Oddbean

It's not an opinion, I'm pointing out your misunderstanding of how nodes work and you should study up on it to avoid sounding like an idiot moving forward. Mempool policy cannot do censorship. Period. (Why? Because proof of work). Mempool policy refers to how a node chooses to validate, store in memory, and pass-on/relay a tx before it is included in a block. The policy is in place for nodes to play nice with one another and each node can be configured differently (i.e. nodes can have different mempool sizes and store different txs). These configurations can be set in -bitcoin.conf Nodes choose to adjust their mempool policy to validate transactions they care about over the ones that are harmful to it (ie. Non-standard Tx/Spam). It is not nice to forward-on junk on the P2P layer which is why OP_Return exists and why there are datacarrier rules 👀. It just so happens some of the more-recent junk (arbitrary days in tapscript) doesn't fall under datacarrier rules because there are no checks for arbitrary data in witness data. Tl Dr; mempool policy isn't censorship, filters don't cause forks, miners who want to include junk are the ones that want to fork 😤

Wow, what a crazy madness 😂😂😂 Call valid transactions “spam” and not propagating these to other nodes is a form of censorship. Being crazy like @OCEAN and removing them from the mining template is definitely a form of censorship. On top of that providing a template with the “spam” and then charging a fee for it while others don’t have a free is a form of steering people to behave in a way some people think is “the proper way”

My node doesn’t pass on transactions with embedded data. Call it censorship all you want, I’m just not passing on every bit of trash that comes my way and make it someone else’s problem. My node, my rules. Run your own node anyway you want to.

I don’t care what your node does or doesn’t, but call this narrative by its name. You are suppressing data because you don’t like it, which is by definition a form of censorship. This whole discussion is in my eyes stupid because it doesn’t matter what your node has in the mempool or not. And filtering the mempool has absolutely no effect. So have fun

Oh get off it. This isn’t the weak speaking truth to power or a document dump about a company polluting a lake. It is morons using a loophole in the code to embed jpegs in the hopes that they will somehow be worth more in the future than the Satoshi they are on. This isn’t a censorship free speech issue. The node isn’t filtering out only voices and opinions that it doesn’t like, only transactions that are going around the rules. Many have already said that they are openly attacking bitcoin with it and hoping to clog up the mem pool with shit.

the discussion isn't stupid, you are. There's no data that is being suppressed by any authority -- no censorship is happening. Run your node or not, just don't equate mempool policy with censorship anymore. mempool filters can absolutely have an effect on spam. Consider a situation of multiple chaintips (happens like every week), on a network of nodes filtering spam, blocks w/ spam would propagate marginally slower than blocks without spam because the spam transactions wouldn't be sitting in every nodes mempool already-validated beforehand. Miners should be wary of the mempool policies that nodes choose less they wish to produce blocks that could be orphaned, every second counts. (important to remember that nodes can validate both chaintips all the same, filters don't cause forks) It doesn't even require a majority or even that many nodes to have an effect, every node that chooses to discourage spam txs incrementally increases the possibility that a spam-block (block containing txs not relayed by the p2p network) to be orphaned. Said another way, mempool filters eventually lead spam-aligned miners to push their luck and pursue forks.

You're absolutely wrong. There's no censorship in mempool policy. There are plenty of consensus valid transactions that your node doesn't relay out-of-the-box* that a miner can include in a block. * It's important to point out that "Consensus valid transactions" aren't always in the best interest of individual nodes and having a mechanism to discourage such behavior is necessary. My favorite example is the 2013 White Paper TX which uses bare multi-sig outputs to encode the Bitcoin white paper. (Coincidentally OCEAN's predecessor Eligius mined it). https://mempool.space/tx/54e48e5f5c656b26c3bca14a8c95aa583d07ebe84dde3b7dd4a78f4e4186e713 Go try and relay that same tx on the P2P network today 🤷 you can't, it won't go anywhere because of size and datacarrier rules in modern versions of Bitcoin so most nodes won't forward it on, but you can still go out of band (i.e. like MARAs tx accelerator) -- where's the censorship ? See? Go back to school 😤