (e.g., Taproot/witness tricks), but you have to work around policy filters, custom peers, or miner relationships - more work, more obvious.
- After (if defaults relax): Arbitrary-sized OP_RETURN payloads become "standard enough" to relay by default. That:
* makes spam cheaper to coordinate operationally (no special peering, no boutique scripts);
* reduces attribution (looks like "enthusiast data" rather than an obvious custom exploit - e.g. by a state actor);
* and widens the "liability channel" (malware/CSAM-in-chain is one broadcast away for anyone with a wallet kit).
The effect under a Core v30-like default:
- It's easier for a deep-pocket actor to spam-attack: less custom infra, fewer "nonstandard" hurdles, more plausible deniability.
- Consequences: sustained high fee floors, node-operator legal risk, centralization pressure (compliance nodes, policy-pools), and stronger MoE suppression (push to custodial/stable-coin [CBDC] rails). That's exactly the containment corridor I've described in my previous posts.
So what about Bitcoin Core v30 makes the attack surface bigger?
1) Congestion efficiency:
- OP_RETURN outputs are provably unspendable, so they don't bloat the UTXO set - but they do bloat block bytes and mempool memory/bandwidth.
- For a fee-floor attack, OP_RETURN is an efficient "pure byte" filler: maximum congestion, minimal future state; attackers aren't "paying" with future UTXO pressure.
In other words, to push up the minimum fee ("fee floor"), an attacker can flood the mempool with transactions that use OP_RETURN outputs - these are just data bytes that fill blockspace and cause congestion, but they don't create UTXOs (they're provably unspendable).
So the attacker maximizes congestion per sat paid today while leaving no long-term UTXO bloat to "pay for" later.
2) If large arbitrary payloads propagate by default, it's trivial to get contraband onto-chain. Then you can run the playbook:
- "Nodes relay illegal content -> node = publisher"
- "Clouds hosting nodes violate AUPs (Acceptable Use Policy) -> mass evictions"
- "App stores delist non-filtering wallets"
Net effect: chill self-custody and self-hosted nodes, push usage into KYC custodians.
3) Narrative cover for policy clients:
- Once headlines say "the chain hosts harmful content", pools adopting filtering templates (policy clients) get social and insurer cover: "We're just blocking abuse".
- That's the fast lane to politically steerable settlement - without a single consensus change.
4) Operational deniability for the attacker:
- With big payloads accepted by default policy, spam waves look like speculative mania or "digital art" booms. It's harder to finger a single adversary, easier to sustain the fee floor.
The fact that most Bitcoiners still haven't figured out that we don't live in a free market, the largest companies are State-subsidized, the State picks winners and losers, and that Bitcoin as a MoE is a direct competitor to CBDCs/stablecoins, is shocking.
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The other day I saw Peter Todd (Bitcoin core developer) begging for donations again for his projects.
How it is even possible to be an OG Bitcoiner, to be in Bitcoin cycle after cycle and to still beg for money is something I can't comprehend.
These are the people you are outsourcing your Bitcoin decision-making to.
From anecdotal observations, these Core developers aren't exactly ballin'.
This doesn't conclusively mean anything of course - I just ask you to use your critical thinking abilities and to not blindly appeal to authority.
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More context on how Bitcoin Core's v30 Update is an attack on Bitcoin's decentralization:
View quoted note →
View quoted note →
