Oddbean new post about | logout
 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 😤