Travis West on Nostr: If it was a State actor doing the spam, instead of degenerate gamblers and scammers, ...

If it was a State actor doing the spam, instead of degenerate gamblers and scammers, would this attack be more obvious and taken more serious?

Disappointing that businesses like Bitcoin Magazine are encouraging and promoting spam too. Shake my head every time I hear them try to justify it.

quoting
nevent1q…r5h7

Someone paying $389 to move $1.94.

547,000 sats to move 2730 sats.

Why?

Because this has nothing to do with Bitcoin and doesn't make any sense from the network's perspective.

People who take comfort that behaviour will remain predictable thanks to economically rational decision making need to know it goes both ways when you start taking in external factors.

You have to do it with miners too.

If a miner can make more money in ways that have nothing to do with bitcoin then you can no longer rely on simple assumptions like "miners will do X because if they don't then they will make less than a miner who does"

The simple example I've used many times is compliance.

If you have a choice between expensive legal battles and exclusion informed by government blacklists (i.e censorship) then it's economically rational to do what's economically irrational.

"You left $500 in TX fees on the table! Why?"

"Because our lawyers advised us that this would save us several million dollars."

We have a case-study of this exact scenario with Wasabi Wallet.

So if this is true, what does it have to do with spam? From a miner's perspective, spam is simply a free lunch.

What's the downside?

The issue is we've been standing on shaky ground when it comes to the assumptions we've made about the choices of miners. Myself included.

It turns out there are instances when economic rationality works *against* the interests of the wider network. It's obvious, but apparently we're all surprised that this it the case, or straight up in denial about it.

Spam is that exact scenario. Blocks are far larger than was ever supposed to be possible with the introduction of witness-discounted data. We see block after block at what was meant to be a theoretical maximum of just under 4MB.

There is no room for interpretation. This is simply harmful and the result of a nasty attack.

The entire basis on which the blocksize wars were fought was that encumbering nodes with way more data would lead to centralization. (Along with a host of other issues, like centralization of mining & pools).

The simple solution is that it needs to stop. Blocks cannot be stuffed with arbitrary data placed there by ambivalent miners.

The way this stops is as a natural extension of a bitcoin community that recognizes attacks and responds accordingly.

It means using node software that isn't designed to hurt its users which is already happening with migration away from Core to Knots. The most popular plug-n-play nodes have all begun offering this.

They did not this time last year.

It means miners choosing pools that at least give them the option of not participating in the attack -> currently well under 1% of the hashrate, 6 months ago not even an option. Hard for me to talk about because obviously I'm employed by the pool in question.

It means people who never mined doing it for the first time.

And mostly it means maintaining an understanding of what makes bitcoin bitcoin. That in itself has always been enough to evict crypto scammers to something other than Bitcoin. Those who wanted to turn it into "paypal 2.0" with the same disregard and contempt for nodes that the spam apologists display now forked themselves off to bcash and craigcoin.

The one thing that will *not* solve this problem is high transaction fees. This is an argument made by those who at least understand an attack when they see it, but are in denial about what surviving it actually involves.

Throughout the last few months the conversation has rapidly progressed and the tide has been turning.

I am under no illusions that this is an easy fix, but that is because of the nature of politics and how much larger the ecosystem is now.

But it's also just history repeating itself.

Bitcoin keeps having to fight the same battles again and again. Always in service of importance of being able to run *and use* a node, affordably and trivially, by complete noobs.

To maintain decentralization.

To resist the corrupting of what we have.

Bitcoin is money. Other features cannot come at the expense of that.

OP RETURN wars, bcash, segwit2x, shitcoins, coloredcoins, hostile BIPs, malicious devs....

We've done it a million times before. Every single time the "laser-eyed toxic maxis" win.