Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Merits 2 from 1 user
Re: Satoshi Nakamoto may have intentionally slowed Bitcoin adoption early on.
by
d5000
on 29/05/2025, 19:14:44 UTC
⭐ Merited by vapourminer (2)
So like, sure spam bad or whatever.  But so what, who cares?  There is a *reason* the bloat is bad-- and that's because users autonomy to reject rule changes depends on the ability to run a full node being a practical choice.

It's also why I'm not particularly concerned about spam in bitcoin-- because it can't have that kind of outcome (unless, of course, the spam promoters convince bitcoiners to eliminate the resource constraints).
Yes, in reality my post went into a similar direction (not "spammers are bad" but "block size limits are effective against spam"), only perhaps it wasn't worded clearly enough ...

If a resource is basically free, like the block space in Bitcoin SV, then if there's an opportunity to exploit that to make money from it, it will probably happen. This BSV weather app for example charges a small fee to those wanting to add a weather station. It's hilarious that the model seems to be profitable even if such a "channel" only costs 3 AUD and "includes" about 200,000 transactions (a bit more than 8,000 days with hourly broadcasts).

And of course this has consequences for the power structure, weakening the power of normal users with full nodes.

Of course some could now say "Spam happened on Bitcoin! See Ordinals and Runes!". Yes, they may have a point, but this spam is expensive for the creators due to the block size limits, i.e. it will only happen if there is really a big financial incentive for it. And unfortunately in this case we can't really do anything as long as it's possible to spam using fake public keys / scripts (to discuss this in depth there are better threads though). But the good thing is that the spam will always be limited to the extent where consumer hardware is still able to handle it and thus full nodes are still possible for potentially dozens to hundreds of million users in the world.

How many people are able to afford a BSV node instead? For rich people this isn't a problem but the possibility to run a Bitcoin full node reaches deep into the middle classes and if several users share a node, even into the lower classes of society.