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63 sats \ 18 replies \ @Scoresby 16 Jan \ parent \ on: Opinion: Spam can't cause high fees - Thriller post bitcoin
Right, I agree. What I'm trying to get at is that if it really is spam, they will run out of money with or without the segwit discount.
If the segwit discount was of much relevance, the people who are doing stamps would run out of money because they aren't taking advantage of it and we wouldn't see much more of those.
Maybe that will happen, and if it does, great! Then we don't have to change anything to prevent that problem. If it doesn't go away, then it means they have a sustainable source of revenue and are not spam but a viable economic use of bitcoin.
We can still have a conversation about whether we want such uses, but that is fundamentally a censorship conversation and not a filtration one.
You need a concrete definition for spam.
"[Bitcoin] verifies and secures endogenous data. Your use of a blockchain to store exogenous data shows you don’t understand the oracle problem."
Exogenous data (spam) has a price advantage to endogenous data, so of course it isn't being priced out. Let me put it to you this way: every 3 sat/vbyte increase in next block confirmation for a real transaction is a 1 sat/vbyte increase for a spam transaction. Couple that with the fact that the data of the spam tx can be sold and you've got yourself a spamchain flywheel.
Would love to see comparison of the number of stamps (not mentioned in the article) to the number of inscriptions. My guess is there are more inscriptions.
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If inscriptions were priced out by being 4× more expensive, why did the feerates go up ~500×?
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Re-read that, friend.
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Bitcoin fees respond to demand.
So you are also saying that the economic value to create an inscription is higher than the economic value of using bitcoin as money.
I think this is probably not true in any kind of long run and mostly inscriptions will dwindle in the coming months. If they don't, it means they've found a thing that people want to use bitcoin for.
Maybe bitcoin needs to change then, but again, my point is that calling the situation spam is much akin to calling an enemy a terrorist. It implies that there can be absolutely no merit in the use case without actually making an argument about it.
I'm not sure I agree with the definition of spam as exogenous data.
If a person encodes some arbitrary data as a signature, it seems like that is clearly exogenous data.
But what if someone uses bitcoin script in a novel way, kinda like BitVM? Is the script exogenous data?
I think the only definition of spam that doesn't bring in subjective value judgments is what I said in the article: transactions that aren't willing to pay the fees.
As to whether there are more or less inscriptions/stamps, I still don't think it's relevant. If bitcoin block space is more valuable to idiots who want to put cat videos there than it is to people who want to use the hardest, most freedom-preserving, censorship resistant money ever invented, we aren't doing a very good job.