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I think you should reconsider: A) whether or not empty blocks are a sign of a healthy or a suboptimal condition B) whether or not non-monetary transactions would be driven out by the desirable monetary transactions
If we take you on your word, as a good faith actor, that core contributors are not overly influenced by the market for putting graffiti and smut on the bitcoin blockchain, neither of these positions seem well-founded as far as I can tell.
We're at all time highs in hashrate in the context of incumbent governing systems that are both powerful and hostile to bitcoin as a medium of exchange, but the transition from SoV to MoE doesn't have to slow and incremental. It is more likely to be like a dam breaking, and if not we are decades away from it being problematic given the quantity of bitcoin mining hardware that has already been manufactured, even if hashing innovation were to stop tomorrow and miners competed on energy cost alone.
The desire to force a fee market is frankly impatient hand-ringing dressed up in a veneer of technical acumen.
On the second point, entire networks, such as Steemit (now Hive) found traction by putting content on a Blockchain. It seems in principle that Bitcoin's robustness, immutability, and market dominance in terms of crypto mindshare that makes it an attractive place to put permanent multimedia content, and that this demand will always outstrip monetary demand for block space if hostility towards it by system design and policy defaults are not upheld. Why wouldn't someone construct a new kind of Steemit on lightning, then "settle" all of the text every 10 minutes, taking up the entire block to create an immutable Twitter? Why would that commentary necessarily be low value junk, maybe the scarcity of block space creates a popularity contest, where someone ports a qualitative voting system onto the chain, that starts to scale as only the highest voted messages get added to the chain. Why is that inherently less valuable than monetary transactions? And on the other side, why would content that is chased off all other communication media, like promulgators of CSAM or other contraband, not wish to use our monetary media just to stain it?
It seems to me that the unfounded fee market anxiety generates a need to feel like block space has a base layer of demand that is not monetary, and that this is both the root of the fatalism about spam and the (unnecessary) cope that monetary transactions will outbid content transactions, but there is no evidence for free latter, it's just a baseless assertion that has taken root in a closed circle of core developers who refuse to listen to anyone outside the clique.
You don't have to be fatalistic about spam, because the fee market doesn't need to be forced, we don't need a base layer of non-monetary demand for block space, and spam doesn't need to be deterministically solved to be inhibited by an ongoing pursuit of memepool hygiene.
Let the spammers collude with miners directly, because then nodes can spin up their filters and force a cost egregious abuse based upon the level of spam through the risk of orphaned blocks.
Why wouldn't someone construct a new kind of Steemit on lightning, then "settle" all of the text every 10 minutes, taking up the entire block to create an immutable Twitter?
Because there is no alternative to using Bitcoin. There is no second best, and no viable realistic alternative.
Therefore 200 million companies, 8 billion people more or less on 7 continents, if they want the 'very best' monetary settlement layer and settlement system (which they will) will have to compete for blockspace.
The 'arbitrary data' crowd will still be there. Banging away up to 1mb-per-10 minutes among 8 billion people in op_return.
But they will pay to compete for this 'space' with the entire world making financial/primarily monetary transactions and the fees (demand) will be absolutely outrageous.
I need to move those funds from London to Tokyo. I need to move those funds to an exchange to liquidate... to recapitalize my business or other investment.
Or I need to pay for this item/thing/service which is so valuable... I need it "high priority" mail... as in now I cannot wait.
Oh and you need arbitrary data? Great. Well we'll see how a billion people and 20 million companies compete for that data and monetary access and it will ultimately be a bidding war of epic proportions.
1 mb per 10 minutes for the entire planet. VS all the world's really valuable monetary transactions that users will bid up...
It will be a vicious bidding war as that was the inevitable, ethical, fate of the mempool anyway.
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You misunderstood my post. I was saying why wouldn't someone construct a kind of exclusive version of Steemit on Bitcoin using OP_RETURN.
Lots of people post, maybe using Lightning, and the most popular posts are "settled" on L1 Bitcoin.
The assumption is that these posts would be low value, but what if their very exclusivity and competitive nature made them valuable enough to outcompete monetary transactions?
I want it to be a vicious bidding war between monetary transactions because I believe that content and communication is inherently more valuable to the communicators, and that they will outbid the monetarists if the policy layer is removed and all we are left with is what is valid.
I believe that all of the content demand went to other blockchains because the policy layer made Bitcoin hostile to spam.
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