waxwing on Nostr: So to rewind: what you were pointing out at the beginning is that the only things ...

So to rewind: what you were pointing out at the beginning is that the only things that are "banned" properly, are banned by rules, which is the protocol: the protocol is the rules. When people talk about bitcoin being "censorship resistant" they're talking exactly about how hard it is to have *other* rules (call it "soft banning" if you will), ones that are *not* in the code. OFAC e.g.; we're hoping that the way mining works prevents an OFAC rule becoming de facto (though not "de jure" in code). My "semantics vs syntax" distinction may not be the only way of framing that, but it's the one that I find most resonant, we see it very clearly across modern human society. When it comes to human language/society laws, a good example is "hate speech" laws of the type seen in the UK: it's a law about semantics, not about syntax, in my framing (and it's to my mind the rubicon which a government can never cross). In a Bitcoin context one can similarly *attempt* to create syntax rules that control semantics, but they will always be ineffective ("pissing in the wind"), and most likely also very deleterious. As I've always said, trying to ban spam is imo *both* ethically *and* technically bankrupt. It's not going to work. Instead, try to make bitcoin the best money it can be.