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umni 8 months ago
Why can't fees out price spam.. Has anyone done the numbers on this? Do minimal fees eliminate more than 95% of the spam? Some thoughts from another post:
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Should we be fixing a problem before it has arrived? How can we accurately define the problem if it isn't here yet? (high on chain fees) are their consequences to fixing problems that currently don't exist? Is it ever possible to define "honest party"? "so our collective goal is to keep transactions off chain as much as possible"... Aren't high fees the only thing to incentivise this, the literal pricing mechanism and tampering with the pricing signals gets us into some serious trouble? Look to any of the unlimited historical examples. Would you agree it might be possible to remove too many transactions off chain? What would the result look like if so.... If you look at Bitcoin alone you might think it is dying, similar to an old tree being overtapped, transactions representing its the flow of sap, and spam representing the buildup of moss or fungi. On chain fees are a measure of how much off-chain transactions could take place before damaging the underlying chain. If we see 'subjective' spam appearing on chain, maybe we overtapped the tree... maybe we're killing it. Instead of manually removing the moss or fungi build up with bip110 we should on chain some transactions and aggressively discouraging bitcoin derivatives socially. 1 solving problems before they arrive. 2 creates new problems, spam. 3 solve for new problem, setting precedent by defining spam externally. Instead of using pricing incentives the only real spam filter Looks a lot like the beginning of a negative feedback loop or governmental growth. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by "good intentions"." I agree with every one of your points but it is the consequences I am afraid of. As we're all aware we can't plant another tree.
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Honnestly I think it's hard to generalize the answer, because the non-monetary market oscillates between two states: hyped or dormant. Hyped markets, such as during the inscription craze, can actually outprice monetary usage & that's precisely what caused all the resentment against these use cases - they are also incredibly hungry in block space and significantly deter scaling efforts, on a system that is already low throughput. Luckily, this state isn't sustainable - it's a bubble - but it's definitely a nuisance. Dormant markets can definitely be outpriced, though the UTXO clutter and block burden from the past doesn't go anywhere, right? What's happening right now is that, because onchain activity is so low, miners will fill the blocks with whatever garbage at whatever price - which is always better than 0. In other words, for miners, there's always an incentive to fill the blocks no matter what. This is why I think we entered an era of forever-full blocks, because miners can now marginally stimulate markets that will buy the stranded block space for storage or meme. This whole thing gives the statistical illusion that spam has been able to constantly occupy a significant portion of our blocks, and that it will be able to keep doing so; But that's conflating two different states of the market. In the first state, it was a real nuisance because it was outpricing bitcoin users, clogging the throughput. In the second, current state, it's not outpricing anyone, it's just that bitcoin is not being used at full capacity. Arguably, the spam market is now so weak that we could easily outprice it if more people were to use bitcoin - it's not clogging the throughput anymore, but it is definitely filling the blocks, adding unecessary weight to the blockchain. My point in an earlier note was that, whether or not you manage to defeat that spam, it won't take long before the block fills again durably because of mass adoption. Either way, forever-full block is a state of things we'll have to adapt to. Now, if we could dodge another spam hype or two, that would definitely be a great thing — but doing so through a BIP that hurts bitcoin fundamentals & legitimate projects is definitely a bad trade. Good engineering requires to be level-headed, patient, focused, and be willing to look at the problem from as many angles as possible in orders to discover the best trade-offs. Only the highest quality solutions should be allowed to make their way into bitcoin consensus. There's a reason why most proposal fails, and it's a very healthy state of things. :)
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