Imagine what email would be like if we decided to give up fighting spam over the last 25 years. #bitcoin
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This is a great comparison.
Imagine if we had used hashcash to make spammers pay to send emails over the last 25 years
Spams are bad
It would be very different indeed.
You would get inscriptions? 😂
There is no fee market in the mail protocol, incomparable things
Spam emails don't pay any fees to be sent. Removing filters isnt giving up.
just because people pay a fee doesn't mean they aren't doing something wrong.
this sounds like an excuse also known as giving up.
Fighting spam is what caused the death of email decentralization... because no one listened to Adam Back when he told them that the appropriate solution to spam is imposing an economic cost.
And eventually they'll run out of money if what they're sending doesn't actually have any value.
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.
as someone that used to run email servers for many companies, i truly do understand that. it became easier to use a trusted mail solution, centralizing your mail, than keeping up with fighting spam. but this also highlights my point that giving up isn't always the answer.
Trust a central authority over imposing economic costs to individual actors is what I would call giving up.
Let's just let the fed issue dollars because gold is too hard to move around.
Email isn't money.
love it. are jpegs money?
Providing important context as to why your OP does not hold the test of logic is an excuse?
in my opinion jpegs are ddos attacks
The assumption that spammers are the ones that will get priced out by fees and not the people using bitcoin as money is a problem.
We can’t assume that the fee mechanism will lead to the outcome we want (the network being used for monetary purposes)
I hope we learn from SF making it easier for homeless people to shoot heroin on the streets because it’s “safer” this way and they were gonna do it anyway, so why bother implementing the law
No. That doesn't make the Satoshis in that transaction and more or less valuable as money. They are wasting money in my opinion. They are still making a financial transaction though.
Looking pretty decentralized to me... Are you referring to the fact that in the US, most users use Gmail, Apple, and Yahoo? Well, that is because they are not spamming their users. Since email users care about using email to send and receiving emails, they look the other way on big tech spying on them, which is another problem, but the moment "Gmail core" starts spamming their users inboxes, you can be sure they are going to move to one of the other ten gazillion email services out there. I think you are getting it backwards.
And that fight was a super powerful centralizing force.
How to exactly is having filters making it more difficult expensive to run nodes leading to centralization?
I have to agree with Jameson here.
Running your own email server is still pretty easy from a technical standpoint.
The difficulty comes in managing black and white lists for your IP addresses constantly because somebody sent spam once and got on one or off the other.
Sir, did you type this while driving? 😂
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
Yeah i know i said "muse". Its then cumulative effects that dont seem to be rationally examinednso far for a 100/1000 year blockchain
They lost the spam fight. Emails addresses still get tons of spam.
That's why my solution will win eventually. The cost to send email should be 2 bits, paid by the sender .
1 bit for the receiver of the email and 1 bit for the service provider.
That would completely destroy spam and scammers.
So, a gigantic change that BREAKS an enormous amount of social consensus is worth it, even though it will cost more for the attacker to use than just jamming things into witness.
Your argument is pretty shitty, sir.
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...
You don't grasp many parts but thats life. Live free.
Taking Bitcoin’s 80‑byte OP_RETURN cap off is like removing the mesh from a window—spam won’t vanish; it just blows straight in.
The line “e‑mail is 90 % owned by five companies” actually counts reading apps, not mailbox hosts. Apple Mail, for instance, only fetches messages that can live on any server. Hosting is more concentrated than it used to be. However, it’s no monopoly, and the plumbing remains highly federated: the Internet is still dotted with independent MX servers and live SMTP nodes. Deliverability is concentrated; the transport network is not—so e‑mail’s path doesn’t prove Bitcoin must centralise if a policy knob disappears.
Hashcash failed because SMTP lacks Bitcoin’s two brakes: an unforgeable fee token and a hard block‑space ceiling. Spammers could mint proof‑of‑work “stamps” on hijacked PCs for almost nothing, while every Bitcoin transaction must burn real satoshis and bid for finite space. Remove the OP_RETURN cap and, when fees are low, jumbo payloads will bloat the chain’s permanent history; when costs rise, attackers will bury data in off‑curve pubkeys, inflating both history and the UTXO set unless those keys are made invalid.
