The great Bitcoin Core / Filters Debate. I previously said I wasn’t going to comment because it’s not going to kill Bitcoin one way or another. I believe this is still true. However there are so many one sided takes on this app that I thought it’s worth at least offering my thoughts. Warning: you must be able to hold multiple conflicting ideas in your head at the same time to process this. I think Bitcoin is for money, not for monkey jpgs, but there cannot be a moral argument here, it has to be economic. Spam is idiotic and degenerate, but I will defend to the death your right to spam (i.e not changing consensus rules) if you want to pay the market price for doing so. I’ll also make fun of you and warn people not to buy electronic pictures of pixelated cats and rocks. That’s my right. There is no consensus-level accepted definition of spam; to do so would imply a specific type of censorship. Having some amount of resistance to relaying spam may impact the marginal spammer. In other words, “filters work,” for the marginal definition of work, because spammers have to get creative. There is no way to prevent jpgs on bitcoin, no matter what you do, because there is no consensus-level spam filter in place, and because any mempool-level filtering is trivial to route around by economically motivated actors. In other words, “filters don't work,” for the pedantic definition of work, because there's always a way around them. Bitcoin software changes that don't impact true Bitcoin consensus have no real impact on the network. The only thing that matters is whether the blocks that miners produce are accepted by economic users. The changing of the certain filtering defaults in Bitcoin Core is not going to kill Bitcoin; it only affects mempool policy for nodes that a) download this software and b) accept the defaults. It does not change anything for users or miners, and anyone who disagrees is welcome to run an older version, their own version, etc. Most economic nodes (e.g. exchanges, etc) are sophisticated users of the software and can set up whatever filters they like, if they think they matter. Bitcoin is decentralized, and that's the point. Bitcoin core pushing through a change that upsets a lot of people is counterproductive to maintaining cohesion around Bitcoin core as a Schelling point, even if the change itself does nothing significant. Bitcoin core as a project, is not as decentralized as Bitcoin as an ecosystem. They may make choices you may not agree with. That's the point, don't run the software if you don't like it. Unlike Ethereum, which forces hard forks on everyone, you don't have to run this software. Running some alternative software like Knots isn't a form of protest in any way. It's not one node one vote. It’s also easy to spin up nodes. It’s called a Sybil attack and is planned for in Bitcoin precisely because this is easy. Bitcoin is not a democracy. It doesn't affect a spammer who wants to transmit a transaction that is valid by consensus rules to a miner who is willing to mine it. If you're a miner and you want to run software that doesn't take spam, that is absolutely your right. However we must recognize that we cannot rely on altruism to run this network, and if spam pays more, miners will mine it. Spam will probably not be able to pay more in the long run because monkey jpgs tend to go to zero in Bitcoin terms over time. Economic transfers of Bitcoin as value, opening of lightning channels, etc are the highest economic density type of transactions. Monkey JPG trading always ends in the same way. Just wait.