Purpose as defined by who? Satoshi seemed to like the idea of storing all kinds of data.
Because of that, I wanted to design it to support every possible transaction type I could think of.
I don't know how to quote correctly from locked post, but here is the link.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611You do your own side a disservice though a poor argument. Satoshi spoke out specifically and fairly vigorously against stuffing data in transactions, on a number of occasions (e.g.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28696#msg28696 ) and quite ruthlessly limited transactions for relay or mining down to a very few kinds of precisely specified templates. In private email, he had to be talked into the idea of allowing even just an arbitrary 32 bytes as a hash to discourage shoving data in wholesale for commitment. If you're looking for endorsement for shoving external data into Bitcoin you won't find it in Satoshi. Saying Bitcoin should support any kind of transaction doesn't imply he meant pretextual transactions that just serve to shove data in, particularly since he spoke out against doing so.
But it's also a poor argument because anything Satoshi said would have been a decade ago and said without the practical experience of actually seeing Bitcoin used, and that he was saying it as part of a discussion and not some contract or constitution. We have forum posts from him, not stone tablets. Many people here have an understanding of Bitcoin today that would have been impossible for Satoshi to have. At most we can say his comments shed light on how people thought about this kind of activity early on, and you can see that it was at best controversial and never 'officially endorsed'.
It was more to question how the other user could so boldly proclaim what Bitcoin's purpose was. When it is impossible to be clear about this position. I didn't know about some of those other satoshi posts, but I cherry picked just one precisely because both positions can be defended and bitcoin's purpose is pretty vague and can't be defined by a individual parties for everyone else.
I'm not strongly on any particular side, but this definitely could have been approached quite differently and possibly a better solution could have been provided for the problem that it is intended to solve. The worst part for me is the removal of the config options, why should I as a user not be allowed to decide the limits for myself?
Besides, I don't think this removal will have the intended consequence that the authors believe it will. If I understood correctly, it is supposed to encourage them to use less harmful methods. However, if the other method has a discount on fees then I don't see why they would change anything in the way that they store data? Did I miss something?
Right!. It's not like its defined or anything.
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Satoshi Nakamoto
satoshin@gmx.comwww.bitcoin.orgAbstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main
benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending.
We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.
The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of
hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing
the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of
events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. As
long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to
attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers. The
network itself requires minimal structure. Messages are broadcast on a best effort
basis, and nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the longest
proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone