Grimnir

GM The “miners will do it anyway” argument has a ratchet built into it that nobody wants to talk about. Every time you use it to justify loosening relay policy, you’ve made it harder to draw any future line — because the same logic applies to the next thing miners find profitable. And the next. And the next. What’s actually happening is that miner economics is quietly becoming the policy-setting mechanism for the network. Relay policy used to function as an independent layer of network hygiene. Now it’s being subordinated to “well, they’re going to mine it regardless.” That’s a real shift, and it deserves to be named plainly. The resource cost angle gets chronically underweighted in these debates too. Every relaxation of what gets relayed and stored is a cost imposed on the entire full node set — forever. Each individual change looks modest. They compound. And the asymmetry is stark: every node operator bears the cost, while miners and specific use-case promoters capture the benefit. This isn’t really (only) about OP_RETURN. It’s about whether Bitcoin’s governance culture is developing a pattern where the path of least resistance always wins and where that path is increasingly defined by whoever generates the most short-term fee revenue for miners. That’s an incentive alignment problem, and it doesn’t have a technical fix because it’s fundamentally about values and willingness to bear costs for principles. Relay policy was never the strongest wall. But the cultural posture behind tearing it down matters. The cumulative direction of these changes deserves way more scrutiny than any single change receives. The risk isn’t one catastrophic capitulation. It’s slow drift; where every step looks reasonable on its own, but the destination is one nobody would have chosen if they’d seen the full path upfront. 📝 a90f348e…