Economist and author of The Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean Ammous, has weighed in on the ongoing debate over spam inscriptions on the Bitcoin network, suggesting he would “throw in a few sats” to fund a full-time developer focused on making Bitcoin spamming more difficult and expensive.
Ammous made the remarks in response to a thread initiated by the pseudonymous developer GrassFedBitcoin, who called for Bitcoin Core to merge pull request #28408, which would enable node operators to filter inscriptions more easily.
According to GrassFedBitcoin, the lack of inscription filtering tools contributes to unnecessary blockchain bloat and undermines Bitcoin (BTC)’s role as a monetary protocol.
“No one running a node wants to relay inscriptions,” he wrote, arguing that the OP_RETURN limit increases were justified in the past under false assumptions. He pushed for a configurable, default policy discouraging the use of Bitcoin for storing JPEGs rather than monetary data.
Blockstream CEO Adam Back challenged the proposal, describing inscription filtering as an “arms race.” He noted that spam data embedded in Bitcoin transactions can be endlessly modified using code structures, requiring constant updates to filtering tools.
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Ammous compares Bitcoin spam to email
Ammous compared the Bitcoin spam issue to email spam — another arms race society continues to fight without abandoning the system.
“It’s not easy, but it’s worth trying to help bankrupt the spammers faster,” Ammous said. He argued that fighting spam is not censorship, noting that node operators already reject invalid transactions.
“So a node runner looking to remove retards’ spam is no less valid than retards’ spam,” he added.
The debate drew commentary from other users. One participant suggested Core developers treat spam-coding employees at certain startups as “unwilling QA engineers” and simply unstandardize every trick they deploy.
Ammous took it further, proposing to “deprecate” the work of developers building spam tools and even hiring outside coders to overwhelm their systems.
The conversation reflects ongoing tensions in the Bitcoin community over the network’s intended use. With inscriptions continuing to congest the network, calls for technical countermeasures — and pointed critiques of those defending spam — are growing louder.
In a Feb. 4 report, Mempool Research said the adoption of inscriptions could drive the Bitcoin network’s average block size as high as 4 megabytes (MB) per block, far higher than current averages.
Bitcoin’s average block size — the amount of data in each block posted to the network’s public ledger — is currently around 1.5 MB.
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