During waves of spam, spam is always defended by spam supporters/defenders by claiming that spam is subjective and that what is spam for you might not be spam for someone else, as they might have a use for it. This section aims at addressing this mischaracterization.
Spam opponents often tend to define or characterize spam by defining it based on the purpose of the network (Peer-to-peer Electronic Cash system), although there is truth in this characterization, it is an argument that can be hard to defend as the purpose of the network is a concept that can be seen as subjective. However, spam can also be recognized by anyone, even intellectually honest spammers, thanks to two main characteristics:
1. Wastefulness of the shared network resources2. Obvious misuse of Bitcoin's functions for a malicious purpose. In addition, these transactions are also often sent in large volumes.
Transactions with no practical value or purpose, such as those submitted by supporters of big blocks during the Blocksize wars for example, are characterized by wastefulness as their output was too small to spend. Other examples of wastefulness are transactions that are sent back and forth repeatedly to the same addresses, transactions which carry no state information, transactions purposelessly split into hundreds of tiny outputs that are then recombined in the next transaction, etc... These transactions are malicious partly because they are wasteful, creating a backlog in the mempool that drives up transaction costs unnecessarily. The 2023 wave of spam is especially egregious because it involves storing obscenely large and unoptimized state data using methods that abuse several of Bitcoin's functions, such as the segregated witness script discount, OP_IF OP_FALSE codes, and bare multi-signatures.