As Bitcoin blocks get closer to full capacity, some members of the community are claiming many of the transactions on the network are nothing more than spam.
Defining a spam transaction on the Bitcoin network is somewhat difficult. In fact, Mastering Bitcoin author Andreas Antonopoulos believes it’s impossible for such transactions to exist.
According to Antonopoulos, the fact that someone is willing to pay the fee associated with a particular transaction means that the transaction is not spam by default. During a meetup at Paralelni Polis in Prague, Czech Republic, Antonopoulos explained his position on spam transactions on the Bitcoin network.
A Top-Down Approach to Spam
Antonopoulos noted there are two approaches that can be taken: “One is a paternalistic, top-down approach that says, ‘This is what is allowed. This is what is not allowed, and by making a list, we will prevent the network from filling to capacity.’” In Antonopoulos’ view, this sort of approach would break net neutrality , which he believes applies to Bitcoin; but the reality is that Bitcoin does not work on net neutrality as a requirement. For example, the Eligius mining pool applies a penalty or simply will not mine some transactions it considers to be spam.
Antonopoulos also explained how picking out spam with a top-down approach would cause Bitcoin to miss out on potential new applications of the blockchain. He noted: “If we start making decisions about what is spam and what is not, we are now choosing the future of Bitcoin and constraining it according to a set of applications that only we can imagine. And the brilliant person who creates the application we can’t imagine ‒ that maybe looked like spam to us ‒ doesn’t get carried across the network because we made the top-down decision to say that transaction is illegitimate.” […]
