On Friday, May 2, 2025 at 3:28:36 PM UTC nsvrn wrote:

I've looked high and low and I can't find any case where I've made the first quotation. Can you help me out?  It sounds like a riff on views I expressed but I can't find it.

I think your comparison though demonstrates a downside of reasoning in broad categories.   High volume nuisance traffic tends to burn itself out because the user that is flooding out everyone else has to burn whatever everyone else was willing to pay in each block everyone else is displaced from-- they run out of money.  But my statement on relay policy doesn't have much to do with volume.  A small consistent _small_ stream of transactions that aren't getting relayed but get mined anyways brings the downsides of having a mining inconsistent relay policy, there doesn't need to be a flood. And no flood, no self limiting behavior in any case.

I also think your argument misses the mark in that there isn't a credible argument that there is/will-be any traffic floods that the proposed-for-removal criteria will *prevent*.  Anyone who wants to stuff data into outputs can already stuff an unlimited amount, there are parties right now who are currently doing so.  Moreover, there is no credible way to stop them from doing so (because you can't distinguish arbitrary data from addresses, essentially).   However, if they use OP_RETURN instead it will prevent the data from going into the UTXO set.  Maybe they will maybe they won't.  But counting this proposal with concerns about 'spam' doesn't get us anywhere because removing the restriction doesn't change the current situation with respect to 'spam' however you define it.

It doesn't really matter how dire spam is when discussing a proposal that doesn't meaningfully *change* the situation around it, except perhaps in giving a lever to convert some more harmful traffic into less harmful traffic.  If it did then sure the harms of the spam would be a relevant consideration.

> People are pre-emptively making accomodation for a startup with a whitepaper

I can't speak for others but I didn't follow any links related to citrea or any other startup in the thread, I don't think it's relevant.  I have been complaining about standardizes rules screwing up block reconstruction and direct to miner relationships to bypass relay rules for several years.  My impression is that random startup whatever carries precisely zero weight in minds of the vast majority of the commenters in favor of eliminating the restriction.