The popular notion that miners must be inherently selfish and solely driven by profit has become a pervasive narrative within the Bitcoin community. The origin of this mostly false narrative is unknown and unclear. Originally, the Bitcoin whitepaper only mentioned the term "greed" once, and that is in the case of an attacker. This belief is not necessarily grounded in reality or based on sound reasoning. In fact, it overlooks two crucial points:
1. Firstly, that miners need Bitcoin to remain valuable and profitable over the long term in order to recoup their investments and to have profitable businesses;2. Secondly, what makes Bitcoin valuable is that it's an electronic cash system with unique and distinctive properties, which can be undermined by excessive spam.
Because of the two previous points, it is evident that miners must be aligned with the long-term success of the Bitcoin network. In a sense, this does not mean that miners cannot run on high-time preference greed only, but that miners must care about low-time preference greed as well as high-time greed, and play a role in the network that balances the two. This directly contradicts the narrative that the system must run with high-time preference only greedy miners.
Spam being by definition wasteful and often serving malicious intents not only affects the efficiency of the Bitcoin system, which is already quite limited due to the blocksize, in addition to affecting its main usage as an electronic cash, which is where it derives its value from. If spam starts dominating the content of blocks, which is currently the case as of December 2023, it will displace monetary transactions outside of the network and degrade its value as an electronic cash. This is already case as can be seen from the increase in transaction volume on the Liquid network or the volume increase of the Canadian Purpose ETF BTCC, which directly affects the usage from which Bitcoin derives its long term value.
Bob Burnett discussed this in a Meme Factory podcast and explained this position from the point of view of a miner: