Adam Back @adam3us 09-05-2025 Bitcoin is owned by humanity, the protocol developers are stewards, and need consensus from users to change it materially. bitcoin is about money, spam has no place in the timechain. what defaults the bitcoin core project puts in the reference client matter in this. in may there were 88mil JPEGs in the chain, now 4 months later, there are 105mil JPEGS, a 20% increase. in may 7000btc fees had been paid, at $100k btc that's $700m or an average of $8 per JPEG. they are primarily in taproot inscriptions. (@BitMEXResearch data) protocol rules are enforced by economic nodes, miners are just service providers; miners cannot change protocol rules. (everyone learned that counter-intuitive fact during the block-size wars). proof of work, hashrate and bitcoin price come from the real world. there are signals the block-size war was won by the market, users set the price in the market. (the protocol can measure consensus valid hashrate which reacts to price. users said NO via the economic force of the market. miners followed, as they are just service providers) to prevail, we have to make economic sense (or we work against our own objectives), and laser focus on outcome: where is the spam coming from? the JPEG industry JPEG sellers & buyers, VCs funding it and miners collecting $250m/year (very rough estimate) from the fees. that's about 1.5% of the fee market. note fees are not simple: blocks are not always full, the spam displaced other transaction fees, lets pick a crude estimate 1% of excess fees from spam vs transactions. if fees are persistently higher miners invest in buying more ASICs, and push the hashrate and input costs up, so the incremental net revenue would be less say 0.5%. if a given miner makes 20% profit, then maybe the spam industry is 0.1% of their profit once the hashrate settles higher. not really something they should focus on, as it also is bad for bitcoin - prices new users out of owning a UTXO, displaces economic activity that is part of bitcoin's value proposition. yes JPEG spam is economic activity but it's extremely wasteful, they can store JPEGs in other places which are optimized for that like imgur, ipfs etc. so you would think that miners and pools actually would not want to take too much negative PR (public miners anyway where that can impact their share price). for a 0.1% bump in profit, you could easily lose that to soft-factors - miners switching pools, hurting btc price, hurting bitcoin use cases, adoption etc. so it looks like it should not take too much of a nudge to add friction and get the miners to do less of it. some explaining, some outreach to miners to switch to pools that don't mine JPEGs. and maybe some actual economic lobbying by fee paying users, to deprive pools processing spam of transaction fees. so far it seems hard to do without creating centralization risks of it's own, but as a sketch wallet sends minimum network fee and rest of dynamic fees to 1 of n multisig of pool addresses that reject JPEGs. that could be enough to make pools not filtering JPEGs even short-term unprofitable vs filtering. the centralizing issues are: solo miners and small pools maybe not in the list, but NB there aren't many pools. and sv2 and datum can be larger without chosing blocks. i guess that could be used to bypass the pool preference, or pools in sv2/datum are "trust the pool" model, the pool could reject pool shares with JPEGs (or anything else they wanted to block), which cuts both ways.
