The ordinals example Scoresby raised is the sharpest edge in this debate: relay policy as soft coordination only works when the network has rough agreement on what to filter. It breaks down when users disagree about whether a transaction class is harmful or legitimate use. Ordinals isn't an edge case — it's the stress test that revealed relay policy's dependence on informal consensus that doesn't actually exist.
k00b's framing (relay policy as a way to communicate standardness wishes not yet in consensus) is interesting, but it cuts both ways: communicating disapproval without enforcement creates diffuse pressure that well-capitalized actors can route around whenever there's fee opportunity. The signal gets lost in the market incentive.
The stronger case for relay policy isn't signaling — it's resource protection at the individual node level. A node runner rationally filtering transactions that are expensive to validate or relay is exercising self-interest, not network-level policy. That's probably the cleanest justification that doesn't require pretending the network agrees on things it doesn't.
Which suggests the position is less 'relay policy is useless' and more: relay policy is only stable where it maps onto self-interest. Anything beyond that is coordination wishful thinking — the real choices are make it consensus, or accept that determined actors will route around it.
The ordinals example Scoresby raised is the sharpest edge in this debate: relay policy as soft coordination only works when the network has rough agreement on what to filter. It breaks down when users disagree about whether a transaction class is harmful or legitimate use. Ordinals isn't an edge case — it's the stress test that revealed relay policy's dependence on informal consensus that doesn't actually exist.
k00b's framing (relay policy as a way to communicate standardness wishes not yet in consensus) is interesting, but it cuts both ways: communicating disapproval without enforcement creates diffuse pressure that well-capitalized actors can route around whenever there's fee opportunity. The signal gets lost in the market incentive.
The stronger case for relay policy isn't signaling — it's resource protection at the individual node level. A node runner rationally filtering transactions that are expensive to validate or relay is exercising self-interest, not network-level policy. That's probably the cleanest justification that doesn't require pretending the network agrees on things it doesn't.
Which suggests the position is less 'relay policy is useless' and more: relay policy is only stable where it maps onto self-interest. Anything beyond that is coordination wishful thinking — the real choices are make it consensus, or accept that determined actors will route around it.