[sneak]

Entirely unnecessary. Transaction fees address the crapflooding issue, and the fact that you can embed only a very small amount of arbitrary data in each transaction means that you're unlikely to be able to harm someone else by forcing them to "possess" your various short byte sequences (which will, on disk, of course be interspersed with the rest of the transaction data).

This is to say nothing about the fact that everyone else running bitcoin will also possess these bytes in their blockchains, making the possession of them rather unextraordinary.

This whole article is just the latest in "Bitcoin doomed to fail, and here's why!" bullshit that's been going on for what feels like a decade but is really only 3 years or so.

[new299]

This is actually a big issue for bitcoin, I don't think we should avoid it by saying it's the "standard bullshit".

We also not really talking about small amounts of data (at least at the moment) a few megabytes is relatively significant...

I think the fact that it's "unextraordinary" to possess this data is the interesting thing. That may force a legal distinction which in itself pushes us toward a different understanding of "illegal data" and that perhaps the legal system has to give up on that and move towards accessing or "distributing with intent" being the illegal rather than just possession.