History of spam on Bitcoin

Free relays > Whitelists > Free relays

● It appears that Satoshi initially wanted to develop and allow for many types of TXs on Bitcoin
● However, he was at some point convinced by Gavin Andresen that was a slippery slope and opened the doors to DDos attacks
● Satoshi then moved back to a whitelist model that only allowed certain types of OP_CODES and TXs on Bitcoin
● Under the pressure of some miners who decided to mine any type of TXs, the whitelist model was then abandoned again

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The rise of Out Of Band transactions


The 22nd of February 2024, Marathon, a US based miner that holds around 25 exahash (by March 2024) officially launched a service designed to allow anyone to directly submit transactions to them, completely circumventing mempools and relay policies.

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This service mainly targets Non Standard transactions. For example, it was used to mine block 832,849 which is th biggest block to date (3.99 MB). It only contains 7 transactions, among which a single one (an Inscription) occupies most of the block.

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A block containing 3097 transactions shared to the mempool was expected instead of this one.