Supply Shock Bitcoin Spam Wars: Who Controls Bitcoin’s Future? | Pierre Rochard
Oct 14, 2025
Pierre Rochard, a Bitcoin developer and educator, shares insights on the future of Bitcoin's protocol and governance. He dives into the cultural shift brought by ordinals and Taproot, debating how these changes influence spam mitigation. The discussion covers miner versus node operator incentives and the implications of arbitrary data on the Bitcoin network. Pierre critiques the dissenting implementation of Knots and highlights the legal challenges posed by relaying harmful content, arguing for a future that prioritizes monetary users while managing network strain.
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Philosophical Split Drives Protocol Choices
- Bitcoin faces a core philosophical split between a scarcity/monetary thesis and a utility/features thesis.
- The op_return debate exemplified that split and helped drive alternative chains like Ethereum.
Taproot Unleashed A New Spam Vector
- Taproot's relaxed input size limits opened a new cheap spam vector and shifted the spam mitigation debate.
- That change made op_return and mempool policy discussions far more consequential for Bitcoin's culture.
Make Spam Economically Painful
- Prioritize monetary users by making spam more expensive and optimizing clients for ledger use.
- Consider removing op_return and limiting taproot input sizes to tilt software toward monetary use.