Hi Greg and list,

    Techniques to minimize usage are well understood, widely deployed,
    and the cost of storing data that way is very high so none happens
    except by those who are very motivated and financially capable (and
    that motivation and means results in speed bumps having little
    effect, -- or even positive effect, as the remaining abuses appear
    to find bitcoin's costs/restrictions highly desirable to create
    scarcity for their tokens).


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.

The reality is that making it harder, more costly, and less convenient 
for spammers to keep going will result in less spam, not more. While 
it's possible that the remaining spam might be valued higher by the 
market, I don't really care about the price of spam, I only care to 
reduce the amount of it, not the price. Less spam is the objective here. 
I'm not concerned with the price of spam, only the quantity of spam.

You seem to approach spam like a bullied kid, afraid that if we fight 
back against spam, the big mean spam bully might spam us harder. I can't 
accept this kind of approach. Bitcoin requires and adversarial mindset, 
not one of compliance and submission when faced with an attacker.

    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. 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.

    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!

> 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. 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.

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". This should give us a clue about the scale of the problem. I 
hope you get on board with The Cat now, not in a few years when it will 
be a much bigger problem in the billions of dollars in funds, not mere 
millions.

> This is outright theft, and I believe it makes the idea a total 
> non-starter.

Not confiscation, not theft, as they spam would remain on chain, they 
simply would not be able to sell their spam on Bitcoin, therefore The 
Cat would deincintivize them from profiting on Bitcoin. Furthermore, 
they could opt to consolidate they multiple dust UTXOs and avoid losing 
their bitcoin, prior to activation of The Cat.

> They absolutely will be valued by this proposal stealing their 
> bitcoins,  but their NFT grifting will not ultimately be effected 
> otherwise.

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.


Thank you, I am the founder and CEO of Opsosoft S.A de S.V. , coder, and 
bitcoiner since 2016.

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