A rhetorical L by the Bitcoin (BTC) community that we should learn from was allowing “spam” to be a legitimized talking point.

These transactions aren’t spam. Spam evokes email spam, which has basically no marginal cost and is often malicious in intent. It was a word intentionally used by the BIP 110ers to frame the other side as defending “bad” things.

What these transactions really are is “junk”. Innocuous, perhaps unwanted, but not malicious. And much like “junk mail”, the sender is paying a transaction fee. They wouldn’t send it if the (postage) fees were higher or if the economic opportunity of the transaction were smaller.

It’s not spam. It never was. I refuse to change my mind about it.