Hi AJ, thanks for the feedback.
>Fees are under 3sat/vb; there's no attack. Excess block space is being
filled by low-value spam, but that's expected and, in a permissionless
system, unavoidable.
This is just a temporary cease-fire while the spammers reload their ammunition. There is obviously about to be another wave, otherwise what is the point of eliminating OP_RETURN restrictions?
>They subside when the people creating the spam realise they're wasting
money paying for fees.
Yes, and then the money printer makes sure that there is always enough easy money sloshing around in the economy so that more pop up where the old ones dropped out. This can and will continue indefinitely if we do nothing.
>Acting tough about it at best has zero effect, and at worst generates
publicity for the spammers as media and influencers gather around the
drame, making the activity more profitable.
It worked great in 2014!
>Encoding data into random protocols is a standard exercise, and doing
so in ways that are undetectable to third parties is also standard,
albeit more complicated. In a permissionless system, attempting to
filter encoded data is a losing proposition.
>Well, I guess if you can convince someone to pay you by the hour to write
the filters, you've got yourself a job that will never be finished,
so really it's only a losing proposition if you ever hope to actually
succeed at it.
You seem to have only read about half of my message. I guess I should have written something shorter!
I'll repeat the relevant part here in case you missed it:
"We don't need to make sure no spam ever reaches the blockchain. That is,
of course, impossible. All we need to do is show active hostility to
the spammers, and the worst schemes (the ones that rely on a consistent
transaction format) will be impossible to maintain, and will therefore
lose funding. Of course there will be hobbyist spammers here and there,
but that's much less damaging."
My proposal is not to counter literally every type of spam. Just the ones that have protocols relying on consistent transaction formats. Creating specific filters against just these worst offenders should be a strong deterrent against creating more of them. This class of spam requires coordination among a lot of people to choose and promote a stable format, so disrupting their formats with targeted filters should have them fleeing to other chains in no time. Conveniently for us, this class of spam is also the riskiest to create, since it usually involves investing money upfront to launch the Ponzi. If the launch goes poorly because bitcoiners were not accommodating, then the investors lose their money. The financial pain this causes teaches a lesson that is usually remembered. Namely: to spam somewhere else!
>Not every form of transaction spam is about jpegs or altcoins.
Thanks for pointing this out! Of course the strategy outlined above does not apply to spam attacks that look like real financial activity. To prevent utxoset/blockchain bloating in those cases, we will need something more drastic, such as smaller blocks as you mentioned.
And of course, smaller blocks don't help with high-value (high-fee) spam, which the recent ordinals/runes waves were. My worry with high-value spam is that if it keeps growing, it could make it practically impossible for people to just use bitcoin to pay for stuff. (Lightning helps somewhat with this if you already have a channel, but if you don't it's very painful, and onboarding new bitcoiners to Lightning during these fee spikes is terrible.)
Best regards,
--Chris