It's not, and nobody seems to think this through. Since you can't (usually, unless through analysis or public announcement of intention) know the source or purpose of a transaction, spam in bitcoin space can only be defined as a percentage function of a transactions fee value relative to other transactions or its probability of block inclusion. So like, if a transaction is in the bottom 10% of currently average fees paid, maybe you consider that spam... or maybe you consider transactions in the bottom 50% spam. All relative to the viewer. Or maybe we are all hodlers, and none of us are actually using bitcoin for anything useful, and all of it is spam. But then you have to ask, what is useful? What if a company that is literally doing nothing but spamming the network with 'useless' transactions but is paying good fees for it and pushing useful transactions away? Is that spam?

Spam is a word that is only useful for the brain to justify something. It's not a number and bitcoin only cares about the math.

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Blind Self Auctioning System. Maybe that's more accurate now.  

I'm not a gambler either. Tried trading, wasn't for me. It's too much exhausting work to try and stay on top of things (at least as much as is needed to be competitive in trading), so I am just an accumulator as well. My time is better spent earning money elsewhere so I can use that money to keep buying more coins. I buy them assuming I'm throwing the money away, so if they are worth $0 or $300,000 in a year I won't sell. My average buy in price is something like $200 for my 210 coins, so I feel lucky. Although my buddy Jake told me about bitcoin when they were worth like 20 bucks and I dismissed him... darn!

People are just realizing that mostly everyone working on bitcoin code right now are mentally handicapped.

I don't think the traditional definition of spam really works for bitcoin. Since we don't (generally) have enough information to know why any given transaction was sent, it could just as easily be ignorance or malice that it was with too low a fee. "Spam" generally has an ulterior motive, such as advertising, or installing a trojan on your machine, to get your bank account info, nigerian prince wants to give you money, etc, which is much easier to determine in email or chats just based on the content. But with bitcoin there isn't any content to analyse other than the transaction itself.

In an engineer mindset, it makes more sense to just avoid words like spam altogether, and just label every transaction with a % probability of being included in the next block. Then you just have a useful number, instead of terms which mean different things to different people. Label transactions with numbers, not words, as the blockchain does not care what words we use. Then you can decide yourself if you think everything below a 3% chance is spam, or maybe you think everything below 90% is spam, doesn't matter as long as we have a probability baseline.

Who is this madman people keep talking about?

I didn't know about ledgerjournal, thanks.

That's what I was thinking, it seems 1mb was just a nice round number for him to pick at the time.

This is why I can't understand where all this contention is coming from. It seems out of left field for me. I run a software company, which we will be exiting this year (assuming all goes well), and I just can't fathom the stubbornness on the function of this single value that seems totally arbitrary. I would be running analysis, bug testing, etc, every possible iteration of that number. Perhaps even writing a simulation to see how the change of the number would effect network performance, hash rates, probably miner dropout, etc. I've been considering what I will do with my time when I exit my current company, and it seems likely that it will be bitcoin related. And I'm starting to wonder if I should just contribute code directly or work on the analysis side of things. I'd love to submit code but it seems the stubbornness is a harder problem to solve than the technical hurdles

I don't necessarily disagree with you that there will be people that want more than 21m coins. However, 'trolling' does not move the economic majority into submission. They can say it all they want. It's not like anyone in particular will own bitcoins direction if theres a fork, not anymore than anyone owns its direction now. If the economic majority wants more coins it'll happen, regardless of whether it is 'big blockers', 'small blockers' or anyone else. But my guess is that would not happen, as I can't think of any situation where it would be logical to devalue your own coins by making more, when they are already practically infinitely divisible. People would rather divide their own and sell than create more.

I am still curious why did everyone get stuck on this 1mb value? I mean, like I said earlier, why not 1.2mb, or why not just 1 transaction per block if limiting it is the best? I'm just so confused why the current transactions per second limit became the magic number.

That's like saying "if the gays can get married, whats to stop people from marrying their pets!". How can you seriously compare raising the block size limit to a slippery slope of raising the total supply? Nobody wants to devalue their coins by creating more, but they DO want to increase the value in them by making them more accessible and liquid.

Has any analysis been done to determine why 1mb is the best? why not 1.2mb, or half a meg. If limited supply is the answer, let's just make it one transaction every block for ultimate success! Why is less than 5 transactions a second the ideal number? Why would raising that to 10, 20, 30, 40, 100, or 1000 ruin bitcoins security?

More on that... how many hashes are done per transaction, and how many miners do we need for the network to be secure? Does anyone know. I mean, it seems like we are doing quite a lot of calculations per transaction, which means mathematically the transactions are plenty secure, even with an order of magnitude more of them.

Lots of opium though.

This is actually something a lot of people don't realize. For a coin to function, it has to be open source. And if a coin has something cool and new in it that is genuinely starting to make bitcoin irrelevant, then the open source nature of the coin means we can copy that feature into bitcoin. Of course the move could cause a hard fork and be contentious in many ways, but in a dire situation where a coin is putting bitcoin out of business, the network will react.

I don't particularly like that bitcoin is reactionary not proactive, but I have no doubt that bitcoin will always be the top coin. Its better to maintain stability with less features and add them  later as other coins experiment to find the new stuff.

EDIT: For that matter, is anything blockstream doing with lightning and so on going to be open source? If so, how do they tell their investors they will get a 10x return when anyone could copy it to fork their own version or implement it right into bitcoin? If not, who is going to trust them to handle their money?

Scaling bitcoin isn't about either of those things, it's about getting more transactions per block. Ideally that is done efficiently, but scaling can mean one or the other or both. The end result is more transactions. If the goal wasn't more transactions then segwit would lower the block size to match its efficiency to keep the amount of transactions the same.