‘Bitcoin Standard’ author backs funding dev to make spamming Bitcoin costly

Economist and writer of The Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean Ammous, has weighed successful connected the ongoing statement implicit spam inscriptions connected the Bitcoin network, suggesting helium would “throw successful a fewer sats” to money a full-time developer focused connected making Bitcoin spamming much hard and expensive.

Ammous made the remarks successful effect to a thread initiated by the pseudonymous developer GrassFedBitcoin, who called for Bitcoin Core to merge propulsion petition #28408, which would alteration node operators to filter inscriptions much easily.

According to GrassFedBitcoin, the deficiency of inscription filtering tools contributes to unnecessary blockchain bloat and undermines Bitcoin (BTC)’s relation arsenic a monetary protocol.

“No 1 moving a node wants to relay inscriptions,” helium wrote, arguing that the OP_RETURN bounds increases were justified successful the past nether mendacious assumptions. He pushed for a configurable, default argumentation discouraging the usage of Bitcoin for storing JPEGs alternatively than monetary data.

Blockstream CEO Adam Back challenged the proposal, describing inscription filtering arsenic an “arms race.” He noted that spam information embedded successful Bitcoin transactions tin beryllium endlessly modified utilizing codification structures, requiring changeless updates to filtering tools.

Source: Adam Back

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Ammous compares Bitcoin spam to email

Ammous compared the Bitcoin spam contented to email spam — different arms contention nine continues to combat without abandoning the system.

“It’s not easy, but it’s worthy trying to assistance bankrupt the spammers faster,” Ammous said. He argued that warring spam is not censorship, noting that node operators already cull invalid transactions.

The statement drew commentary from different users. One subordinate suggested Core developers dainty spam-coding employees astatine definite startups arsenic “unwilling QA engineers” and simply unstandardize each instrumentality they deploy.

Ammous took it further, proposing to “deprecate” the enactment of developers gathering spam tools and adjacent hiring extracurricular coders to overwhelm their systems.

Source: Saifedean Ammous

The speech reflects ongoing tensions successful the Bitcoin assemblage implicit the network’s intended use. With inscriptions continuing to congest the network, calls for method countermeasures — and pointed critiques of those defending spam — are increasing louder.

In a Feb. 4 report, Mempool Research said the adoption of inscriptions could thrust the Bitcoin network’s average artifact size arsenic precocious arsenic 4 megabytes (MB) per block, acold higher than existent averages.

Bitcoin’s mean artifact size — the magnitude of information successful each artifact posted to the network’s nationalist ledger — is presently astir 1.5 MB.

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