Until consensus rejects off‑curve keys and the fee schedule fully prices storage (e.g., via a higher vbyte multiplier for data outputs), the 80‑byte limit is the least bad option. Lifting it now would swap a miner‑relay concern for a permanent chain and UTXO bloat that every node would carry forever.
But sending email spam doesn’t cost hard sats
Except we could delete them!
Naah, botnets would still have won. Remember how bad security was in those days: you could have many, many CPUs quite easily.
What @Jameson Lopp means is that Bitcoin’s current 80-byte OP_RETURN filter centralizes mining: big pools with private relay connections can bypass it, giving them exclusive access to lucrative data transactions. Smaller miners and public nodes are effectively left out.
I believe removing this filter too early will shift centralization elsewhere. Without consensus rules blocking off-curve pubkeys or proper fees for storage, we’ll invite spammers to stuff data cheaply into the blockchain, bloating chain history and the UTXO set. That raises the costs of running full nodes, ultimately pushing validation into fewer hands and centralizing the network at a different layer.
Even if it is not jpegs it will be just shitty things.
People still buy padlocks to hang on a bridge and symbolize their forever love. Yes they "buy" it whatever the price is.
Even if the bridge exist to allow people to cross a river.
So, yes, the price won't do anything to stop any shitty spam, and it will not always be jpeg, but also someone that want to put an entire book in it.
Spoken like someone that has no idea how much it would cost to put a book on Bitcoin
If padlocks were $1000 they wouldn't buy it... The price absolutely matters and Bitcoin blocksapce is expensive as shit.
i am. but it was an example. i am very sure some will find something so interesting to put on this place that the cost will not be a problem.
You focus on my finger, not the direction i was pointing.
are you ready to have this fee too for your BTC transaction of $100 ?
Again you don't understand. My transaction would still be like $5 while the jpeg is $1000... Transactions are small.
i understand it doesn't worth to host jpeg in the blockchain because of cost.
now get my point too.
I am an attacker and i want the bitcoin blockchain to be stopped for transactions for a moment, whatever is the reason (because i know a whale have to move BTC, because state attack, because anything you can imagine).
how many blocks could be retarded for $100000 ? or 1 millions ?
is the cost is the only protection possible against that ?
Or even more interesting, what if i use the same money to do 1 millions of 1sat transaction move to avoid legit transactions ?
My concern is about legit transactions to be include in the blockchain as they have to.
So you're going to spend a ton of money for no real effect... Incentivizing even more security...
" Incentivizing even more security... " how ?
And now that the cost is not the problem. why and how they can be spam on the blockchain nowadays, if it is so expensive ?
More fees, more miners. More hash, more security.
It's not that expensive to spam right now because blocks are empty nowadays.
So spam have an impact on transaction fee too ?
when they are both needed to be include in a block ?
Yes of course spam has an impact on fee. The same way any transaction effects fees...
Yes if there is a lot of transactions to be written fees are higher, it is the way.
But spam could add extra fee here with time.
If there is an economic profit usage of this spam space (like proposing to a lot of people to write their short name on the blockchain for $10, or any stupid reasons like this), it could be a problem but i get we haven't reach this case yet... we have to wait for human imagination or AI one.
You know it is really interesting to have this kind of Q/A.
Because bitcoin is for a lot of people on earth now.
And few people only decide what they put on the blockchain.
So it is also important to share point of view, and put light on some unclear side.
This should always be the way to lead discussions about BTC and about his future.
Avoid any exchange feels like there is something to hide, and make some people suspicious or very angry.
If you think about it there is not so much concern about BTC now.
so it is easy to list them and have a clear reply about it, like we did on one point and questions associated to it.
Thanks for this and your time.
Another note about spam
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