Bitcoin spam debates with Charlie Spears | SLP724

**Charlie Spears** (0:00)
I think it's a much bigger existential issue that normal transactions are not pricing out what many users consider to be spam.

**Stephan Livera** (0:09)
Hi, everyone, and welcome to Stephan Livera Podcast. Today, I'm chatting with Charlie Spears. Charlie is from Blockspace, which is a Bitcoin media and publication focused on, you know, Bitcoin technology aspects and also organizers of the Opnext conference. So, Charlie, welcome to the show.

**Charlie Spears** (0:29)
Glad to be here, Stephan. Long-time listener, first-time caller.

**Stephan Livera** (0:32)
Well, thank you. Yeah, well, look, there's lots of arguments going on right now, some of which I'm getting into those as well, around, you know, BIP 110 and this fork around ordinals and all that stuff. I know you're obviously a lot closer to the spammer ecosystem and the ordinal side of things.

**Charlie Spears** (0:51)
I'm a spam sympathizer, so I'm part of the problem, but also like...

**Stephan Livera** (0:54)
To be clear, I'm not endorsing, I do not spam the chain. I don't take any money. I get a thousand accusations, so I'll just say it again. I do not take any money from shitcoin or spam companies. I'm not invested in any shitcoin or spam companies. I'm just, you know, copying the flak anyway. But nevertheless, let's get your view. How are you seeing all this now?

**Charlie Spears** (1:15)
With regards to the fork and the filter debate, I mean, this is really on year three of the long debate. What a lot of folks think was a debate which started in like May of 2025
That was actually probably two years into the modern iteration of it. Yes, it goes back to the genesis of Bitcoin. Yes, it goes back to the original, like, op return debate of 2013 or 14 or whatever. But the modern version of it, the same conversations we're having right now, really started the first couple weeks on the mailing list in right after Casey threw out the org client in January 23 and February 23, because I remember that. I myself was hanging out with Casey on Discord just by accident. And as a long-time Bitcoiner, I was conflicted. And I saw a lot of the early discussion on the mailing list, and I realized it wasn't an issue. And what's funny is, I would say no new information has been introduced into this conversation since those first couple weeks. The argument has just evolved, and I want to say matured, but it's degraded.

**Stephan Livera** (2:32)
I mean, I would say there's been some little nuances of things that have shifted. So as an example, Livera Relay is probably like you can't deny that's something that kind of changed a dynamic, an important dynamic in terms of Relay. There have been elements of evolution along this journey. I would say, in the earlier, as you said, in 23 and more like late 2023, there was this V-spike was happening. A lot of people were angry about it. And there was a sense of, what's the response from the community? Should it be like a social thing? Should it be like an effort to actually try to filter it? Should there be a consensus change, et cetera? And at that stage, most of those guys were saying, they were kind of swearing up and down, no, no consensus change, only policy is enough to stop this.
Where are you at there?

**Charlie Spears** (3:24)
Some people swore that they would never advocate for a consensus change. Any accusations of doing that was an outright lie. They are now advocating for that. I'm glad that it took them three years to come around to the fact, something that we all knew years ago, that to reduce these types of data would require a consensus change. But again, that's something that was well known years ago. As it relates to something like Liver Relay, yeah, that's actually a new evolution. But I would say, I kind of subscribe to information theory that it doesn't really make sense to try to limit this type of data at a policy level long term. If Bitcoin is going to be ready for global adoption, then we should be talking about consensus changes. The policy is like guardrails that helps Bitcoin bootstrap to the first maybe few trillion dollars market cap.
Beyond that, I think if we want to think adversarially, policy is not really a feasible solution. So I think Eric Wall actually characterized Peter Todd in such a way that Peter is a little bit like a wizard sitting back and saying, well, there's these incentives which will eventually play out, and he will kind of occasionally throw things into the mix, Livera really being one of them. And I kind of believe that too. I'm a bit of an accelerationist in that I also think that for relatively benign things like ordinals or inscriptions or just arbitrary data, as we see it today, that type of thing being introduced to the network today is probably way better than truly adversarial types of information, which I do anticipate will happen. If we want to think that nation states will try to attack Bitcoin in some ways, they will do it through ways. So, I'd rather much prefer it to be benign things. And also, I just think that the onboarding narrative of thousands, tons of new Bitcoin users is underappreciated by the existing legacy Bitcoin community. So, that's my opinion. Yeah.