Who was claiming that “Bitcoin Core v30 was going to result in a massive node crash / network outage”? It seems like you offered a bet that nobody would reasonably take and now claim it means people were wrong about something vaguely related. Instead, can you please explain the rationale for the Core v30 changes to OP_RETURN and why they are beneficial for Bitcoin as money? I still have not heard a single rational explanation for that change.

For those reading the thread (because you obviously already understand this - and that’s why you keep pushing it), 1 BTC for you is far less of a commitment than 1 BTC for many other people. That’s if the bet makes sense. I’m not sure this bet even makes sense. I think the issue people are raising is that spam is bad and that we should discourage spam. Your response should also be that spam is bad - but you refuse to say that, so people reasonably conclude that you have a financial interest in spamming the Bitcoin blockchain. We can define spam as non-monetary use of Bitcoin - then legitimately argue about how to identify that via dust outputs etc… We should also agree that fighting spam is not really hard (it’s tedious, but not difficult from a technical perspective. Knots has some very simple spam filters Core could adopt - that would need to be periodically updated as spammers change tactics).

We should not be arguing about this. Spammers say you can’t define “spam”. It’s not that difficult- if you need to attach large amounts of arbitrary data, or hide it in massive amounts of unspendable “dust” outputs, then it’s not a financial transaction, and belongs somewhere else that’s not on the bitcoin blockchain. I agree there’s a bit of a slippery slope here - like how side-chains anchor on the base layer blockchain, and we should periodically reconsider how much arbitrary data is needed for financially adjacent use-cases.

Weird - this seems like we agree on spam being bad, but in the other thread you are advocating “permissionlessness” (I.e. spamming). What am I misunderstanding?

If miners including it is sufficient for it being ok, that’s ignoring the centralization impact of the externalities they impose on nodes. If miners choose to include even more toxic arbitrary data due to the lax Core v30 filters, or massive amounts of non-financial data (even if it’s not toxic) then fewer people will run nodes, and Bitcoin gets more centralized, which increases the risks of (future) censorship.

I think this libertarian view of “permissionless” (without any boundaries whatsoever) is a risk for bitcoin. Yes, the protocol allows it, but that doesn’t make it good for bitcoin, and until Core v30, default node policy discouraged it. We should agree that bitcoin needs to focus on being money and leave the other use-cases to other protocols/platforms. I’m not a fan of BIP-110, but Core really dropped the ball on spam and that’s not good for bitcoin. Are you running a Core v30 node?

Please do the work to understand this issue. If you believe that bitcoin is money, then large amounts of arbitrary data storage is not acceptable because it weakens bitcoin as money (because nodes incur the cost of storing the data while miners extract the value of mining it). Saying that all financial transactions are ok, and that attaching large amounts of non-financial data is not ok, is not *censorship* - it’s common sense. Try depositing a check at your bank and attaching a poster size photo and requiring your bank to archive that photo and make it available to everyone forever - no matter what the photo is of. That’s not a monetary use-case, and has no place in the bitcoin ecosystem.