Quote from: pokeybear on May 06, 2025, 11:26:52 PM

Do you think it’s possible to modify the Bitcoin Core and other software to make certain transactions go through a specific consensus of node operators before minors are allowed to process them?

If that worked bitcoin never would have had mining in the first place. Mining exists because it doesn't work, for the reasons highlited by Ava. Aside, the term is miner not minor-- the confusion is understanble, both are known to play with blocks.

Quote from: achow101 on Today at 02:03:41 AM

Furthermore, this wouldn't even stop data storage in Bitcoin. Sure it would make it harder, but steganography is an entire field dedicated to hiding data in things that are not meant to store such data.

In addition to the excellent points as to why these sorts of schemes don't work anyone proposing these schemes should explain why, if their scheme actually worked, wouldn't just be a way for some rogue government actor to impose a blockaid on donating to their political opponents or what not.

The whole reason preventing 'spam' in Bitcoin is hard is because Bitcoin was designed to be censorship resistant and to depend itself on censorship resistance to work, to take advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread and hard to stifle. You don't need to settle the perennial debate on if filtering data stuffing nft shitcoin nonsense constitutes censorship itself to recognize that from a technical perspective the same *means* are used, and have similar effectiveness.

If anything ordinary transactions are more vulnerable than bullshit: Bullshit doesn't care much about how it's encoded. Ground into TXIDs? Stuffed into 'fake addresses', twiddling bits of signatures? There is no end to the flexibility of bullshit encoding because the network doesn't do anything with the bullshit data. The honest user can't so easily freely change what they're doing to avoid some filter targeting them, and they may be much less well funded than a spammer. It's easy for a spammer to e.g. get a relationship with a miner because while although what they're doing may be unpopular and repugnant to many, it isn't *illegal* anywhere, it's not going to get some powerful state actor mad at you, the worst it does is outrage a largely impotent social media mob. And even the angry mob can be avoided because miners can produce blocks anonymously too (and should be more often).

Now I don't fear for Bitcoin's censorship resistance, these filtering methods ultimately don't work all that well. But their advocates argue that not working well doesn't necessarily mean doing nothing at all-- maybe pushing hard and constantly issuing updates that stamp out each use as it's discovered could at least reduce the total volume of spam. Yes, it probably could. But at what cost? You've just appointed or empowered a self appointed dictator[1] over what transactions are good or not, who will now waste lots of energy squishing stuff and you'll inevitable disagree with some of their decisions. Even if there is some kind of *vote* someone is deciding how it works or setting its default behaviors. You'll have sent a clear message to powerful actors that there exists tools to suppress transactions they don't like (or just haven't approved of) if only they apply enough pressure to node operators, developers, and/or miners. And sure while the censorship may not be complete, they may not care just like people constantly demanding 'spam' filtering are fine with it being incomplete at best.

I've grown wary of calling this traffic spam because it result in the wrong way of thinking about it. Spam is messages directed to you that you don't want, filtering it is largely effective because all the filtering need to do is keep it from showing up in front of you-- it's still 'effective' when your (ISPs) computer had to process the spam, it's still effective if someone *else* got the spam. It just has to keep you from seeing it. But this traffic in bitcoin involves a consenting sender, one or more consenting receivers, and a consenting miner who happily got paid for their facilitation. To block it effectively, it has to be blocked by pretty much everyone. Because-- short of using a block explorer or something-- you would never even see the 'spam' at all, the criteria for success is stuff like your computer not spending time processing it (or at least not storing it in the chain)... and that is an infinitely higher bar than applies for email spam.

So I think you could fairly say that if you define spam the same way we do for email Bitcoin is already has almost perfect spam filtering, that the only spam that remains is varrious kinds of 'dusting'. People seldom complain about dusting though for that there are lot of additional things that could be done, because like email spam you wouldn't have to block it everywhere for everyone for it to have an impact, and because there is an involuntary receiver that doesn't want it.

I think people too easily fall into the trap of thinking some obnoxious shitcoin stuff is "the enemy" and forgetting what Bitcoin is for in the first place. Shitcoin nft stuff isn't the enemy, the enemy is systems of money that are capriciously controlled by third parties, inflated out from under us, surveilled, seized, and wielded as a weapon against the political opponents of whomever has power over it. The embedded data stuff an annoyance, an impediment, occasionally a bit of a threat.. no doubt but it's not the enemy. If it were it would have an easy solution: set the block size to zero and head home. No more spam! When you run a node you take on varrious costs in doing so, such as processing the 99.999999% of transactions that have nothing to do with you. It's a cost of Bitcoin's existence and a well justified one. Junk traffic is just part of that. It's critical that nothing is able to flood you off the chain, junk traffic or not, aided by miners or not, but that's part of why the Bitcoin consensus rules have limits on the amount of resources the system can take up.

[1] And inevitably the person who wants this job most is the person who on no accounts should be allowed to have it... that is even clear already in Bitcoin where the most outspoken anti-spam person is basically infamous for their fringe judgemental views.