The purpose of ‘the spam’ is to get you to buy memecoins, jpegs or nfts. That’s it. Most of this activity comes out of China, probably Hong Kong.

Op_return outputs on Bitcoin have existed for 10 years… and now that memecoins on altcoins are dying there is a new scam - the same ‘memecoins’ but on Bitcoin in the form of arbitrary data.

Op_return outputs, unspendable outputs, have always been a place for arbitrary data on Bitcoin - op return was specifically created as the “least harmful” way of encoding arbitrary data for whatever purpose. Now degens have created ‘tokens’ and ‘memes’ using op_return and there is no way to keep them from gambling on… tiny injections of code based on dog memes.

Bitcoin knots, a custom bitcoin implementation, has a set ‘mempool policy’ where the bitcoin transactions don’t get propagated to the broader network if they include arbitrary data. However even op_return outputs are still valid as long as current nodes propagate them or they are sent to miners directly.

Therefore bitcoin core and most devs believe that trying to ‘limit’ the arbitrary data sizes through ‘mempool policy’ does more harm than good - it hurts the transparency of the mempool and won’t stop degens anyway. The degens will include arb data anyway… just to gamble by paying miners or spooling up their own nodes and using op_return in its current form of 10 years.

The ‘other side’ of the argument is… OK degens may degen on tokens but that doesn’t mean we should make it easy for them. It should be as difficult as possible for them to do this… even if it’s not 100% complete.

The first solution (letting degens burn themselves out) is economic - the degens eventually run out of money as memecoins are a fad. If Bitcoin can’t compete against gambling… it never had a future anyway and it doesn’t help to ‘fragment’ mempools.

The second… is technical. If somehow memecoin arb data never makes it to ‘the mempool’ to begin with then the degens will just… give up. Which personally doesn’t make any sense to me (and is the prevailing opinion among traditional core devs).

The issue still isn’t ‘100%’ resolved… and so the debate around it continues with passion on both sides.