Here, your
argument runs completely opposite of the claim that "the miner
fees are the filter". You appear to be claiming that dping nothing
about spam, making it easier for spammers and being more
accommodating to them is the way to go. Unfortunately, that's the
approach we have taken for the last 3 years while spam only gets
worst.
On what basis do you claim that spam has 'only gotten worse'-- the existing setup is incredibly effective against spam, essentially blocking all forms of pointless data storage that aren't made more valuable by the limitations. What does go in, goes in at extremely high costs to the spammer.
Of what concern is this residual traffic to Bitcoin use? It doesn't increase node resource use as that's governed by the capacity limits, in fact because it's generally much easier to process it speeds up block processing. It's substantially a non-issue.
The proposed
gain is some negligible one time reduction in utxo disk space.
Between 40
and 50% of the UTXO set is comprised of spam UTXOs with dust
amounts. Even more conservative estimates put it at 30%. The Cat
would remove those spam NMUs from the UTXO set. I hardly view that
as negligible.
It is negligible-- it's just a one time constant fraction. It will not increase the set of devices that can run a node in any meaningful sense. What improvement it provides could also be alternatively achieved through local only technical changes like changing how the data is stored.
Furthermore, The Cat would send a strong signal to
spammers: you are not welcomed on Bitcoin, we are rugging you, and
we might do it again. This likely would reduce future spam
activity on Bitcoin, further protecting the UTXO set.
As I've pointed out, it won't stop their NFTs. They'll simply make a new rule in their NFT indexers that says that deleted NFT X will be owned by the first output created with the same (or cryptographically related) scriptPubKey. Doing so will give them free press-- probably the most valuable thing that could possibly be done for them--, cause them to make additional txn, and send a message that their NFTs are _unblockable_ because they are.
Moreover, it would send a message to the whole world that your Bitcoin aren't safe. That an angry mob might confiscate them from you if you became unpopular enough in their eyes. That would be entirely at odds with the ethos of Bitcoin-- Bitcoin is money for enemies. Your ownership of Bitcoin shouldn't be up to popular vote-- if you're okay with money that operates at popular whim then you're better off with the fiat of a major democracy. Because of this this proposal just won't fly and this discussion is a waste of time and energy that could be otherwise used to actually improve Bitcoin.
Were such a
proposal seriously advanced it would likely cause a new flood of
transactions both to move to evade it directly and as a result
of NFT indexer changes to just "wormhole" the tokens to new
outputs after the fact (and a new marketing opportunity for the
NFT gifters).
As Claire
already explained, with millions of cases of spam, this would
cause a massive block space demand increase and a large fee spike
which would prove very costly to spammers. And retaking a new
snapshot would force them to do it again. Someone needs to feed
the poor miners!
Existing data embedding traffic is already definitionally the tiny residual interest which is not particularly price sensitive or they wouldn't be on Bitcoin at all. In the case of NFTs the limitation makes their tokens more valuable by creating a limited supply or an otherwise endless asset class. "Claire"'s explanation is just false as it assumes they'd reembed the NFTs, but there is no reason for them to do that as the existence of an NFT isn't governed by Bitcoin's consensus rules but rather by the behavior of NFT indexers-- and they don't pay any attention to the UTXO set at all but rather watch the blockchain and maintain their own indexes. So post this proposal when you want to transfer your 'deleted' NFT you simply make one transaction paying your old scriptPubKey (or some related one, as per the revised NFT spec) and then pay that output to the new owner-- the extra cost to the NFT jockie is one extra in/out pair at their first transfer post 'deletion'. And god knows they may find a way to even reduce that further, my example is just the extremely obvious response and not whatever improved idea someone would come up with after actually thinking about it.
NFTs are just an
imaginary parallel world that don't depend on the network to
validate their activity, so they don't really care about the
network's rules, and as such the network's rules have pretty
limited effect.
So here, you are saying The Cat would be noneffective at reducing
spam.
And moreover the proposal
would intentionally and knowingly confiscate millions of dollars
in funds.
You just finished telling us "the network rules have a pretty
limited effect" and now you tell us The Cat would result in the
confiscation of millions of dollars in funds. That sounds
conflicting and contradictory to me.
The consensus rules govern the operations of *bitcoins* not NFTs. This proposal would delete their Bitcoins, based on the published figures (and the percentages in your post) it would be confiscate on the order of 358 Bitcoin.
It wouldn't, however, confiscate their NFTs.
Furthermore, dropping the spam
UTXOs from the UTXO set would not delete any spam, they still would
have ownership of it, they just wouldn't be able to sell it or
transfer it to anyone else on L1.
It would steal their Bitcoin's but leave them able to continue transferring their NFTs.
Furthermore,
those are all dust UTXOs. An unbelievably high amount of them
would have to be on chain to amount to "millions of dollars in
funds".
Yes, but that is exactly what this proposal is claiming-- They're almost all >=546 satoshi in value. There are 164 million txouts, you and the proposals are saying 40-50% would be confiscated. Do the math.
If they lose "millions of dollars in funds" as you claim, thus
making their business must less profitable, I would call that a
success, not ineffective at all.
I hope you step back and think carefully about what you're saying here.
I, and many others, consider the aggressive anti-'spammers' to be a threat to Bitcoin in a way that some NFT nuisance traffic could never be due to the quick recourse to confiscation and censorship and the constant baiting of government interference by proposing technical means for transaction censorship and confiscation. Should I propose to confiscate the funds of Opsosoft and Ocean Mining (and you personally, of course) in order to discourage the continued efforts to screw with Bitcoin's central properties?
It would be much more effective against you than it is against the NFT jockeys because at least the NFT degens would get to keep and continue to trade their NFTs.
Fortunately for you (and everyone!) that just isn't how Bitcoin works: confiscation proposals are non-starters. But it says something significant about the level of derangement suffered by its advocates that someone had to tell someone who isn't a total Bitcoin newbie that it was a non-starter.
You, presumably, do not consider yourself and
your comrades a threat to Bitcoin, but nor do the NFT degens. Such
determinations are highly subjective, and Bitcoins design and purpose
was to minimize human judgement over how people get to store and use
their own coins. An inherent consequence of that is that there will always be users and users we strongly disapprove of personally. Having seen the alternative in dollars and paypal and whatnot this is an acceptable cost.
We should all still feel empowered to fight that which we think harms the world-- but the place for that kind of battle is outside of the Bitcoin protocol. Bitcoin is valuable because it strives to eliminate third party judgement from the ownership and usage by consenting parties.