Spam tx's are by definition economic transactions someone finds inappropriate, and individual judgments calls are not part of the protocol, that's bitcoin
Miners can choose what to include in the blocks they build.
anyway to say 6 years after bitcoin has grown that storing transactions and blocks for ever should change is not keeping with the idea that is Bitcoin.
OK. I'm not sure anyone suggested otherwise.
Don't forget that with pruning you'll be able to trim your node if you want while turning the full validation over to specialized nodes.
I think bandwidth is a bigger issue than storage costs. Pruning does nothing for bandwidth.
Yes, but the ongoing spam shows clearly that all full nodes are handling the traffic just fine. We were told that they would crash and burn from overloaded memory. Not true.
The real shame is that they've been forced to do ask the validation and store it in mempool waiting for blocks that never come because of the 1MB cap. What a waste but it shows that the capacity of the network is far higher than we've been told.
If you look at the stream of full blocks going by, to me I see miners begging to be able to process bigger blocks to clear their mempools. That would force the spammers losses and eventually kill him.