Another banger really from Matthew Kratter.
Because 'this' does not warrant a hard fork and splitting of the network into Bitcoin Core and effectively Bitcoin Knots:
This is at the medium-priority of TWO sats/vbyte. TWO. Think about that.
Now consider the blockspace demand when 8 billion people, and 200 million companies on 7 continents want and need to use Bitcoin... even if a large percentage of that usage is custodial or ETF-driven the demand for blockspace should be HUGE. MASSIVE.
Even if ONE Lightning channel can be reused thousands of times, again and again, just ONE Lightning channel opening for ONE person requires an on-chain transaction meaning that the mempool should be teeming with transactions at high feerates.
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Behold "Citrea"...
The Shitcoin...
In fact, there are an infinite number of tokens, BRCs, runes, 'distributions', 'launches'... in an infinite number of configurations to speculate on and scam people with in order to get their Bitcoin...
The reason they fail is that they are economically incoherent and suffer massive OPPORTUNITY COST.
Is THIS transaction spam? I mean... no because it uses an op_return less than 80 bytes. But wait... it says USDC so it is! So it would be "filtered" by Bip-110! :D
Actually, it wouldn't. NOR would this one be:
Even though this transaction has clearly ZERO ECONOMIC PURPOSE. It is literally an address paying itself ~ 3800 sats, with a 300 sat fee attached, with an op_return included...
THIS op_return:
And at an effective fee-rate of 2 sats/vbyte it costs the bot that broadcasted it 12 cents. Which makes zero economic sense...
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In short, there are an infinite number of ways to speculate on schemes, distributions, bridges, and tokens...
AKA worthless nonsense
The only reason these things exist is to TAKE YOUR BITCOIN. Take your Bitcoin and give you worthless junk in return...
Spammers want only one thing... to make the least amount of effort... to convince you to give them greatest amount of Bitcoin...
Therefore the thing that stops scams is limited blockspace, fees, the opportunity cost of wasting Bitcoin and the scammer's own laziness.
Bitcoin can never be a "low fee" network forever.
There the more users, the more fees, the better the education and the sounder the money the more the spam is easily outbid and the more the spammers go elsewhere.
They are already doing so. And the current situation does not warrant a hardfork or the associated risks proposed by Matthew or others.
If your claim is that this transaction has "ZERO ECONOMIC PURPOSE" then how does the spender afford the transaction fees?
Its a Chinese exchange bot gone awry. Normally it makes transactions at very low rates... But for some reason it also broadcasts a few transactions at normal/regular rates too.