Blocksize: Should we take a step back and look at spam from a different angle?

[john3335]

Hi Guys

I'm just a nobody who's been standing at the sidelines watching this whole thing. Signed up quickly because I believe we can at the very least discuss the following.

Is it possible that the blocksize limit was put in place as a very quick and dirty "blunt tool" to stop spam. Satoshi himself mentioned that this is just a temporary measure. Could he have meant "a better system had to be coded" meaning "something better than the max block size blunt tool"?

The very first time spam appeared on email in the very early years, I'm pretty sure a few sysadmins started filtering their mail if the mail was over a certain size. Way way back they didn't have fancy filters like Spam Assassin with Bayes filtering. But at the time, stopping mail by size helped. But it was just a very blunt temporary tool.

And in that similar fashion, is it not possible that Satoshi put in a stopgap to be replaced by something far more advanced later?

Something like "Spam Assassin" built into bitcoin. Instead of us all fighting about the size of this incredible blunt anti spam tool, should we not at least be looking into the direction of intelligent antispam systems?

By tackling the actual issue... spam... wouldn't we sort out the mempool problem as well?

If we put out heads together and come up with an REAL workable clever anti spam system, would the max size really matter?

In closing: I'm not suggesting that the bitcoin network just discards transactions (because of course, false positives will happen), but at the very least we could look into something that flags a transaction in the headers as possibly being "spammy". Then the bitcoin core code could do something creative with those transactions. For example, the nodes can store flagged transactions on a physical disk to be dealt with later (and this is just 1 tiny suggestion out of a whole host of currently unknown options/innovations)

[mallard]

I think the network already does something like this.
If you try to send an output that you just received, it will have lower priority.

[Lauda]

No. Stop pulling nonsense of what satoshi might have wanted to do. Even if he had plans, there is no guarantee that his solution would be any good. Just because he made something revolutionary such as Bitcoin, that does not mean that his future ideas would be so great. Besides, the initial coding was a mess. Do not look up to Satoshi as she is some kind of 'god'.

Essentially the solution is quite simple. As Andreas Antonopoulos pointed out we need a combination of everything (i.e. increase the block size, lightning network, side chains, payment channels). I'd say that we need to make more room for legit transactions, and then continue the fight against spam.

[NorrisK]

The fight against spam is not really won by filters in email, just look at how much is still being sent... The only thing that helped to reduce spam was taking out the spam networks, this might be even more important.