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.